Using the zoom in your compact digital camera

Compact cameras are now incorporating longer zoom lenses that make taking certain photographs easier and the results more pleasing to the eye. Let’s have a look at why you should be zooming more often. Compact camera zooms are not designed for wildlife or sports photography. You need something much more powerful for that. But in our everyday snapshots there are opportunities – and good reasons – for using the zoom.

Before zooms were incorporated into compacts, they were typically fitted with wideangle lenses, reducing the subjects in most of our photographs to proportions that made them all but disappear in the frame. Even today, most snapshots taken of friends and family still bear the unfortunate mark of having the subject too small in the picture.

Zooms in compacts can help you fill the frame more with your subject. This is a very important first step in making your family snaps more pleasing as they will contain less of the unimportant stuff around your subject. Also, because you come closer to your subject, you avoid the bad compositional habit of placing the subject’s face smack bang in the centre.

If your compact camera has a fixed wide-angle lens you are often forced to stand uncomfortably close to your subject in order to fill the frame. This is especially so with photographs of babies and small children. The other problem here is that compact cameras with fixed lenses do not normally focus closer than three or four feet and so your endeavours to fill the frame end up being out of focus, overflashed and distorted. Your zoom lens will fix all of that by enabling you to distance yourself from the subject more comfortably. Longer lenses also blur the background more effectively, which is a technique used by professionals to draw the eye to the subject.

Some of the most memorable photos of family are those taken candidly. This is next to impossible without a zoom lens. The moment you step too close to your subject, their attention is turned form what they are doing and you lose the moment. Use your zoom lens to capture these moments more successfully.

Because the photographs we take of our family are those which are without doubt the most precious to us, buying a compact with a good zoom is integral to making those photographs as good as they can be.

Buying the compact digital camera

Make sure the camera has a glass lens, and that the focus system is autofocus, not focusfree. Try to buy a compact with the ‘longest’ zoom lens possible (the most magnification) so you can fill the frame better with your subject – without having to get uncomfortably close.

The viewfinder should be as large as possible in relation to the size of the camera so you don’t have problems looking through it, especially if you wear eyeglasses.

Make sure the cameras controls are simple and intuitive.

Look for flash options like auto flash, flash off, red-eye reduction and fill flash for better flash photos.

Spend a little extra for a quality compact. You may even consider a simple single lens reflex camera so that you have greater control over the image. These cameras are not hard to use but offer you a better quality image with greater future options for growth if you want it.

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