Mar 30
With just a few minutes and Photoshop’s clone stamp tool, you can quickly edit out almost anything from your digital photos.
Tags: Digital Photos, Photoshop Elements, Photoshop Tutorial, Stamp Tool
Mar 30
michael wong asked:
Photography has always been a fascinating subject to many people. Nowadays, you don’t just see pictures taken on land. You can also see pictures taken from space, air and underwater. So, for those divers who have the interest, underwater photography has become another perfect reason for them to do more diving.
Here are some tips for you if you are interested in this new hobby.
1. The equipments
As you already know, most cameras nowadays are not water resistant. Even some of the digital cameras that were designed to be water resistant, they can only be submerged underwater for the maximum of 2-3 meters.
So, when you want to practice underwater photography, you will want to get a casing to protect your camera. This kind of casing is just a transparent plastic with rubber to house your digital camera. As long as you fit your camera nicely in the plastic case, you can still access its function from the outside.
There is one thing you need to remember before you jump into water is the capacity of your memory card. Imagine that you are happily taking picture of the unique underwater life and suddenly your memory card is full. You certainly can’t change your memory card like you are on land and you can only do that at the surface. But by the time you get back to the same spot, your subject might be long gone. There is nothing more frustrating to a photographer than to miss the perfect shot and it is even more frustrating when it is cause by a small mistake like this.
2. Closing in
It is said that the things you see underwater is 3 times larger when they are on land. This is because water distorts (refract or bend) light.
So, when you are taking pictures underwater, you will want to get as close as possible to your subject. Another tip for you to keep in mind is that you need to be careful when you are photographing marine life in close proximity.
Even though some of them might look still, your flash and distant might provoke them and cause them to attack. The last thing you will want to get with underwater photography is to get hurt by your subject. So, keep yourself safe by minimizing your flash and use your zoom lenses whenever is possible.
3. Research
You are supposed to know where you are diving, right? So, research about the underwater marine life before you go there so that you will know what you are going to see. You can also assess how dangerous your subjects will be so that you can be prepared for them.
And for you to enjoy your diving and photography trip to the fullest, you can also look for any experience guide who can dive with you. When you are diving with them, there is a high chance for you to take some astonishing underwater pictures.
Happy Snapper?
Mar 29
Tutorial on how to cut out an image in Photoshop and stack layers to create image effects.
Tags: Image Effects, Photoshop Effects, Photoshop Tutorial, Stack
Mar 26
Alex Don asked:
One of the most appealing areas of photography is travel photography. When visiting a new place, every photographer wants to find a way to catch its feel, its uniqueness and bring it home with him. Travel photography can a very appealing and rewarding, yet very complex task. Just walking around and getting random shots is not the way to do it. You need to spend some time thinking about what you want to express and how.
When you think of a particular place, all the different elements that cross your mind are melt together to form its unique character or personality, that je-ne-sais-quoi that makes it different from any other place in the world. Whether it’s an old village or an exotic travel destination, a good photographer can capture its uniqueness and present it to the audience. This article is aimed to share some ideas on how to capture the character of a place through photography.
Basic Elements
A location has certain specifics that make it what it is. In most cases, these can be broken down into landscape, culture and people. Let’s take each of them separately to go into more details.
Landscape. Every little town, mountain or city looks different from any other place in the world. The architecture may be exclusive to that specific region or the natural surroundings may be unique. Think of the Gaudi area in Barcelona or the steep cliffs and rough seas of the coasts of Ireland and Scotland. Think of how the place looks like at night or early in the morning. A location takes on different personalities throughout a day and it’s important to capture each of them.
Culture. An important aspect of a destination’s character is its culture. A photographer can capture elements of culture in foods, drinks, local festivals and other things that are specific to that place. Local dishes, an yearly parade with traditional costumes or a street party are good examples.
People. People from different parts of the world look, dress and behave differently. Try to take as many photos as you can, both posed and candid, and catch people in activities the place is known for. If they are famous for being happy and lively you should take photos at parties to express this lifestyle. If they are hard working, photograph them while at work.
