Do you feel that you have a great camera, but your pictures don’t come out as well as you want? If you feel that your pictures are not showing well what you remember in real life or if you would simply like to improve your skills in taking pictures, then these tips are for you! I have compiled eight tips to help you preserve those memories.

8 Simple Tips for Taking Better Pictures

1. Any Camera Will Do

Now that DSLR cameras (Digital Single Lens Reflex) are more affordable for non-professionals, I have noticed there is a lot of want for that type of camera. People might think, “If I have that camera, I will have better pictures.” And the answer is NO. A great part of the result of a photo lies in the photographer and not only on the camera. Sure the camera helps, but there are plenty of great point-and-shoot cameras with lots of functions that can help you take a great picture too.

2. Always, Always, Always Bring the Camera Wherever you Go!

You never know when you will have a great photo opportunity. Sometimes I have told myself: “I don’t need to bring my camera. I don’t think I will have time to take any pictures or it will be a horrible place.” Well, I was wrong! And I have regretted it very much because there I was with a great photo opportunity and no camera.

3. Avoid Using the Flash

Flash makes pictures look less natural. It adds deep shadows and highly contrasted areas so, as an example, faces look very harsh. Always, always turn off the flash, even if you are using the camera on automatic. Keep in mind that if you are in a place where there is less light and do not use the flash, once you press the shutter button, the camera may take longer to take the picture and the picture will look blurry if you move the camera just a bit.  What you can try to do is support yourself in a way that you move the minimum while taking the picture, or if you have a table or a counter where you can place the camera, that will help as well. Of course, if you own a tripod, use it!

4. Read your Camera’s User Manual

Believe it or not, your camera’s user manual is where you can learn the most of how to use your camera, as well as basic principles of photography. I know this sounds like a no-brainer, but most of us don’t like to read manuals and go straight to use the product, since most products are built very user-friendly these days. But take this tip seriously. Always experiment with the camera modes, the exposure, and the zoom until you feel comfortable with your own equipment and, most importantly, until you feel you know your camera.

5. Use the Camera Controls, Especially the ISO Setting

Learn about ALL the controls your camera has. If you are using a point-and-shoot camera, try to use the functions for sports, macro, and so on. All cameras have an ISO setting; this controls the camera’s sensitivity for light. If you are out on a very sunny day, use a lower ISO (100 for example). If you are taking a picture of a still object, a low ISO will also work. If you are taking pictures of moving objects or people – like kids, a lower ISO (400 or 800) will be much better. This will allow the shutter to go quicker and the objects won’t appear blurry.

6. Pay Attention to the Background

Many times we look at our subject while taking a picture and forget about the background. Later we realize that there was a horrible trash can or lots of people in the background, making the picture busy and unpleasant. So, be aware that the background plays a huge role in your photo and remember to look at everything in the frame you are photographing. This also applies when you are taking pictures of people. If you are including their complete bodies, don’t cut off the feet or a hand on the side; include ALL of it, sometimes a cut-off foot just doesn’t look right.

7. Take a Picture from a Different Angle

After you took the picture that you were taking, stop and redo it! Just for fun, get close to the subject, get further away, place the camera on the ground or stand on something high and look down! These are just a few examples. The point is to experiment taking the picture from a different point of view. The good thing about digital cameras is that you can take lots of pictures and discard the bad ones easily, so take risks when you take pictures – it will be worth it!

8. Edit your Pictures

You don’t need a professional photo editing software for this; you can use the software that sometimes come with cameras. iPhoto, Photoshop Elements, or Picasa are good too. But, it really helps when you put in that little extra time to edit your photos. Some simple edits you can always do are:

• Adjust contrast: Try to make the picture brighter with deeper shadows. Using the auto adjust feature is always helpful too.
• Crop: Sometimes a little cropping goes a long way.
• Play with colors: Maybe turn the photo into a black and white photo or use sepia tones? Depending on the picture, this might look great!

