I thought it might be useful to have a thread where people can add any photography related hints and tips that they have. Particularly if there are good solutions to common problems or money saving ideas.

#1 - How To Remove A Jammed Circular Filter: Rather than gripping the edge of the filter with thumb and fingers, place the palm of your hand flat across the filter. It will unscrew easily because the frame of the filter wont be distorted by your grip. Of course it will need cleaning afterwards.

Great idea, Jon. Thanks for the tip, too. Here are some of mine:

No. 2: Cheap diffuser

Moisten the sticky end of a cigarette paper and affix over the flash unit of your compact or DSLR. This softens the harsh contrast and colour cast from a pop-up flash at a fraction of the price of a dedicated diffuser. (You can't re-use it for a roll-up, however.)

No. 3: Cheap reflector

Use the cardboard from a packet of cereals. Scrunch up some aluminium foil (it has to be crinkled up otherwise the reflection is too direct). Cover the cereal packet and there's your reflector.

My friend Jim Coleman posted this on his blog. It's a brilliant idea:

How To Protect Your Camera For £3.24

And I'd add this one:

How to protect a camera from light showers. Cost: free!


Next time you're in a hotel, in addition to all the towels, sheets, cosmetics, movable furniture, etc., you might consider "borrowing", remember to take the shower cap. The thin transparent ones can even be used for shooting through and the elastic strip keeps them reasonably dry in light rain.

Another bathroom accessory you can use is white shower curtains - they are excellent as a diffuser over a window, casting a gentle soft light.

If you have one of those pop-up light reflectors, don't panic if the zip is a little hard to pull on the interchangeable covers. Simply press the springy side of the reflector in a little to release the pressure on the zip. You may need to repeat this 2 or 3 times to go all the way around.

Ok, if we're talking about *completely random* tips, I'll stick my 2 cents here as well. They are very obvious for some people, but might be useful for beginners I think

1. If you want to create so called "cut-outs" from your pictures, i.e. remove the background completely, tools like "magic wand" work perfectly if there's a high contrast between the subject and the background. However if the background is busy, "magic wand" fails miserably and you end up defining the outline manually - in this case getting even a cheap graphic tablet will make huge difference. Our hands are much better at marking fine details with a pen as opposed to a soap bar (a.k.a mouse).

2. If you want to shoot glass, place the light source behind the subject, not in front as you'd normally do.

3. Silverware looks best on a black, however if for some reason you need to shoot it on a light background, place a sheet of black paper outside the frame: silver will reflect some of it and define the outline much better. Also use a polariser to control the reflections.

4. This one is pretty obvious calibrate your monitor. Devices like spyder or pantone huey are really cheap now and it does make a difference.

5. This one probably is rather classed as "imho": in situations (macro photography, for instance) where you can choose between a remotely triggered flash and an off camera flash cord, choose the latter. Somehow it results in more precise metering.

Not sure if these are helpful in any way, it's just from my personal experience

Are you getting "banding" on your prints? The cause could be colour information being compressed away, making gradual tone progressions break up into articulated steps of monochrome. If you are printing from a jpeg it can help going back to the raw file, if you have one, and reexporting the image as a 16 bit tiff or psd file in the ProPhoto rgb colour space in order to retain as much information as possible, The next bottleneck can be the printer itself, check the settings to make sure it's not doing some compression of it's own. On my Canon printer there is an option "prevent loss of print data" that finally did the trick for me.

Fascinating tip about banding. Thanks. I'd check four more things:
1) If you see banding at 100% magnification in your image editor, you'll get it on your print-out, whatever you do
2) Make sure you have selected the correct paper type in your print settings. If you're not sure what kind of paper, the best bet is "semi-gloss premium photo paper" for Epson, HP and Canon inkjets when using photo paper. You can also download more accurate "ICC"s (instructions for printers on how to print on specific paper). These are freely available from the paper or printer manufacturer's website.
3) Make sure your paper isn't dried out. Paper should be stored away from any light and kept sealed. Once you've opened the box, you should use it quickly
4) If you print directly from a good image editor, make sure it controls the colours, not the printer. There is usually a "colour management on/off" setting in the printer settings. If you print from Windows Gallery or iPhotos, let the printer manage the colours.

[Edit] Sorry, there's a fifth: don't let your printer expand an image to fit the page. Resize in the image editor, not the printer utility.