Creating the whole picture. To put all these elements together, zoom in on the subject. You can start with the landscape, photographing surroundings, interesting buildings and anything else to help the audience recognize the location. Then you can zoom in to people, capturing their attitudes and lifestyle. Finally you can start exploring culture. Apart from local food and festivals, photograph shop signs that can show the languages spoken there, as well as products that are a tradition for the area.
Travel photography is a very complex job because you need to be good at portrait photography, still life photography, nature photography and still life photography. Learning all these will put you on the right track of becoming a good photographer.
Bargain Digital Compact Cameras
Mar 21
michael wong asked:
Imagine that you are looking at picture of a scrumptious pork fillet, mouth watering steak and a glass of iced cold grape juice. How do you feel? Hungry?
That is what successful food photographers can do. They can trigger your hunger by just looking at their pictures. Isn’t it amazing when you can do the same? Let’s start by looking at the tips below:
1. Lighting
Lighting is very important in food photography. When you have the right lighting, it will seem like the dish is asking the viewers to feast on it. So, it is very important that you look at the surrounding and experiment your picture with as much natural light as possible.
There will be time that the surrounding light can’t really illuminate the dish. When that happens, you will want to consider using a flash. Then, you need to control the intensity of the flash. Remember that you want to highlight the essence of the dish and get your viewers hungry instead of disgust them with an all brighten up dish.
2. Presentation
Imagine a plate of pork chop with its broccoli scattered around and the sauce flooding the plate. Do you still have the intention to dig into it? Most likely you will wonder how a chef can present that for dining.
So, take your time to arrange your dish. It must be visually attracting before someone will actually have the desire to eat it. When you are photographing a burger, you will want to get the stuffing out of the bun and that is how the fast food chains advertise and get you to visit them.
And when you are photographing a dish, experiment your picture with and without the cutlery. How does that feel? Sometime, the cutlery will enhance your picture and sometime not.
3. Out of focus
Creating shallow depth of field on your dish will keep your food in focus while the background blurred. Your viewers will automatically pay attention to the food and it would trigger their urge to eat.
However, the compact digital cameras in the market now are unable to adjust the depth of field. It is true that you can create the effect with photo editing software later. Still, the picture will not look as natural as when you are using a DSLR camera to capture the picture.
As much fun as talking about food photography, you will start to feel hungry. Unfortunately, that is the side effect of looking into this interesting topic.
Nikon DSLR Bargains
Mar 21
Whether you are on a professional assignment or just planning to take some photos on your annual holiday, by putting some effort into planning your trip properly you will be able to maximize your time and produce better results. It all comes down to research and knowing what to expect once you get there. Continue reading »
Tags: Stock Photos, Travel
Mar 20
Low Jeremy asked:
Although photography largely involve an eye for beauty and a natural instinct for clicking the camera, it is still important for photographers especially those that are just starting in the field to gather some experience in actual photography. Some practice on their spare time and learn the techniques on their own but this will take a lot of clicking time and magazine reading.
This is why most will go for the short-cut by enrolling in schools that offer short courses in photography. Of course, this will not guarantee to make you a master photographer in months but at least you already have all the tools that you need to make your way to the world of shapes and colors.
Here are some of the things that you should consider when looking for a good photography school to enroll to.
1.Course outline
This is perhaps the most important thing that you have to think about when looking for a school. The course outline will help you determine if the course is suited to the training that you need. It will contain a rundown of all the lessons that students like you will tackle in the class.
Take a look at the list and try to see if all the things that you need to learn are already there. If you find it lacking, try to shop around for other photography courses in the same school or better yet inquire in another school. With a lot of schools, museums and centers offering photography courses, chances are you will find the one that fits you to a T.
2. Specialization
There are courses that are offered according to certain specializations. For instance, some courses concentrate entirely on nature photography. Others go for portraits and human interest pieces. There are even some that do **** photography classes.
In other words, there are a multitude of specializations that you can go into. You can even take all of them; but of course, you have to shell out big bucks for that.
3. Laboratory and field work
Photography is a largely experiential field. You learn not from reading about it or discussing about the theories but in actual taking of shots and doing field works. In the course outline, try to look for the number of hours that will be spent outside the classroom.