Don’t worry if you can’t follow all of these tips. If you start at least with a couple, I guarantee you will notice a difference in your pictures really quickly. Have fun, and remember that the latest camera might have amazing features and controls, but a huge part of a nice picture is a skilled photographer!

All photos courtesy of Dariela Cruz.

Guest post: Sandy Salle is a native of Zimbabwe and was born and raised in Southern Africa. She is the Chief Executive Officer of Hills of Africa travel and is passionate about using her first-hand knowledge of Africa to create the trip of a lifetime for her clients. Currently based state-side in North Carolina, she resides with her husband and two small children. Sandy travels home to Africa several times a year and believes that the next best thing to living in Africa is sharing it with others.

Like most work-at-home mothers, I wage a daily battle against the clock to get the kids dressed, emails sent, homework completed, proposals drafted, calls returned, and dinner cooked all within an impossible twenty-four hours.

Struggling to do it all, I began multitasking, but I found that, when I did everything at once, nothing was done well. This, in turn, led to guilt: I got to the soccer game late, I didn’t have time to distribute the invoices, and I was on conference calls the entire time my daughter and I were making cookies for her class. Wasn’t the whole reason I left the office to work at home so that I could spend more time with my kids? Yet, here we were together, and I was so distracted with everything that still had to be done, that I wasn’t present.

As the CEO of Hills of Africa travel, a premier provider of personalized, luxury safari vacations, I have big responsibilities at work. Clients depend on me to plan once-in-a-lifetime safari trips for them, and it’s hard to do that when I am scrambling to clean up the house during the few quiet hours my kids are at school. On the other hand, I don’t want to sacrifice time with my kids. They are only young once, and this time with them is precious. I want them to be experiencing their childhood with me instead of a nanny.

Exhausted, guilt ridden, and overwhelmed, I had to make a change. Here’s what I did . . .

Stopped Multitasking

My first step was to create a structured work schedule around the time my kids are at school, 6:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. During this time, 100% of my energies are focused on Hills of Africa—no more scheduling play dates or baking during conference calls. No matter where I am in my work at 3:30, I close up shop and refocus all my attention on my kids.

Eliminated Distractions

The old me would sit in front of the computer first thing in the morning and look through a few emails before jumping up to brew a pot of coffee or download a few songs to listen to while I worked. Each of these small tasks took time and broke my concentration. Now, before I even sit down at my desk, I have cup of coffee in hand, my favorite classical play-list on, and my personal phone line set to go straight to voice-mail, so that I can sit down for several hours of uninterrupted work. It’s amazing how much more I began to accomplish when I wasn’t jumping up to switch the laundry every couple of hours!

Became Present

Just being physically there with my kids was not enough. I had to be mentally and emotionally present for our time together to be meaningful. Now, when I’m with my family, I’m not just there, I’m present, listening, and interacting. I mentally free myself from distracting work obligations when I’m with the kids. At the end of the day, my kids crave my attention more than my home-cooked meal, and there’s no shame in occasionally ordering a pizza if it means that we get to eat and engage in conversation together as a family.

Let It Go

If that client call has yet to be made and those pots and pans still need to be washed when the kids arrive home, I forget about it. It can get done the next day. I’ve learned that supermom is an impossible notion, and I can’t do everything by myself. I now have my groceries delivered by Peapod and outside assistance with housekeeping. Anything that allows me to focus my work time completely on my job and my family time completely on my kids is a worthwhile expense.

Blogging without readers is about as much fun as throwing a party and having no one show up. Whether you’re blogging professionally or casually, it’s nice to get a comment and know that you’ve connected with others.

When building a loyal readership, it’s important to keep in mind that not all your readers are bloggers. In fact, readers who aren’t bloggers themselves are very valuable. Non-blogging readers aren’t busy tending to their own blogs and thus will have more time to visit and comment on yours. But how do you attract non-blogging readers? Where do you find them and how do you keep them? Here are 15 tips for building your non-blogging readership.

