Top indoor photography tips

After reading many magazines, taking thousands of indoor shots with semi-professional cameras and point and shoots, I have compiled the following list as an absolute essential for good indoor photography.

Indoor Photography Tips

1. Use a tripod 

Use a tripod if possible specially for slow shutter speeds. Anything slower than 1/40 will produce sharper pictures with a tripod.

2. Remote trigger

Remote trigger when using a tripod use remote trigger or delayed trigger to maintain sharpness. Nikon cameras have default values for how long remote trigger will remain selected. Make sure to change the value to 5, 10 or 15 minutes so that you don’t have to keep going back to the camera

3. Set the correct apperture and shutter speed.

Apperture should be between 4-2.8 or higher if possible.The shutter speed should not be lower than 1/60 or you will lose sharpness in your pictures

4. Don’t use flash straight on to your subject

Don’t use flash straight on to your subject as it will brighten the facial coulours too much and often produce a shadow on the background. It also could completly blacken people in the background, spoiling the picture. Flash must be bounced of the ceiling or side walls.
Even using a diffuser will produce poor results unless the light was bounced via surroundings. Important thing to remember is that, what ever you bounce the light from has to have white colour, otherwise the coloured bounce will spoil colours in your picture. Using a reflector may be ideal to control light.

5. Don’t use zoom

Don’t use zoom, instead move closer to the subject. For example if you are using 18-55 mm lense, set it to 18mm then move closer to your subject to acheive required subject details

6. Use correct “white blance”

Use correct “white balance” on your digital SLR. Take a few test shots to check colour temperature on different preconfigured settings.

7. Take pictures in “Manual Mode”.

 Make sure you’ve taken all of previous settings into considerations. Make sure apperture in between 4 – 2.8 or higher, shutter is 1/60 and play with the correct ISO. Try to achieve lower ISO where lighting in the room is producing correct pcitures.  Don’t forget to set these settings with the flash on, as ISO settings will produce very different results with the flash. Ideally ISO should be between 200-400