It seems everyone is carrying a compact digital cameras around these days. And for a god reason, they’re small, lightweight and easy to carry. Because of their mobility and ease of use why not extend their functionality to help make your life easier?

Here are eleven creative and useful digital camera tips you probably never thought of.

Without a doubt photos shot from high angles can be super interesting and creative. Problem is unless you climb a tree, building, fence, or attach your digital camera to a kite it’s tough to get those nice high shots. Just think how much cooler your pictures might be if you could loft your camera say 16 feet straight up.

Applications:

• Real estate photos
• Creative photography
• Group pictures
• Crowd shots
• How’d-you-do-that style pictures
• Concert pics
• Spy shots (photograph over fences etc.)

Here’s a very inexpensive DIY project that’ll allow you to just that – put your digital camera straight up in the air to as high as 8 feet.

Stuff you’ll need:

• Telescoping extension pole, 4? to 8?, plastic top
• 1/4?-20 hangar bolt
• Drill
• Pliers
• Light and small tripod ball head

For the full details and instructions hop over to photojojo.

If you have ever wanted to marry your digital camera to your bike here’s your chance. There are several bike/camera mounts out there but the big problem is most require you “unscrew” the camera which can be a super inconvenience.

This DIY tutorial produces a fully articulated, quick-release camera mount and appears to work perfectly plus it looks to be convenient and fun to use.

Hop over here for full details…

Here is a great little trick that will increase the light quality of your compact digital camera by about 500%. Most photos take with compacts are taken in tight quarters and generally the light from the majority of small digital flashes can be pretty harsh.

In this video you’ll learn a couple of quick tips that will give your flash photos a more professional look.

Increase the quality of compact digital cameras flash.

Well… it looks like Harrison Ford has resurrected Indiana Jones and he’ll bring his new adventures to the big screen for all to enjoy.

In the meantime here’s a tutorial that will teach you how to transform your photo into a cool Indiana Jones style poster.

If you have ever wanted to see how your Canon point-and-shoot digital camera would perform on steroids, here’s your opportunity. Recently LifeHacker published an in-depth article explaining how to add some code to your cameras memory card that would literally transform your camera into a supercamera. Adding this simple code gives your camera a new breath of life and some outstanding features like…

• Remaining Battery Life Indicator
• RAW Capability – (YES!)
• Histogram
• Depth of Focus
• Faster Shutter Speeds (1/25,000 sec or faster)
• Auto Bracketing – (Now you can experiment with HDR – high dynamic range)
• Longer Video Recording Times (up to 1 hour or 2GBs)

Now that you’re excited you should run over to LifeHacker and see if your camera is supported.

Notiice!

We plan on running this update on a Canon PowerShot SD850 IS and then posting the experience. Stay tuned!

Here’s a great step-by-step tutorial on how to create a magazine quality product silhouette. Ebay and other online auction users will be particularly interested in this technique.

You’re seen examples of silhouette everywhere. In printed magazines, ebay and web sites. They are the pictures that appear to be perfectly outlined with white making them easy to place on web pages and printed material. One of the nice things about silhouette images is they don’t have traditional borders or frames and appear much more natural. This tutorial is accomplished with fairly simple lighting and a few minutes spent in an image processing software like Photoshop.

Different lighting effects are analyzed and examples of each are displayed along with a neat little “water bead trick.”

Read the full tutorial >>

Marcus Newey has figured out how to create a multi-light effect using illumination for a single flash. He has posted this creative and highly effective technique in a flicker discussion group in which he explains how to photograph multiple shoots of the same scene with a single flash and then use Photoshop to combine the pictures to create one composite photo.

The tutorial is aimed at the real estate photography crowd but I can see some REALLY creative applications for this technique. An example might be how to light a very large interior such as a church using just one flash.

See the entire tutorial here.