15 Tips for Attracting Non-blogging Readers to Your Blog

1. Make sure your blog is non-blogger friendly. Some non-bloggers are not technically inclined. Is the layout easy to follow for them? To test this, ask your grandmother or another older relative to visit your blog and give her opinion. You might be surprised by some very good suggestions for making your blog or website easier to navigate.
2. Don’t make commenting a challenge. Make sure that when people leave a comment, the only information they need to fill out is their name and possibly E-mail address. (URL should be optional not mandatory.) Also re-consider using captchas. A lot of people find them very frustrating.
3. Make it easy for them to return. Can they subscribe by E-mail and RSS? Do you have a distinct favicon so you’re easy to identify?
4. Don’t underestimate word of mouth. Do you include your blog link in the signature of your E-mails? Is it on your business card? How about in your yearly Christmas letter? Don’t forget to share your blog URL with your parents, siblings, relatives, friends, co-workers, and neighbors so that they can pass it on to their friends. Some of my most loyal readers were friends of my sister, and I didn’t even know it until I met them and they told me they loved my blog.
5. You gotta give some to get some. Leave meaningful comments on blogs that are similar in content to yours. You’ll attract the blog owner and their readers. (It isn’t stealing – it’s widening the community.) Guest blogging is another great option. Invite someone to guest post on your blog, and consider accepting the offer if someone asks you to guest post on their blog.
6. Leave a trail. Do you have a Facebook page? Twitter profile? Photos on Flickr? YouTube videos? Sell stuff on Etsy or Ebay? Review books on Amazon.com?… Make sure your URL is somewhere on all of your user pages around the internet.
7. Ride the buzz. Once in awhile, write about something that is a “hot topic” in the headlines or in the blogosphere. Of course, don’t do it unless it’s something of interest to you and your readers. If it doesn’t fit your regular content, then the readers you attract won’t stick around.
8. Write about something obscure. Is there something you’re an expert on that few people are informed about? Is there something you really love but you’ve noticed it’s hard to find information about it? When you search online for it, are there almost no results? Write about that and then when others go searching, you’ll be at the top of the results. (Again make sure it fits your content.)
9. Go find them. Non-bloggers hang out in forums, message boards, social networks and chat rooms. Join a conversation on a message board that is relevant to your blog, and make sure your URL is in your signature.
10. Study SEO and apply the knowledge. Knowing a little about search engine optimization will help you blog effectively so that you’re easy to find through internet searches. There are a lot of free tutorials online. You don’t have to get into anything complicated. Even applying a few basic SEO principles will help you.
11. Make yourself approachable. Your E-mail address should be easy to find on your blog in case someone wants to contact you privately. Also, try your best to respond to each and every comment left on your blog, whether they’ve asked you a question, shared something about themselves, given you a compliment or even disagreed with you.
12. Be compatible with social news websites. Consider adding buttons to your blog posts so they can easily be submitted to social news and sharing websites like Stumbleupon, Digg, Reddit, etc. (But make sure you don’t add so many buttons that it looks cluttered.)
13. Have a Giveaway. Honestly, most of the people that are attracted by giveaways are coming for the free stuff and they won’t be back, but you might grab a reader here and there. Besides, giveaways are fun. Everyone likes to play Santa Claus once in awhile, don’t they?
14. Watch your statistics. Some blog platforms come with built in “stats” that you can check, or you can use a third party stat counting website to track how people are finding you, where they’re coming from, and where they hang out on your blog. Keep an eye on this information so you know what’s working and what’s not. This will determine what you spend more time doing, and what you stop wasting your time on.
15. “Content is King”. It’s been said again and again, but maybe it can’t be said too often. The biggest rule to remember is that you need to make consistently good content and be dependable with how frequently you update your blog.

Happy blogging, and I wish you many comments!

Photo by Suzanne Edge

Facebook. Twitter. MySpace. Plurk. Identi.ca? With so many social media tools and networks out there, it’s hard not to get overwhelmed. How do you choose which to use? How do you keep up with them all? How much time will it take out of your already busy life?

Through trial and error, I’ve developed a daily routine to keep up with the various social media accounts I use. When I was working full-time outside the home, I had to really use my time wisely since I could not be engaged in social medial all day, but still wanted to maintain a social media presence. As you know, it’s not enough to just have an account, you have to actually use it and be “present” for your social media efforts to work.

