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Plan your walk and take a note of what you need to take with you
Include a spare camera, glasses cloth to wipe lens, extra fully charged batteries, hill-walker's GPS, compass, notepad,
pencils, sharpener and maps in your bag
Carry an umbrella if rain is imminent and a High Visibility clothing (the latter for busy roads or to be easily seen)
Have a coffee with a biscuit and a banana - it will give you enough energy to keep going to lunch time
Shoot as high a resolution image as the camera will do and it will allow you to enlarge and crop without losing image quality
If you have GPS in your camera, have it enabled to double check the location of your shots
If the GPS in the camera isn't needed, switch it off to conserve battery power
Use a high capacity memory card in your camera
Tell someone where you are going if you are going off road or take a friend with you
With wild life, shoot first in case the subject disappears, then take care with additional pictures
Take pictures of moving objects in sports mode
With landscapes, pause the finger on the shutter and then gently press fully down, to allow the camera to focus
Pick an overcast but reasonably bright day to take pictures of buildings or people
When taking meter readings, point the camera below the skyline, press the shutter slightly to sample to sample
the light level and raise the camera level and take the shot.
Preview the image in the monitor screen and if it doesn’t look right, take another
Take plenty of pictures if you have adequate space in your memory card, that is the advantage of digital cameras
Adhere to the rule of thirds in your composition
When photographing historic buildings, there is generally an information board nearby – picture the text on it to look at later.
You can use an Optical Character Recognition Program to read text in a JPG image and copy the text to a photo description
Panoramas can be shot effectively with some cameras. If not, take some overlapping frames and stitch them manually with software
Use a tripod when taking pictures low light or if you have an unsteady hand
If you don’t have a tripod available, use something to steady the camera. Set it on a wall or hold against a vertical surface like a pole or door frame
It is better to hold a camera to your eye and look through an optical viewfinder and breathe in slowly as there is less chance of shake
A simple accessory is a mini-tripod or pole to attach a camera and get the camera to take the image using the in-built timer
The pipe can be alkathene which is light to carry and is useful to fend off cross dogs
Another tip is to fit the camera to a mini-tripod and fit it to the end of the pipe to look over tall hedges along country roads
When shooting against the light shade the camera behind a tree or an electric pole
If there are people in frames that you can’t get rid of , one solution is to take a picture of the person at the left side, hold the camera pointing in
the same direction and wait until they pass to the other side, take another picture and join each half together.
Take a plastic bag with you, useful if it gets extremely wet and you want to ensure that the contents of your camera bag stay dry
One tip I got from a hill-walker friend is that a plastic bag is useful if you need to sit down on a wet surface
Unavoidable shadows in a frame, the same applies like people – move slightly to one side and take another shot, cut and paste it into the original frame
Ensure that the exposure of the image is the same with the abobe
Speak to locals on your walk, they can sometimes give you pointers what to look for
If your camera gives up, try using the camera in your smartphone, it should give a reasonable result if you have good light
A free software editing program is Picasa 3 by Google – it will suffice for most tasks. In my case, I might straighten up the picture, or slightly adjust the colour.
Index your images before saving to disk
Back up all your images on a couple of hard-drives
If you have deleted images on your memory card or drive they may be recovered with suitable software provided that you haven't formatted them or started to take more pictures. Success rate can vary
eTrex problems
My eTrex couldn't find satellites when I switched it on
Switch it off. Hold the power, page and enter buttons to do a hard re-set
Your unit will ask if you want to reset all user data. Select "Yes"
It should now find the satellites
If in the UK or Ireland you will have to reset the time to London
and the units to either British or Irish Grid
Google Sites
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