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Using your digital camera at Christmas

You'll no doubt be entering the festive season with a series of dates booked in your diary for office parties, school pantos along with Christmas and New Year celebrations. Your digital camera is ideal for these social times, because you can show the pictures as soon as you take them and you can send them to your friends and relatives around the world with ease. You could even turn your photos into presents or how about sending your own personalised Christmas card?

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So with your camera in hand lets look at how you can create a great Christmas photo.
The first thing to do is capture the picture and most digital cameras make the job easy. If you're new to photography, simply select a Program mode and the camera takes all the exposure technicalities out of your hands, leaving you to concentrate on the portrait.

For indoor shots some cameras have the appropriately titled Party or portrait Mode. These ensure the camera's flash fires to make the picture bright. All you have to do then is get the person to look good in the photo. When photographing children you'll find they tend to smile unnaturally or pull a face when asked to pose, but there are ways around this to ensure you capture a more natural expression.

One tip I use is to ask them to look into the lens to find the "camera genie". This obviously only works with younger children! They'll start to stare intensely into the lens. Joke about the genie to make them smile or laugh and press the shutter. Not only will you get a better expression, but you'll also find the eye contact perfect.

Most cameras have a red-eye reduction mode that fires a pre-flash to reduce the devil-inducing effect. Make sure this is switched on and showing a small eye icon on the LCD panel.

When you become more experienced try turning the flash off and using natural light from the window or room lighting. The mode appears as a small lightning symbol with line through it. Window light will cast a shadow on the unlit side of the portrait which can be reduce effectively using tin foil, spray mounted onto a large sheet of card. Position this reflector so it points at the subject from the shadow side. As you move the card you'll see light reflect onto the person and the shadows disappear.

A question of balance
If you take pictures using room lighting you may need to switch the camera to a different white balance setting. This is usually automatic, but you can manually correct by setting the light bulb option when the pictures are coming out too yellow. You can also override auto to force a colour cast. A photo of children blowing out candles on a Christmas cake will look better with its natural orange colours.

With more experience, you'll be able to switch to manual exposure mode and set the exposure to suit the subject. The exposure from the candles will make the background dark. Using the manual exposure setting or exposure compensation will improve the lighting and you can check the result using the LCD.

If you go into manual or aperture priority and select a large aperture, you can reduce the sharpness of the background to make your subject stand out.

Try using the camera's zoom lens at the telephoto setting to magnify the subject and home in tightly on the face. Entry-level cameras have a 2x zoom while more sophisticated models have more powerful ranges often up as high as 8x.

Snow fun
The first sign of snow and children will be out sledging, building snowmen and throwing snowballs. Take this opportunity to get some great candid pictures (see our candid feature for some great ideas). But watch out for the pitfalls, snow is very bright and will fool the camera. We explained how to overcome this using your camera manually in an earlier article. The latest Nikon Coolpix cameras have a useful program scene mode called Snow that compensates automatically ensuring the snow appears lovely and white.

You could also consider using fill-flash by switching the flash on and forcing it to fire. This will ensure harsh shadows from reflective snow or bright sunlight don't appear black across the face.

With all your pictures safely captured it's time to share them. In the package that came with your camera you're likely to find a CD with a program on it that takes care of downloading pictures to your computer. Once installed it's all done automatically when you plug the camera into the computer's USB socket. Then you can enhance, print and share them. Kodak and Fuji provide a docking station that makes connectivity a one-touch operation and it even recharges the batteries while the camera's sat in the cradle.

Nikon have taken things a stage further with their Coolpix camera where you can take advantage of their Fotoshare Web site. Here you can upload photos from your computer and arrange them into albums. Select a subject such as wedding or Christmas to give the album a customised design and then email friends or relatives to invite them to take a look. You can also select pictures to be printed via the on-line print ordering service. The program lets you know what size photos you can order from your pictures and posts photo quality prints to your home.
Other Internet companies offer similar facilities - you just need to go online, register and download the necessary software to get going

You'll no doubt be entering the festive season with a series of dates booked in your diary for office parties, school pantos along with Christmas and New Year celebrations. Your digital camera is ideal for these social times, because you can show the pictures as soon as you take them and you can send them to your friends and relatives around the world with ease. You could even turn your photos into presents or how about sending your own personalised Christmas card?

So with your camera in hand lets look at how you can create a great Christmas photo.
The first thing to do is capture the picture and most digital cameras make the job easy. If you're new to photography, simply select a Program mode and the camera takes all the exposure technicalities out of your hands, leaving you to concentrate on the portrait.