Let me share a sample schedule of how I used social media when I was working full-time. In the mornings, I had the benefit of an empty home after my husband left for work and dropped off my daughter at day-care. Since I started work a little later than him, this meant that I had about an hour each morning to do my social media/blog work before I had to get myself ready. In this hour, I created the following social media routine and would do most (and sometimes all) of the following.

Image from webtreats on Flickr

Sample Social Media Routine

• Open up my browser and open a tab for each of these sites: ping.fm, myspace, facebook, plurk, twitter, gmail, google reader, and delicious. As I completed my tasks for each site, I would close the tab and move on to the next.
• Post a status update using ping.fm.
• MySpace: Even then, MySpace was slowly being phased out of my social media routine, but since I (still) have some real-life friends and family that use it, I would check in every morning. It was a very quick check of messages, comments, and friends’ status updates.
• Facebook: I would login and respond to any comments or messages sent to me. I would post a “Happy Birthday!” message for those with birthdays that day and possibly leave a comment or two on others’ profiles. If I had something to promote – a contest or my latest post – I would do so via my fan page and/or group. Of course, I’d also take care of any requests that were waiting for action – friend requests, even invites, page suggestions, etc.
• Plurk: Though not a common microblogging platform, it’s one I was exploring at the time and continue to participate in since I’ve made some connections that are not elsewhere. Again, I would quickly check in on any replies to my updates and try to comment on one or two people’s updates.
• Twitter: Similar to the rest, I would login to Twitter and be sure to respond to any @ replies or DMs I received overnight. I would also review new followers and follow-back appropriately (or not). I would then leave this tab open since I would often interact with various other folks that were up early like me.
• E-mail: I use gmail for my e-mail, which has the ability to star items you need to come back to and label your messages for finding later. Simple Mom has a nice system she uses for managing her inbox that I try to follow. I would definitely take about 10 minutes each morning to check urgent items and clear out the “junk” so that it didn’t clutter up my inbox.
• Google Reader: I didn’t always have time to get to reading some blog posts – it just depended on how much time I spent on the other tabs. But, some days, I’d be able to read a few posts from those blogs you “must” read each day.
• Delicious: Since I have the delicious plugin installed on Firefox, I’d only need to open this up if I saw there was new activity in my network or if anyone had sent me a link. But, in browsing resources bookmarked by those in my network, I’d often find a great article or tip or even a blog post idea.

Photo by Jen R

Each morning I’d go through my routine and get a great head start on my day – social media wise, anyway. Then, during the day while I was at work, I would monitor twitter, facebook, and e-mail using my smart phone. Of course, I wasn’t always on it. But if I took a quick break from my desk and especially during lunch time, I’d be able to update my status (again using ping.fm) and check in on comments.

In the evenings, after dinner and the nightly bed-time/bath routine for baby girl, I’d take another hour (sometimes two depending on how busy the husband was) to go through the same routine. However, I would focus less on checking comments/messages and more so on clearing out e-mail and writing a blog post.

Wondering what I do now that I’m not working full-time? The same. Though I don’t always have the house to myself in the mornings anymore, I still take a half-hour to an hour each morning and use the same social media routine. The days that baby girl goes to preschool, I do this routine after I’ve dropped her off. The days she’s home with me, I use the time when she’s eating breakfast and watching her morning cartoons. If I’m lucky and she’s overslept, I go through my routine before she wakes up.

Through the rest of the day, I periodically check in on social media and e-mail. As I mentioned in a previous post, I tend to login again mid-day and in the evening. I try to follow my social media routine each time, but depending on other projects/tasks I have to get done, I may cut my routine in half during those times.

Seem like a lot to-do? Keep in mind that you don’t have to have accounts for all the sites that I do. You will find those that serve your needs the best. Truthfully, though, once you get into a routine, it will become habit and not be so overwhelming.

