After last week’s picture presentation of how to hold your SLR camera got such an incredible response, many people chimed in via email, asking if I could do a piece on how to hold your Point-and-Shoot camera. While it’s not hugely different, the lack of a lens on the front to really give additional place to position your hands for support can be awkward for some people. I took the liberty of putting together a short video tutorial on how I’ve found positive results for hand-holding my point and shoot grade of cameras.
What is unique about it, is how I use my left hand (specifically my thumb and fore-finger) to brace the camera from underneath. It’s kind of counter-intuitive, but making cameras so small makes it more difficult to really get a good hold on them for producing stable shots. This technique demonstrated here should give you a good starting point:
Notice a couple of things are similar – how you stand, knees slightly bent, lean forward a little, and try to keep the camera closer to the core of your body. As you can tell, it’s really only a minor modification of how to hold an SLR, but an important one – otherwise you’ll find your arms flapping out beside your body, and your shots as less stable.
The question that will likely come out from this is whether the now common in-camera stabilization can account for hand holding better? The answer is yes, you can gain about half a stop to a stop of light (and if you don’t know what a stop of light is, come back later this week – I’ll be talking about that too!) from IS, but that’s only part of the equation.
How do you hold your camera? What if you are left-handed? What about right-eye versus left eye shooting? These are all factors that can require a bit of a modification to how you hold your camera, so chime in the comments section with what works for you!