Ideally, about 75 percent of the whole course should be used as practice time in fields or in the dark room. Only a quarter should be spent for theories and basics. Some courses offer a 50-50 ratio. Shop around for courses that emphasize field works and experiential learning as these are the courses where you can learn more.
Blogmonster Discount Store
Tags: Museums, Photography Portraits, Spare Time
Mar 17
Alex Don asked:
e most appealing areas of photography is travel photography. When visiting a new place, every photographer wants to find a way to catch its feel, its uniqueness and bring it home with him. Travel photography can a very appealing and rewarding, yet very complex task. Just walking around and getting random shots is not the way to do it. You need to spend some time thinking about what you want to express and how.
When you think of a particular place, all the different elements that cross your mind are melt together to form its unique character or personality, that je-ne-sais-quoi that makes it different from any other place in the world. Whether it’s an old village or an exotic travel destination, a good photographer can capture its uniqueness and present it to the audience. This article is aimed to share some ideas on how to capture the character of a place through photography.
Basic Elements
A location has certain specifics that make it what it is. In most cases, these can be broken down into landscape, culture and people. Let’s take each of them separately to go into more details.
Landscape. Every little town, mountain or city looks different from any other place in the world. The architecture may be exclusive to that specific region or the natural surroundings may be unique. Think of the Gaudi area in Barcelona or the steep cliffs and rough seas of the coasts of Ireland and Scotland. Think of how the place looks like at night or early in the morning. A location takes on different personalities throughout a day and it’s important to capture each of them.
Culture. An important aspect of a destination’s character is its culture. A photographer can capture elements of culture in foods, drinks, local festivals and other things that are specific to that place. Local dishes, an yearly parade with traditional costumes or a street party are good examples.
People. People from different parts of the world look, dress and behave differently. Try to take as many photos as you can, both posed and candid, and catch people in activities the place is known for. If they are famous for being happy and lively you should take photos at parties to express this lifestyle. If they are hard working, photograph them while at work.
Creating the whole picture. To put all these elements together, zoom in on the subject. You can start with the landscape, photographing surroundings, interesting buildings and anything else to help the audience recognize the location. Then you can zoom in to people, capturing their attitudes and lifestyle. Finally you can start exploring culture. Apart from local food and festivals, photograph shop signs that can show the languages spoken there, as well as products that are a tradition for the area.
Travel photography is a very complex job because you need to be good at portrait photography, still life photography, nature photography and still life photography. Learning all these will put you on the right track of becoming a good photographer.
Improve your photography leaps and bounds!
Mar 16
The Canon EOS 5D 12.8MP Digital SLR Camera offers advanced photographers a lightweight, robust digital SLR that uses Canon’s superlative EF lenses without a conversion factor. Its full-frame 12.8 megapixel CMOS sensor combines with Canon’s DIGIC II Image Processor, a high-precision 9-point AF system with 6 assist points. The DIGIC II also features “Picture Style” color control to deliver images of superior quality with enough resolution for any application. With its wide-angle Continue reading »
Tags: Canon, DSLR, Eos System
Mar 13
Christine OKelly asked:
When it comes to commercial product photography, people often ask, “Why do professional photographs look better than non-professional?” The answer is complex and the process requires a great deal of skill and practical experience, but it is a skill that can be learned. If you’ve got products to photograph, investing the time and resources into learning how to correctly shoot commercial product photography - or hiring a professional product photographer is a choice that can drastically increase your return on investment.
The Importance of Lighting
In commercial product photography, professionals use special lighting techniques to bring dramatic effects and crystal clarity to the images. By using lighting correctly, you can bring a three-dimensional feel to a two-dimensional product image; making it seem more tangible to the viewer - as if they could pick it up in their hand and actually feel it.
Typical lighting used in commercial product photography includes powerful strobe lights to gain depth of field, special soft lighting boxes, reflectors, and macro lenses for close-up work.
Creating a Mood
Anyone can throw a product on a white background, but a professional creates a mood in commercial product photography instead of simply documenting a product. Creating an atmosphere that makes the customer want to buy the product is vital.
