Michael People keep asking: How do you take such great pictures? Answer: With cheap cameras and a bit of experience. I get frustrated when I hear that yet another vacation photographer buys an expensive camera and, of course, produces equally bad pictures with it. Expensive cameras are useless. Anyone who pays more than 250 euros for an SLR (body), or more than, let's say, 400 euros for a digital camera is throwing their money away. If you don't spend five hours a day taking photos and making a living from it, the additional features are completely unnecessary. I am a big fan of so-called point-and-shoot cameras that produce a 35mm negative and do everything automatically. You can get quite far with them, but the automatic settings fail in situations with difficult lighting. Those who know what they're doing can outsmart and correct them. Today's digital cameras in the aforementioned price range are roughly at this level.

If you want better photos, you need an SLR camera and a few interchangeable lenses. A simple automatic exposure system is sufficient, which selects the correct exposure time for a pre-selected aperture. Program automation is nonsense. Winders (automatic film advance) can be quite practical, but due to the noise they produce, they can also be very disturbing. Spot metering is okay, useful for advanced users. Autofocus is nonsense. If you can't focus your pictures manually, you need glasses. If you're too slow, you need more practice.

To improve the quality of your photos, you need to learn how the aperture relates to shutter speed and depth of field; otherwise, all is lost. You must know that good light includes sunlight that falls as parallel as possible —- it's no coincidence that professionals only work in the early morning hours and laze around for the rest of the day. In poor lighting conditions, the camera simply stays in the bag; it's as simple as that.

And one must understand that in a photo, there is always only one exposure. If the frame includes several zones with different brightness levels, problems arise. The eye can look at a bright beach and simultaneously resolve details in the shadow of a sunshade. However, if you capture such a scene on film, there are two possibilities: Either you expose the beach correctly, but then the shadow becomes so dark that you can't recognize any details. Or you measure the shadow, then you can see the details there, but the beach becomes so glaringly white that you go blind at the sight of the photo. You have to learn to avoid such problem areas or use a flash even in daylight to reduce the discrepancy.

The fastest way to learn is by analyzing the photos immediately after taking them -- digital cameras are ideal for this. It costs nothing to take multiple pictures of the same object with different settings and only keep the best one without deleting it right away. Even with printed photos, it pays off to take many of them. From a roll of 36 exposures, only one or two pictures are really good for us.

If you're making paper prints, you should use an expensive film and opt for the most expensive development service. The quality of a picture is 90% determined by photographic skill during exposure and the development process. The camera equipment only contributes 10%. A professional can produce excellent pictures even with a pinhole camera (a cardboard box with a hole). An amateur will produce only rubbish even with a Nikon F5.

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• More topics you might be interested in:

  	Lanai
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  	Top product: "Maui Babe"
  	The record of the month
  	The Mysterous Game of Baseball
  	Elections in America
  	Bush vs. Schröder