It is often interesting to see the difference between the photos an amateur and a professional take even when using the same equipment.  One of the separating factors between the two is the use of composition and design. If you want to radically improve your photos, leaning the elements of good composition and good design is a must.

Freedman is one of my favorite authors. His writing is easy to understand and easy to follow.  He always illustrates his books with amazing photos that are a feast to the eye.  This book is no exception and if you are wondering how to bump up your photo skills a notch or 5, you simply cannot go wrong by getting this book.

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2. Better Stock Photos
3. From Still to Motion

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Chase Jarvis has created a 10 minute video on How to Manage Your Digital Workflow.  His company is involved in both video and still production and the workflow description and diagrams apply to both aspects of their work.

Here is the video … but you might also want to visit the website because there is also a detailed written description and some nifty diagrams of the workflow processes.

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I’ve spent a whole day looking for great photography tutorials for digital photographers. (There’s a lot of real drek out there!)  Here are the best tutorials I could find on digital camera basics.

The first two are for beginners  and the next three are for more advanced users who have an adjustable camera.

Robert Vasquez, is a photographer from Fontana California. He owns and operates Photo Magic which is an on location photography and video service.

Photography Tutorial 1 (Fundamentals)

This is a MUST for beginning digital photographers. It explains the top three digital photo concepts: aperture, shutter speed and ISO. Just knowing these three things will immediately improve your photography!

Photography Tutorial 2 ( Insider Advice)

Robert is a working photographer, in this video he gives you some advice that comes from his years of business and photography experience.

The next three videos are “the basics” for more Advanced Photographers.

Digital Photography 1 on 1: Episode 1

In this episode Mark Wallace explains how the shutter works, shutter sync, and how to control the ambient light exposure while using a flash.

As I was watching this video I kept on thinking “wow, I didn’t know that.” The explanations are fabulous, illustrated graphically and easy to understand.

Digital Photography 1 on 1: Episode 2

In this episode Mark Wallace describes the two types of light meters. He answers the questions, “What meter should I buy?” and “How do I use a light meter?”

Digital Photography 1 on 1: Episode 3

In this episode Mark Wallace talks about the kinds of lighting equipment you need.

RESOURCES

Portable Lighting Studio

Here is what one happy customer had to say: Great item for the money. Folds up to a carrying case that holds the lights and tripod. Tripos is metal and holds my Fuji S5000 without issue. Feet on tripod need to have a non slip surface though as the tips are plastic and easily slide. But again, you CANNOT beat this deal as it is the perfect choice for a beginner or novice.

Digital Concepts Ps-101 Portable Lighting Studio

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1. Free Guide Ends Your Digital Photography Frustrations
2. Business and Legal Forms for Photographers
3. Managing Your Digital Workflow

Picasa helps you organize your photographs the way you want to. You can create groups of photos as albums. When the photographs are initially imported it is saved in the same structure as in your hard disk or digital camera. Once you create albums, you can play around with the photos without affecting the original photos. It simply means even if you delete an album your original photos remain intact.

Labeling and Grading Photographs

You can create sects and sub-sects of photographs. In simple words you can label your photographs without changing the original folders. You can also grade your photographs according to any criteria that you assign. The grading is  based on the number of stars.

Editing the Photographs

For beginners this tool is a blessing.Basic editing functions include cropping, coloring, filling and auto coloring the photographs. You can also create effects in a photograph like sharpening or brightening.

Another feature under the edit tool is tuning of photographs which allows you to work around with adjusting the contrast or removing unwanted colors. It also has an I am feeling lucky button similar to the parent Google page which simply edits the photographs what it thinks is the best. Probably the best feature of Picasa is that any changes you make to a photograph with the editing tool are saved in a reversible format. This allows you to keep editing without saving different files.

Picasa utilizes a simple  folder system to organize photographs. The editing features, though good for amateurs is limited. It does not allow you to do much. The biggest disadvantage in the editing tool is that there is no way you can edit the date on a photograph if there is one.  The best features of Picasa include the easy and almost automatic  digital storage and the ability to share photos with friends without exposing your photos to the entire world!

RESOURCES

Organizing and Editing Your Photos with Picasa: Visual QuickProject Guide

Digital Photography: Top 100 Simplified Tips & Tricks

Googlepedia: The Ultimate Google Resource (3rd Edition)

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1. Resizing Your Photographs
2. Free Online Image Editor
3. Understanding the Digital Histogram

The frustrations begin from day one. You have decided to buy a digital camera and there are friends who talk about the optical zoom and digital zoom. You are not sure what the best one for you is. You are not even sure if you should go in for a digital camera with all these terminologies to get used to.

Well you just decide to go get one and have started to try out taking pictures. And there you are again frustrated! The pictures just do not come right. They are either blurred or there is too much of light or too less of light. You wonder if you made the right decision by buying something you cannot manage or even understand.

