This collection was compiled by members. If you have any to add, please send them to any member of the committee.

When framing your image through the viewfinder of your camera, or on your mobile phone, be mindful of the four corners of your viewscreen. Is something encroaching from one of the corners?

Can you get a better vantage point that will keep these elements out?

As you prepare to take your photograph, spare a thought for what may be behind you.  Is there a better image just waiting to be taken?

Before you press the shutter, or click that button on your phone, think about what is in the frame.  Does everything there enhance the image you plan to take?  Would some elements in the viewfinder be better removed?  How can you do this?  Can you move your position so that any distracting element is excluded?  How about cropping your scene so that the main image remains the focal point.

Going out to take some photos but don’t want to take a tripod to support your long lens? Take a bean bag with you.  Then when placed on a suitable bench or fence you will have the support you need.

Don’t have a bean bag? Half fill a (clean) sock with rice and tie it off. This will provide a suitable substitute.

The free upgrade: wipe the lens

Your phone lives in a pocket, a handbag, or against your ear. The lens picks up fingerprints, face grease and a fine coating of pocket fluff — and the result is photos that look slightly foggy, with milky patches and streaky flares around bright lights. Most people assume that’s just how their phone is. It isn’t.

Give the lens a wipe with a soft cloth (a glasses cloth is ideal) before anything you actually care about. Avoid a gritty shirt hem, which can scratch the glass.

Try this: Take a photo of a lamp or a bright window, wipe the lens, take the same photo again. The difference is genuinely startling.

Light matters more than anything else

Photographers are slightly obsessive about light, and for good reason: it’s the single biggest difference between a snap and a photograph.

Three rules that will carry you a long way:

• Midday sun is the enemy. Overhead sun puts hard shadows under eyes, noses and hat brims. Everyone squints. If you must shoot at noon, move your subject into open shade — under a tree, in a doorway, on the shady side of a wall. The light there is soft and flattering.
• Overcast days are wonderful. A grey sky is one enormous softbox. Cloudy weather is a gift for portraits, not a disappointment.
• The hour after sunrise and before sunset is called the golden hour because the light is low, warm and kind to faces. It’s why holiday photos taken at 7pm look so much better than the ones from 1pm.

Try this: Photograph the same person in direct midday sun, then two steps into a shaded doorway. Same phone, same face, completely different picture.

Tap the screen. Then slide.

Your phone is making a guess about what matters in the frame, and it’s often wrong — especially with backlit subjects, where it exposes for the bright window and turns your granddaughter into a silhouette.

Tap the person’s face on the screen. A little box appears: the phone now focuses and exposes for them. Next to the box there’s usually a small sun icon — slide it up to brighten the picture, down to darken it. That’s it. That’s manual exposure control, and almost nobody uses it.

Holding your finger down on the screen for a second locks focus and exposure, so you can recompose without the phone changing its mind.

Try this: Stand someone in front of a bright window. Take one photo normally, then tap their face and slide up. You’ve just rescued the shot.

Take two steps forward

The most common fault in amateur photographs is that the subject is too small. The war photographer Robert Capa put it bluntly: if your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.

Fill the frame with what you actually care about. If it’s a photo of your friend, we don’t need three feet of car park either side of her.

A note on zoom: if your phone has buttons marked 2x, 3x or 5x, those are usually genuine second lenses and perfectly good to use. Pinching to zoom beyond those numbers is just cropping the picture and throwing away quality. Better to walk.

Mind what’s behind

We look at faces; cameras record everything. Hence the great British holiday photograph tradition of a lamppost, a drainpipe or a bin sprouting from the back of someone’s head.

Before you press the button, spend one second looking past your subject at the background. Then take one step to the left or right, or crouch slightly. That’s usually all it takes to move the offending object out of the way.

Busy, cluttered backgrounds also fight for attention. A plain wall, a hedge or open sky behind someone makes them stand out enormously.

Get down to their level

Photograph a small child from adult standing height and you get a picture of the top of a head and a foreshortened body — a photo about a child. Crouch down so the camera is at their eye level and you get a picture of a person, taken from inside their world. The same is true of dogs, cats and toddlers on the beach.

It’s the least comfortable tip on this list and the one that improves family photos the most.

Try this: Next family occasion, take every photo of the children from a kneeling position.

Stop saying “cheese”

“Say cheese” produces the same tight, slightly pained expression in every human being on earth. Real photographers get natural expressions by keeping people busy and shooting through the moment.

• Ask them to talk to each other, or walk towards you, rather than pose.
• Ask a question and photograph the answer.
• Hold the shutter button down to fire a burst of shots, then pick the best one. This is how sports and wedding photographers work, and it is the only reliable way to catch a candle being blown out, a child mid-jump, or the second after the posed grin relaxes into a real one.

The photo people treasure is almost never the one where everyone was ready.

Turn the grid on

In your camera settings there’s an option called Grid or Gridlines. Switch it on and two faint lines appear across the screen each way.

Two uses:

• Straighten up. A sloping horizon or a leaning church tower is the quickest way to make a picture look amateur. The grid gives you something to line up against.
• Get off centre. Placing your subject on one of the grid lines, rather than dead centre, usually makes a more interesting composition — an old idea called the rule of thirds. For landscapes, put the horizon on the upper or lower line rather than slicing the picture in half. Ask yourself: is the sky or the ground the interesting bit? Give that two-thirds of the frame.

How to hold a phone still

Blurry indoor and evening photos are usually camera shake, not a bad camera. In dim light the phone holds the shutter open longer, and small wobbles smear the picture.

• Tuck your elbows into your ribs rather than holding the phone out at arm’s length.
• Lean on a wall, a pew, a railing, or rest the phone on a table.
• Breathe out, then press.
• Press the volume button instead of jabbing the screen — or better still, use the 3-second timer, which removes your finger from the equation entirely.
• If your phone offers Night mode, it needs you to stay still for a couple of seconds after you press. Count to three before you move.

Tell the whole story

The classic holiday album is forty photographs of famous buildings with nobody in them — the same view as the postcard, only worse.

Photographers think in threes:

• The wide shot — where we are. The cathedral, the beach, the valley.
• The middle shot — what’s happening. Your family walking down the street, the market stall, the queue for ice cream.
• The close-up — the detail. The tiles, the menu, the sandy feet, the ice cream running down a wrist.

Together those three tell a story; the wide shot alone is just evidence you were there.

And do put people in the picture. A figure in a landscape gives a sense of scale, and in twenty years’ time you will care far more about who was standing there than about the building behind them.

Bonus: take more, keep fewer, and edit gently

Professionals shoot dozens of frames for every one they show anybody. Take several. Then be ruthless later — deleting the near-misses is part of the craft.

When you do edit, the three adjustments worth learning are crop (get closer after the fact), straighten, and a small nudge to exposure or shadows to open up dark faces. Heavy filters date badly. Restraint almost always wins.

Finally: photographs on a phone are hostages. Back them up and print the good ones. Nobody has ever pulled a hard drive out of a drawer at Christmas and passed it round.