Additional tips:

• Always answer @ replies, DMs, comments, etc. for the various networks you belong to. It’s so frustrating when you’re trying to talk to someone and they ignore you, isn’t it? Don’t ignore.
• Catch what you can while logged on. You won’t be able to read every single status update for every single network you belong to.
• Retweet interesting statuses, share good information, and useful links/resources. Your readers will appreciate it and will come to know that you have valuable information.

Have you already created your social media routine?

Image from Anne Helmond on Flickr

Every once in a while someone will make a comment about how they “see me everywhere” online. I’m on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Plurk, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Friendfeed, and various Ning communities. There’s actually more places to find me, but those are the most commonly known ones. Naturally, I’m also asked how I can keep up with multiple social media accounts. Typical questions include:

• Do you log on to all the different sites to update them?
• How often do you update your status/account?
• Are you always on your computer?

I’d like to say I’m just that talented, but the reality is that there are tools out there that help me keep up and make it “seem” like I’m everywhere. Some are web-based, and others are self-created, but all help me stay on top of my social media presence. I’m going to give you three simple ideas for helping you be more present in your social media efforts without going crazy.

3 Tips To Help You Manage Your Social Media Presence

1. Use Online Tools

Using tools like Ping.fm can help you update multiple social media accounts with one step. You create one account on Ping.fm, link it to all your other accounts, and update your status for all of them from one place. I use this to update Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Plurk, BrightKite, Identi.ca, and a few other sites all by sending one message. The even better part is that you can link your Ping.fm account to your cell phone, Skype, AIM, and other instant messaging platforms to update your status on the go. That is, you don’t have to go to the Ping.fm site to update all of your accounts – you can do it by simply sending a text from your phone or an instant message.

Something else I often do is pre-schedule updates using sites like SocialOomph, ObjectiveMarketer, or HootSuite. With these sites, you can create a message and publish it at a later time. Some even allow you to set the message on a repeat schedule, if it’s something you want to be seen at different times of the day or for multiple days at a time. This is great because it means you can go to work all day, run some errands, spend some time with the family, or have some fun and your social media presence doesn’t suffer.

Image from Aaron Coyle on Flickr

2. Schedule Your Social Media Time

This is one of those self-created tools that has helped me. I try to have set times in my day that I dedicate to managing my social media accounts. I use those times to update my status, respond to comments/replies I received, and manage requests (i.e., followers, friend requests, group/page suggestions). This works better for me than constantly having the windows open on my computer. I can continue to work on other things and know that I won’t be tempted to keep clicking over to check for the latest comment. Taking breaks throughout the day from social media doesn’t greatly affect your presence. People know that you have a life that just may take you away from your computer. It’s ok to have chunks of the day where you’re more interactive than others.

For me, what seems to work the best is to check in on social media about three times throughout the day – on average. Some days I only check in once or twice, but generally speaking, I log on in the morning, mid-day, and evening. I find that this keeps me up to date, present, and coincides with the majority of people’s schedules. There are those who work early in the morning before the kids are up or before heading out to their “day job.” There are also those that take a lunch break and those that work after the kids go to sleep. By checking in on my social media accounts during each set period, I can interact with a variety of people and those in different time zones from me.

I don’t spend a large chunk of time during any of those three periods, either. I log on to each site, respond or manage requests, and move on to the next. Unless something extremely interesting caught my eye or required me to spend more time managing the situation, I typically complete my social media rounds within 30 minutes, if that.

Image from Volker on Mobile

3. Use a Smart Phone

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about how I use a smart phone to increase productivity. I included ideas for managing home tasks and personal calendars, as well as blogging and social media tasks. Like I mentioned in that post, it helps to fill in some gaps throughout the day where you may find yourself with some time, but you’re not near a computer. You can update your status – use that text feature from Ping.fm – or check in on a few comments you may have received. Either way, you can easily be present while on the go.

I know you’ll find these tools to be useful and will eventually find the right combination that works for you. If you’re already familiar with these tools, you know what a great help they can be for managing your social media presence. What do you find works for you? Let’s hear your tips in the comments below.