For indoor shots some cameras have the appropriately titled Party or portrait Mode. These ensure the camera's flash fires to make the picture bright. All you have to do then is get the person to look good in the photo. When photographing children you'll find they tend to smile unnaturally or pull a face when asked to pose, but there are ways around this to ensure you capture a more natural expression.

One tip I use is to ask them to look into the lens to find the "camera genie". This obviously only works with younger children! They'll start to stare intensely into the lens. Joke about the genie to make them smile or laugh and press the shutter. Not only will you get a better expression, but you'll also find the eye contact perfect.

Most cameras have a red-eye reduction mode that fires a pre-flash to reduce the devil-inducing effect. Make sure this is switched on and showing a small eye icon on the LCD panel.

When you become more experienced try turning the flash off and using natural light from the window or room lighting. The mode appears as a small lightning symbol with line through it. Window light will cast a shadow on the unlit side of the portrait which can be reduce effectively using tin foil, spray mounted onto a large sheet of card. Position this reflector so it points at the subject from the shadow side. As you move the card you'll see light reflect onto the person and the shadows disappear.

A question of balance
If you take pictures using room lighting you may need to switch the camera to a different white balance setting. This is usually automatic, but you can manually correct by setting the light bulb option when the pictures are coming out too yellow. You can also override auto to force a colour cast. A photo of children blowing out candles on a Christmas cake will look better with its natural orange colours.

With more experience, you'll be able to switch to manual exposure mode and set the exposure to suit the subject. The exposure from the candles will make the background dark. Using the manual exposure setting or exposure compensation will improve the lighting and you can check the result using the LCD.

If you go into manual or aperture priority and select a large aperture, you can reduce the sharpness of the background to make your subject stand out.

Try using the camera's zoom lens at the telephoto setting to magnify the subject and home in tightly on the face. Entry-level cameras have a 2x zoom while more sophisticated models have more powerful ranges often up as high as 8x.

Snow fun
The first sign of snow and children will be out sledging, building snowmen and throwing snowballs. Take this opportunity to get some great candid pictures (see our candid feature for some great ideas). But watch out for the pitfalls, snow is very bright and will fool the camera. We explained how to overcome this using your camera manually in an earlier article. The latest Nikon Coolpix cameras have a useful program scene mode called Snow that compensates automatically ensuring the snow appears lovely and white.

You could also consider using fill-flash by switching the flash on and forcing it to fire. This will ensure harsh shadows from reflective snow or bright sunlight don't appear black across the face.

With all your pictures safely captured it's time to share them. In the package that came with your camera you're likely to find a CD with a program on it that takes care of downloading pictures to your computer. Once installed it's all done automatically when you plug the camera into the computer's USB socket. Then you can enhance, print and share them. Kodak and Fuji provide a docking station that makes connectivity a one-touch operation and it even recharges the batteries while the camera's sat in the cradle.

Nikon have taken things a stage further with their Coolpix camera where you can take advantage of their Fotoshare Web site. Here you can upload photos from your computer and arrange them into albums. Select a subject such as wedding or Christmas to give the album a customised design and then email friends or relatives to invite them to take a look. You can also select pictures to be printed via the on-line print ordering service. The program lets you know what size photos you can order from your pictures and posts photo quality prints to your home.
Other Internet companies offer similar facilities - you just need to go online, register and download the necessary software to get going

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can you use two teleconverters together??

OK. Will be taking pictures with my older canon ae1. I'm going to a rodeo this weekend. I know from last year, that using my awesome vivitar series 1 70-200mm and a very good High Quality vivitar 2X converter that 400 mm isn't going to get me close enough to the action from the stands.

I own both the Canon FD 1.4x teleconverter and the Vivitar Series 1 70-210mm 3.5.

I just checked, and the combination you're wanting to use is not physically possible. The rear element of the Series 1 isn't recessed far enough into the lens barrel for the portruding front element of the 1.4x to mount.

If you really need a lens longer than 400mm, I can suggest a few other options.

The first that comes to mind is the 300mm f4, which is available as either an L or non-L lens. The L version is available for around $250-300, while the non-L version can be had for as little as $100. Either version can use both the 1.4x and 2x teleconverter.

The option I chose was the 400mm 4.5, for which I paid $225 for a very nice copy. The later bayonet mounting version can use both the 1.4x and 2x, and I often even use mine with both stacked if necessary.

The last option I would suggest would be the 200mm 2.8. I also own this lens, and often use it when I don't really want to carry around the rather large 400mm. The internal focusing version(last version) can use both the 1.4x and 2x. I've used it with both before, and, although the optical quality isn't the greatest, if you need the length, you need the length. I paid $150 for the internal focusing version.

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