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When you go to an amusement park with a digital photography camera then you are probably planning on taking around a hundred photos of your family and friends. Now, I recently looked at the photos my friend took when he went to Disneyland and I was shocked how bad they looked. Sure, he just took them for the memories, however, bad photos are not very nice to keep compared to quality composed shots. This article will provide some simple tips for taking photos when at an amusement park.

First off, you are probably going to end up using the automatic mode when at an amusement park. The reasons are mostly because people don’t like waiting to take pictures and waiting for you to set the shutter, aperture, focus, etc can be very annoying.

Of all the settings, you really want to make sure you have manual focus. Automatic focus messes up too much and can ruin a lot of your photos.

You can manually set the shutter speed to very fast settings when you want to capture a motion shot of, for example, someone on a ride. Or you could blur the motion and create a really cool effect with a slow shutter speed.

Compositionally, if you are taking people shots at amusement parks you should try to follow these simple rules.

1. The Rule of Thirds

Try avoiding to place people dead center. Place them to the left, right, etc.

2. Depth

Rather than place people in front of a background, try placing them at an angle to the background. This will make the background look like it has more depth. This is especially useful when taking shots of people standing in front of an attraction or monument.

3. Simplicity

As much as you may want to capture everything in one shot, it will look much nicer if you take a few shots isolating on one particular subject in each shot. Amusement parks are very cluttered with different attention grabbing items. Try focusing on one.

Al Sanchez has a Free Photo 101 E-course that teaches digital photography. He also has another free program on how to Sell Your Pictures Online

Tags: amusement parks, photography

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 at 8:08 pm and is filed under digital photography tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.