picture perfect

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Published: 12:00am, 11 Nov 2007

A snap-happy party girl I know photographed a couple making a twilight toast to the camera. Arresting enough to grace a coffee-table book, the portrait suggests anyone armed with a high-resolution digital camera or camera-phone can pull off the occasional dazzling shot.

Even so, the amateur snapper's Facebook gallery abounds in duds: lousy portraits of grinning subjects caught mid-blink.

The lameness of most pictures displayed online - on social networking sites such as Facebook and on photo-sharing sites Flickr and Snapfish - suggests skill and the right equipment are both required to take a good shot. Professional photographer Andrew Loiterton (www.ajlphoto.com), based in Wan Chai's Sun Street, says success rests on three factors.

The first is the technical ability to handle your camera. Second is composition, which is trickier, much harder to learn and amounts to a snapper's 'feel' for when something looks 'right'. Third is the choice of subject - if you take pictures of people, your personality and communication skills matter as much as your knack with the camera.

So where do you surf if you want to see acres of eye-catching photographs? As opposed to stock sites, few good online photography galleries exist. The internet apparently does pornography better than photography, with the following exceptions:

SF Gate: Photo Gallery (www.sfgate.com/gallery) It's crunch time for newspapers - a case of adapt or die. The San Francisco Chronicle, alias SF Gate, has been evolving more rapidly than most.