I'm gearing up to write a post on basics of photography (unless one of you folks is a 'real' photographer and would like to jump in, in which case please do!) and I'm wondering what kind of challenges people have with their current setups. Do you have poor lighting? Cluttered backgrounds? Shaky hands? Does anybody have some photos they wish were better they'd like to share so I can see if I can think of any suggestions? If somebody has an unsatisfactory place/camera and can link to a photo of the space along with the make/model of the camera, it would be much appreciated.
On the other side, do you have any tips or ideas that have worked really well for you? I've done a post about this elsewhere following on from a discussion with folks who wanted their photos to better reflect the quality of their work, but didn't want to get bogged down in a lot of technical details. The idea here is to have a few easy suggestions that folks can employ without ever changing any settings or taking their camera (or cell phone!) out of auto mode.
If there is interest in Photo 102 and learning to use a few manual settings I'd be happy to do that, too, and I promise to make it incredibly unthreatening. It does still involve learning a new thing and I know everybody's very busy and probably already has a long list of new tools and hobbies to try out before getting around to camera nerdery.