You worked hard for that grouse
limit. Your dog worked even harder. It's a shame that when you asked
your buddy to take a photo to commemorate the moment, his shadow
obscured the dog, the top of your head got cut off and the grouse were
so blurry they looked like an impressionist painting of cockatiel.

Another disappointment – you
brought your young Lab all the way to South Dakota for the pheasant
opener. Just 10 months old, he marked your first downed bird and made a
stunning retrieve. Delighted, you grabbed your pocket camera to be
ready for the next retrieve. When he trotted back proud as could be
with that big ol’ rooster in his mouth, you snapped away. Too bad you
forgot to zoom in. The little black speck in the bottom corner must be
him, right?

You don’t have to pay for a photo
class or scrutinize photo magazines to take good shots with a digital
camera. Whether you use a pocket-sized point-and-shoot or a full-size
digital SLR, the camera does half the work. Use the auto settings,
and you need not worry about things like metering, aperture, f-stops
or white balance. Your half of the work comes in picking a few basic
settings and thinking about what's going on in front of the lens.

Eight Simple Tips for Better Photos During and After the
Hunt:

Tip 1: Set your camera to take
large JPEG files. The larger the file is, the better the
resolution. Sacrifice the number of shots to improve quality. Camera
disks are now available with a lot of memory. Set to take large/fine
files, a 4 GB Compact Flash card gives you about 877 photos, each
being about a 3.5 MB JPEG file. Small/normal files would allow over
1,000 photos (each only a .7 MB JPEG) on the same card. Even though
those small files look great popped in an email, they won't enlarge or
print without getting pixilated and fuzzy.

Two other basic settings to attend to via the
camera's menu are “red eye” (keep it on to automatically fix those
glowing demon orbs) and “shoot without card” (keep it off because it's
very disheartening to hit the playback button and discover those
awesome shots of Drahthaar Gus bounding through the snow-dusted
prairie never happened – and that’s a true story).

Read the rest of the tips on the Ruffed Grouse Society website...

http://www.ruffedgrousesociety.org/magazine/spring2010/