1. Own The Frame

How many good shots had to be cropped just to get half a person out of the frame? Element on the border of the frame tent to draw attention. They may compete with the subject of your picture. And if the edges are cluttered with half of people or faces, your picture will look random. Clearing the edges of the frame is called owning the frame.

Just before you click the shutter, take a quick eye-tour on the edges of your view finder. Check - are there half people there? If you see anything you don't like, you can recompose, zoom in or out. Take a decision - what's in shot and what's out.

2. Parallel Your Parallels

Do you have any parallel lines in the frame? Are they parallel when you are watching them through the view finder? Make sure that parallel lines in the real world stays parallel in the final image. There are two common reasons for un-paralleling lines. The first is lens distortion - a hard one to over come. You can usually zoom in to reduce some of this effect, but not eliminate it completely. The second reason is the angle at which you shoot. Sometimes a quick adjustment on the angle can re-parallel the lines. A pleasing effect to the eye.

3. Avoid Horizon Spillage

This one is a common beach images killer. When the horizon is tilted, the balance in the image is disturbed. The general concept holds for any image with strong lines as part of the composition: horizon, window, cabinets and wall edges. Since the brain is used to seeing those lines horizontal (or vertical), it tends to prefer images that have horizontal lines as well. Some cameras can display horizontal lines on the view finder. This is a handy feature to turn on. If you don't have this feature in your camera, you can align the horizon on two of the focus dots in the viewfinder as well. (OK, Photoshop came to the rescue here)

4. Verify your ISO -

Whenever it gets a little dark we bump the ISO. The real trick here is
to remember to punch it back down when the light gets better. It is hard to catch this one since the camera will still let you take a picture. The LCD will not show the high ISO, the only warning is a "weird" exposure decisions made by the camera. So, what's the deal? Higher ISO means more digital noise. If you missed your ISO, you will not see it on the LCD. Most likely you will only notice it on the screen at home.

Luckily you can always use free software to remove the noise from the shot. However this takes time and the results are never as good as shooting low ISO in the first place.

5. Verify camera modes

Very often we set the camera mode to match a specific shot we are taking: Manual focus for a macro shot, Manual exposure and white balance for a panorama, or set the camera on auto pilot when we let someone else (like my what-are-all-those-knobs sister) take a shot for us.

Manual focus can be misleading, is the focus is set somewhere in the vicinity of your subject, it is hard to detect through the view finder. The way to overcome this hurdle is to set your camera to beep when it focuses. Now you'll get into a habit: no beep, no focus! You will look for the beep before every shot.

Since camera modes are the choice of the photographer, most cameras will assume that you made an artistic choice and will not give indication on those settings. So make sure: Your camera is set to exposure mode of your choice.