Here are ten hints for taking great digital photos:
- Take the time to learn what your camera can do. Go through the manual and understand its various features
- Take several shots of what you want to portray, maybe using "burst mode," and choose the best resulting image
- Keep your lens clean but never wipe it with something that might have scratchy dust or even sand particles on it
- Use natural light when possible
- In high contrast situations, as at the beach in bright sunlight, use HDR mode -- high-dynamic-range imaging -- if you have it. It keeps the sky from being too bright and shadows from being too dark
- "Digital zoom" just enlarges what may already be a blurry image
- For the sharpest pictures, use a tripod or rest the camera or phone on a solid surface
- Get close; people want to see details, facial expression and such, not empty space, pavement, sky or whatever
- Get even closer than that, buying cameras/phones with "macro" capability. Photograph the insides of flowers, insect wing venation and headparts, and shots like that at the right
- Finally, if your camera doesn't offer ways to improve the image after the image is taken, use the best photo-finishing apps or programs you can find. There's more on this, below.
FOR NATURE SHOTS YOU NEED MACRO CAPABILITY
Especially in the local neighborhood where there may be more weeds, garden plants and insects than gallivanting deer, waterfalls and picturesque volcanic peaks, maybe 90% of the most interesting shots are those taken very close up, like that of the Fork-tailed Bush Katydid head shown at the left.
Certain cameras and phones come with built-in macro capability, and you should consider buying those. Otherwise, if you want to photograph an eye-spot on a Polyphemus Moth attracted to the backyard night-light, such as that appearing below, think about getting a macro lens adapter for your camera.
When shooting macro pictures, you need to know about 
at the left, the face is in sharp focus, but everything else is blurred, especially the background. In taking the picture, the depth of field had to be centered on the face. A camera's "automatic focus" might do the work for you, especially if you have the camera configured so that it focuses using the
If your camera is set on "automatic," in general, the more light you have, the less depth-of-field problem you'll have. If you manually control your camera you may be able to take better pictures, but you need to deal with all the following details:
F-numbers refer to the size of the opening in the lens through which light enters the camera. On a typical camera F-numbers may range from about F/2.0 to F/8. F/2.0 lets in much more light than F/8, but the depth-of-field is much shallower. Most smartphones have fixed apertures, at around f/2.0 or less, which may enable sharper pictures, but makes the depth-of-field problem worse.- When you use a higher F-number to increase the depth-of-field, thus letting less light into the camera,
you must compensate by keeping the lens's shutter open longer -- maybe 1/30th of a second, not 1/500th. However, that slower shutter speed is much more sensitive to movement, so if the camera shakes just a little or the subject moves, the image will be blurred - Blurring caused by movement at slow shutter speeds can be reduced by setting the camera on a stable surface or
using a tripod . With tripods you can even make "time exposures" such as the one at the right - By increasing your camera's sensitivity to light you can overcome many macro depth-of-field problems. Do this by increasing the
ISO number . But the higher the ISO number -- like 2000 instead of 100 -- the grainier your resulting image.
Starry sky time exposure; photo courtesy of Yoshiyuki Ito in Japan and Wikimedia Commons"In other words, unless you're a real stickler for perfect photos, with today's technology and if you have an upper-end camera, often it's best just to keep your camera or smartphone on "automatic."