How to take great photos at the top of the world, Burj Khalifa, or on any tall building's observation gallery?

Have you tried to take some photo of you or your family from the 125th floor of the world famous Burj Khalifa? Or from One World Trade center?

Most cameras and cellphones will give you two types of photos. If you are looking good in the photo, the background would be too dark or will wash out. It would be hard for your friends to know that you were rally out there in Dubai!
If the background is beautiful, you will be too dark. Your friends would have hard time making sure it is your photo!

How to fix this issue? Try taking some photos with Flash on. That may do the trick. However if you want to make sure you have good photos that have nice background as well as clear photos of you, here is a trick.

Take a photo in Landscape mode of only the outside. Then note down the Aperture, Shutter-speed and ISO that was used. In my case, it was f/4, 1/640 and 100 respectively.

Burj Khalifa

 Then, I change the camera mode to manual and I set above values. Then I turned on flash and took a photo of my family against the background. Voila! I had a shot that was enough to showcase to friends and prove that we did have great time on the Top of the World in Dubai!

Top of the World, Dubai

When the Sun is against you, outdoor photos can be challenging. Solution: OVER EXPOSE YOUR PHOTOS!

I was taking photos of my son's AYSO soccer game in bright Sun light. In the area where team parents were sitting, it was difficult to take good photos. Here is the first photo I took in Auto mode on my cell phone. As expected the players and refs were too dark.

The phone camera doesn't have a brain. It tried to capture the quantity of light it thought would make a nice photo. However in really, that was not working.
So once I knew the issue, I opened up settings and selected Exposure Compensation. It move it to +2. Another way to tell camera to take more lights is to touch or press on the darker object in the scene. Of select the object you want Camera to expose better. In our case, it wa the ref's shorts.
On many phone cameras, I think in new iPhones for sure, you can touch the subject and the Exposure Compensation bar comes up. You can scroll it up to tell camera to take in more light.
Here is the next photo I took. It came out well. Actually, it looks awesome IMO as the Sun creates nice rim light.

As I keep saying, it is not a rocket science to be able to take good photos there days. Take one photo, find a problem with it and then try to fix the problem!

Enjoy photography!

Eyes closed in a group photo? TAKE MULTIPLE SHOTS!

Some times, we take group photos at party or some event. It takes time to gather everyone and when they are there in front of the camera, we have few seconds. Most of the time, you will find that eyes of some of the people are closed. If the eyes of the key persons in the group, like bride or groom, are closed, the photo becomes sort of useless.
To make sure I have one good group photo, I take multiple shots. On most cell phone cameras, it is simple. Just keep the shutter release button pressed. This will take 5 to 10 photos in a second. Or, just press and release the button quickly. For cameras, you can change the setting to Continuous shooting mode. Then, you can keep the shutter release button pressed and camera will take few pictures. After you are done, view the photos. Keep the best one and delete all others! It does not cost anything these days with digital cameras! You don't waste film so make it a habbit to take few photos when you are shooting a group of more than 2-3 people! For a bigger group, even with multiple shots, there will be people with eyes closed. However, you will have some photos in which those people have eyes open. You can share good photos selectively!
Note: There is also some software which can help you open eyes in problem photo from a good photo!