Introduction

---

Good photos combined with good explanation makes a great how-to. Photos should provide the reader with both context and clarity. Providing good context means the photo orients the reader with the "what" and "where". For example, don't just show the bolt, but also where the bolt is, by including a reference point the reader is familiar with. Clarity, on the other hand, means providing a clear image: good focus, good lighting, good contrast, etc. Keep in mind that your goal is to make it as easy as possible for anyone to follow your work!

Providing Context

---

Providing good context means including enough surrounding detail to orient the reader (usually, zooming out) with highlighting the subject details that your discussion is about (usually, zooming in). Consider these two images, which are supposed to show where the reader should drill:



People have to guess what and where the left image tells them to drill, but the right image leads them right to it. A good practice is to snap a photo with more context than necessary, and then use ImageTuner to crop and highlight the most useful area.

Providing Clarity

---

When trying to demonstrate something important, harsh lighting and blurry photos don't help anyone. Harsh lighting can be solved with indirect lighting, like bouncing lights off the ceiling, or filling in the shadows with your camera's flash, a technique known as "fill flash". Solving blurry photos is slightly more complex. Two common causes of blur, besides plain old bad focus, are taking a picture hand-held, and having too narrow a depth of field (DOF).

Avoiding Hand-Held Blur

The obvious, and best, solution to hand-held blur is to stop holding the camera and use a tripod. You can still go hand-held, but you need to change things until your exposure time less than 1/60th of a second. Here are a few suggestions:

• Turn on more lights!
• Increase the ISO level (Negative: grainy images)
• Open the camera's aperture (Negative: narrow DOF)
• Use your camera's flash (Negative: harsh and distracting)

Avoiding Narrow Depth of Field (DOF)

A narrow DOF means that only a very thin slice of your photo is in focus. Sometimes, where the rest of an image distracts from the area you want to highlight, this actually helps. Most of the time, however, blurry pixels are wasted pixels in how-to images. Here are some suggestions:

• Close the camera's aperture (Negative: needs more exposure)
• Stand back and and zoom in (Negative: exaggerates shakes and needs more exposure)
• Orient the camera so most details are in the same focal plane

Notes on Tripods

Tripods solve all kinds of problems, because exposure times no longer matter. However, merely pressing the button to take a photo can shake the camera enough to blur your image. The easy solution is to put your camera in delay mode - what you usually use to take group shots - or to use a remote so you can give the camera a few seconds to stop shaking before snapping a photo. Also watch for wind and moving near the camera, which both add to the shake-factor.

Photography Side Notes

1. SLRs have a shaking issue that regular cameras do not: before an SLR takes a photo, it has to mechanically flip a mirror out of the way of its CCD, causing slight shakes right when you don't want them. Use the mirror flip-up function, if your camera has it, to solve this problem with long exposures.
2. Your flash memory's format (the file system) is important to how quickly your camera writes photos. By default, when you format a flash card in Windows XP, the file system is FAT32. However, in a test of writing 80 raw images, totalling 619MB, an older Ridata 80X saw an 8% improvement and a newer SanDisk UltraII saw a 73% improvement in writing performance when formatted using FAT16. So, format your flash memory as FAT16 (the Windows format screen just calls it "FAT") to snap the fastest photos. The down side is FAT16 limits your flash drive to 2GB or less!

Adding your Image to a How-To

---

When uploading, your image needs to be at least 320x200 in resolution and less than 10MB in size, and either the standard JPG, GIF, or PNG formats. In most cases, you can simply upload the original photo from your camera, and then use ImageTuner to crop and tweak the final image. Keep in mind that images are reduced to 320x200 when displayed on a how-to.

See Also...

---

• [ Using the ImageTuner]