Lighting and staging play a huge part in creating mood. Modern lighting, home lighting, colored spot lighting, and dramatic lighting are well suited for producing a mood or feeling. For example, a commercial product photography shot of caramel covered apples in front of a plain white background is not very appetizing. It would not create the mood necessary to motivate people to want a caramel apple. A makeover of this shot includes creating a homey look.
An old wooden table in front of a window with special bright outdoor lighting coming through highlighting the apple uses light to create a cheery feeling. Additional staging for this shot could include the apple sitting on an old-fashioned plate positioned on top of a crocheted doily like the one Grandma used to make. An antique white vase full of daisies adds to the homespun photograph, making the apple seem homemade and more appetizing than with a plain white background.
Evaluating a Commercial Product Photography Professional
If you choose not to invest the time to learn how to accomplish high quality commercial product photography yourself, you’ll still want to invest some of that time in evaluating a professional product photographer. Finding the right product photographer can be the difference between average online or catalog sales and record-breaking sales.
A great commercial product photographer not only has a keen sense of marketing, but should also take the time to learn about your product specifically. The photographer should ask questions about your target audience, your competitors, and the formats in which the image will be displayed.
Hiring a commercial product photographer is an investment, and you’ll want to make sure you get results that absolutely thrill you. With the computer equipment available today, a great commercial product photography professional should be able to show you the images before the shoot is over so that you can be certain that you love the quality. Steer clear of any commercial product photographer that refuses to offer a 100% satisfaction guarantee.
With these three tips under your belt, you can achieve professional commercial photography that works overtime to sell your products. Whether you choose to master the art of commercial product photography yourself or hire a professional, refusing to settle for less than professional product images is a decision that will pay off dramatically in both sales and the way in which shoppers perceive the quality of your company.
Electronics Discount Store
Mar 10
Photoshop CS4is a very powerful tool, learning it is fairly difficult but with these tutorials and with a little practice, anyone can become an expert. Adobe CS4 is the latest version of this industry standard photo manipulation software and has many new features.
Tags: learning, movie, Photoshop Tutorial, training, Warp
Mar 08
Avi Roth asked:
Managing the challenge of narrow depth of field in highly reflective surface environment
By Avi Roth
In the field of commercial photography, be it in motion or static, every category presents a challenge of its own. With jewelry photography, an object of highly reflective surface (HRS), the challenge is amplified due to its relatively small size captured mostly in close-up environment with shallow depth of field, surface complexity (specular), and limited ways of lighting due to space restriction between the lens and the object. Jewelry photography demands knowledge and experience to overcome the compounded difficulty of controlling reflections and limited depth-of-field (perceived sharpness) in close-up jewelry photography.
In addition to the problems mentioned above, the success of reproducing and obtaining a high quality digital image of jewelry will depend on the equipment used in the reproduction process. There are basically three types of camera systems one can employ:
a. Digital SLRs like Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Sigma with good sensor resolution (6-14 MP)
b. Medium format cameras like Hassleblad, Rollei or Mamiya with a larger sensor digital back (11-39 MP)
c. Large format view cameras like Sinar or Toyo with live video studio solution (11-39 MP)
The purpose of this article is to discuss some of the principal challenges posed by the complexities of reflective surface reproduction, particularly in digital close-up photography. Below I will present some solution to these challenges from the lessons learned and experienced in my daily practice and from my own research as to what is the best, fastest, and simplest solution to an otherwise complex assignment of jewelry photography.
Jewelry surface (HRS)
The most difficult task of all HRS digital captures is jewelry. In essence all jewelry objects are built with reflective qualities of various degrees and can be compared to mirrors. Mirrors are objects with good specular or diffused reflection; that is, image forming qualities. Imagine pointing your lens towards a mirror at a close distance. What will you see? Exactly, yourself holding a camera and your surrounding area. Jewelry objects in essence embody three kinds of mirrors: flat, convex and concave determined at random by the jewelrys very shape. Curved mirrors magnify or shrink images therefore distort the reflected image. Most jewelry objects typify spherical mirrors structured in an interesting relationship of concave and convex surfaces.
