Improving the fingers-and-thumbs family album

Your holiday snaps needn't always be a disappointment, photographer Maria Dunphy tells Louise Holden.

Smudged lens, finger in shot, squinting eyes or just plain boring - are your holiday snaps a perennial letdown? Maria Dunphy, president of the Irish Professional Photographers' Association, deals with countless disappointed holidaymakers at her family-owned camera shop in Kilkenny and she has a few pointers for better picture-taking this summer.

"The first advice I would give is to take the right film away with you," she says. "Don't just rely on the free rolls you get at the developers. You will need 100ASA for bright, outdoor shots, 200ASA for cloudy conditions and 400ASA for indoor shots and action shots. One size does not fit all."

The usual pictures that emerge from family holiday cameras are shots of tiny people at the foot of enormous landmarks, stagy set-ups of smiling groups and blurry snaps of children dive-bombing into swimming pools. With a few small adjustments, pictures like these can be improved, says Dunphy.

"When taking pictures of landmarks don't stand with the rest of the tourists," she says. "Find an odd angle to take the picture from - get above ground level or get lower down. Walk around and find a more interesting perspective."

If you are including people in the shot, get the whole landmark in shot then position your subjects 10 feet from the camera, she advises.

"The beach is a wonderful place to take pictures, especially of children," says Dunphy. "The light cast by pale sand creates a lovely atmosphere. Try close-up shots of children's faces, taken from below with the sky as a background. Always have the sun to your left or right, never shining into the lens or into your subject's face."

Action pictures are always more interesting than staged ones - catch the kids paddling or building sandcastles when they are not aware of being photographed.

Dunphy also reminds holidaymakers to be extra vigilant with expensive equipment on the beach - sand, water and sun-tan lotion can destroy a camera.

When taking pictures of your family in action, use 400ASA film. If you hope to catch your child in a dive or emerging from a waterslide, focus on the point where you think they may emerge - and wait. Trial and error may be the order of the day.

If you are photographing a wide landscape or large scene, try and get something in the foreground to give the picture a sense of perspective, says Dunphy. "For example, if you are talking a picture of a street scene in Manhattan, try and get the bonnet of a yellow cab in the corner, close up. If you are photographing a landscape, find a tree or stone wall to have in the foreground."

Don't bother using a small compact camera to take pictures in dim places - it's a waste of film, Dunphy adds. "A tiny flash camera won't illuminate St Peter's basilica. You're better off buying a postcard."

When photographing people, Dunphy advises a bit of interaction with the camera. Everyone smiling stiffly is a tired image. "Encourage your family to shout something at the camera, to move about or to interact with each other," she says. "For example, if sitting at a restaurant table, get everyone to go 'cheers' with their glasses. If your camera has a panorama function, use it, instead of bunching everyone together.

"Keep cleaning your lens with a lens cloth. Sun-tan lotion, sweat, ice cream, sand and other holiday-related substances will gradually build up on the lens and dull your pictures. And remember, if you use the right film for different kinds of shots you will see a marked difference in the quality of your pictures."

On the way home, carry your camera as hand luggage and don't offer it up for X-ray in the airport unless there is a sign saying that your film is safe. If there is no sign, ask security, says Dunphy.

If you are using a digital camera, don't leave your shots languishing on the hard drive. Take them to a processor for printing - at around 25 cent per photograph, it's cheaper than you may think.

"Make sure that the size setting on your digital camera is big enough to take printable photos," says Dunphy. "There's no point in fitting 200 shots on one memory card if they're all too small to print."

She recommends that each picture should take up roughly one megabyte of memory to produce a good print, although this varies from camera to camera.

Her final word of advice comes from hard-won personal experience.

"If you're the designated photographer, try and get into at least a few of the photos," she says. You might feel camera-shy now, but in the decades to come you will want people to believe that you were in fact a member of the family.

Snap happy, snap strange: Teens on the button

If your family photographs are not lighting any fires, perhaps you should entrust the camera to the teenager in the house. A new arts project for teens that is running as part the Kilkenny Arts Festival (which continues until Sunday) has helped local teenagers to discover their own creativity with a lens. Katapult is the first arts project at the Kilkenny Festival to focus specifically on teenagers - previously, it was all about adults and children.

"We gathered people together from all over the county to take part in a series of workshops that would help them to express themselves creatively through a number of media - photography, animation, film, performance and writing," Outreach coordinator Sinead Foley explains.

"None of these young people had any prior experience using a camera. On the first day we sent them out to find magazines and images that they found interesting. Then we discussed the styles of photography and how the image could be used to distort reality. Then we sent them off with disposable cameras to take their own pictures of distorted reality. We were amazed at what they came back with."

A picture of a man with six fingers on each hand, a strange shot of a cat in a dark hall, a cutout photo of a lamb suspended over a drawing of a pool of sharks - the level of creativity and downright strangeness was a revelation.

"Teenagers look at the world in a unique way," says project consultant Tony Fagan. "They are starting to figure out that everything is not as it appears. They like to shock and they like to have fun. This is a delightful, quirky, interesting group."

The teenagers themselves discovered new talents as the project went on, according to Fagan. "The majority have not worked in such a free and open way before. We give them a framework and some skills training (basic animation, using a video camera, etcetera) but we have left the ideas up to them. One girl in the class has astonished us with her ideas. When we told her how unusually creative she was, she couldn't believe it. Apparently no-one had ever said that to her before."

The Katapult programme culminated in a performance piece last weekend, called Dream City, as part of the Kilkenny Arts Festival. If you would like to get your teenager involved in next year's Katapult programme, contact Sinead Foley at the Kilkenny Arts Festival office (tel: 056-7763663)