Solutions:
Understanding the basic reflective properties of mirrors can be helpful in solving some basic problems related to jewelry photography because of their common reflective properties.
a. Jewelry reflection has no physical existence. Conceal the camera or choose a shooting angle for the jewelry to reflect a controlled surface such as a white board or soft box.
b. The location of the camera/lens matters in terms of how and what will the jewelry reflect. Use longer lenses to extend the working space between object and lens.
c. When light strikes the jewelry surface the angle of reflection equals the angle of in incidence. Place your light source indirectly to the angle of reflectance.
d. The reflection on the jewelry is half the size of the reflected image - the jewelry is always halfway between the reflected image and the reflection. Creating and placing the jewelry inside a large soft tent enables the application of various light sources to minimize and control unwanted reflections.
e. If the jewelry surface is flat and perfectly shiny, specular reflection will result. If the surface is rough, diffused or distorted reflection will result (bending) Place the jewelry in a light zone of several loosely arranged large white panels, and by modifying their position relevant to the object will enable the control of light source there by controlling unwanted reflection.
Overall Sharpness:
A narrow depth-of-field (DOF) can create spectacular effects when photographing insects, flowers, etc., but in jewelry photography if the entire image does not appear in full focus, the image becomes an unusable one. Unusable in the sense that some parts of a ring or bracelet needed to provide useful data for the purpose of presentation will be unacceptably less sharp than other parts. For example, the front part of a bracelet (focal plane of the lens) is in sharp focus; but as we move towards the back region the loss of sharpness becomes unacceptable (blurred). DOF and image sharpness changes with sensor size. Smaller digital sensors obtain maximum sharpness at wider apertures (f:8-f:11) while larger ones at (f:11-f:22). Capturing small objects like jewelry via close-up photography presents a problem since only a very narrow portion of the object relative to the focal plane will be acceptably in focus. One way to extend depth of field would be to take images using a narrow lens aperture. This solution has a serious disadvantage. Small apertures bring more light diffraction, degrading the image resolution. This is one reason why many consumer digital cameras (with very small sensors) won’t let you stop down past f:8, while studio solution sensors are often stopped down to f:32 and beyond.
Solution:
The application of double exposure solution or photo stitching in jewelry photography partially solves the limitations of shallow depth-of-field. The technique known as “focus stacking” is another. Using double exposure when limited depth-of-field is available is a powerful technique to help photograph and present jewelry.
Depth-of-field determines what part of the jewelry has the sharpest focus and its amount. Unfortunately, at larger apertures depth of field limits attention to a particular focal points i.e. the top of a ring, while minimizing details at the shank. A greater depth-of-field would presents all the elements of a ring sharp at once, relatively equally. Depth-of-field is determined by the following: lens aperture (-stop), lens focal length and your distance from the focal point. In jewelry photography, of these three the aperture has the most influence and the least modifiable. Therefore to increase depth-of-field and achieve total sharpness over the entire image, move farther away from the jewelry by using a longer lens.
1. Capture two images, first focus slightly below the ring top, then a second focused lower at the center.
2. Bring both images into two separate layers in Photoshop to combine the two into one sharp image.
There are of course other solutions such as the Helicon Focus. This program is designed to manage the shallow depth-of-field problem in close-up imaging. It also aligns the images that change their size and position from shot to shot. This function is especially important with closeup jewelry photography.
However, the most pragmatic answer to the depth-of-field challenge is the large format studio camera. These cameras such as Arca Swiss, Linhof, Sinar, Fuji, Calumet or Toyo have expandable bellows, tilt and swing capabilities, and are allowing the capture of high-quality images with extended depth-of-field beyond the optical limitations of the lens.
Electronics Discount Store
Mar 03
Don’t you feel a little jealous when you look at photos taken by someone else and they look incredibly good, while yours are almost always bad? Some amateur photographers feel that everyone can take a great picture except for them. The fact is that taking good photos is not something you just have, but something you learn. Even a basic digital camera can take beautiful portraits if you learn a few simple techniques and keep them in mind each time you take a new photo. Here are some of the most common techniques you can use. Continue reading »
Tags: Portrait