Neither buying a digital camera nor working with one is as complicated as it may sound. You have a one stop guide to end all your problems with digital photography. It is worth downloading and seeing what the guide Shoot Digital Pics Like the Pros is all about. It is just 28 pages but provides you with all information that you need to get started as a digital photographer.

For those of you still toying with the idea of buying a digital camera, the guide has a section catering to How to choose a camera. Many of us who have been proud owners of digital cameras still do not really understand the camera settings. Understanding your camera’s settings will unleash the full potential of your camera. It helps you understand focusing, balancing colors and exposure apart from the many other aspects.

Understanding the camera settings alone does not free you from the problems that you have been facing. You need to dig a little into photography basics as well. Photography basics are a collection of simple tips and tricks to help you take better photographs.

What makes a good photograph takes you through simple solutions to shoot better pictures. The best tip is to carry the camera around so that you do not miss some amazing happening. It also throws some light on having a good background.

There many other interesting features discussed in the guide like the fill flash mode, the macro shots and many more. The guide comes absolutely free and you can start using it right away and start shooting like a professional. Why wait? Download your free copy NOW!

RESOURCES

The Digital Photography Book

The Digital Photography Book, Volume 2

Digital Photography Masterclass

Related posts:

1. Understanding the Digital Histogram
2. Choosing a Digital Camera
3. Five Top Tutorials for Digital Photographers

You are back from a holiday in Venice and have a load of photographs that you want to share with family and friends. But each photograph size is so big that it is taking you hours to upload to enable online viewing. What can you do to resize your images for online use without compromising on photo quality?

Before we get into details, let us first understand the format in which a picture is saved in the camera. Generally pictures are saved in the JPEG format. If your camera does not save in the JPEG format, be sure to save your picture in the JPEG format before you start any editing or resizing.

One of the simple ways of reducing the image size is to crop off portions in the photograph that you do not require. All photo editing software have an option to edit the photographs. They will also have an option to resize the photographs.

Open the image that you want to resize. Save the image under a different file name. It is highly recommended that you do not change the original photograph. The Image menu has an option to resize. This will lead you to a dialog box to select the image size. You can choose the size that you want but be sure to also select the Constrain and Resample options. This will retain the image aspect ratio of the original photograph and the resized imaged will not be stretched or distorted.

When you are compressing, be sure to opt for medium to high quality. The issue with JPEG format is that the compression scheme it follows makes the image loses clarity every time you edit and save. In order that your image does not become blurred and lose detail, edit and save only once. If you are resaving use the same compression settings as the initial save.

But I have all the holiday photos to be resized for online viewing. What do I do? Editing and resizing photos one by one is time consuming. The solution to this has been provided by almost all photo editing software wherein you can do a batch resize.

BlueFive’s PixResizer is a program that enables you to quickly and easily resize your photographs. It is a free to use software and saves your resized files in a different folder so that your original images remain untouched. It is a handy tool for photographers. So why wait? Go ahead and show off the beauty of Venice to one and all on the web!

Another low cost alternative is Batch Photo Factory

Batch Photo Factory has the ability to batch process the photos. You can batch add frames and watermarks, convert,resize and rename a great number of your photos in ease. It is a useful and easy tool to prepare pictures for websites, making the photos smaller and lovelier and protecting your photos’ copyrights. All of the process can be done in batches.

RESOURCES

Black & White Photography Techniques with Adobe Photoshop

Microstock Photography: How to Make Money from Your Digital Images

Advanced Digital Photography: Techniques & Tips for Creating Professional-Quality Images, Revised Edition

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1. Free Online Image Editor
2. Picasa
3. Choosing a Digital Camera

If you shoot digital, you have a distinct advantage over the film photographer. One of the most helpful features of the digital camera is the histogram, if you know how to use it.

The Digital Histogram is a graph that can be pulled up on the display screen of most digital cameras for every photo taken on that particular camera. It is not nearly as scary and difficult as it sounds. The histogram is really nothing more than a graph that shows how the image has been exposed. In other words, the histogram shows the brightness of the photograph.

If you’ll learn how to read a histogram, you’ll never need to worry about washed out highlights and blocked shadows again. It’s not difficult

Every medium to high-end digital camera incorporates this feature. Many point-and-shoot cameras have it too.  Photoshop and Photoshop Elements can also display it. If you don’t know how to display it on your camera, take a break, go grab your manual, and learn.

Even though you can’t view it on your 35mm camera, the histogram applies to negative film and transparency film as well. To view a histogram of your transparencies or negatives, you’ll need to scan them and view the results in an editing program such as Photoshop or Photoshop Elements.

The histogram is simply a graph showing how the light was recorded from pure black to pure white and everything in between.

There’s an awful lot of information available in the histogram, but for our purposes, we’re going to use it for just one thing, to find out if we’ve washed out our highlights or blocked out our shadows.

Of course, we don’t necessarily want to completely avoid either of those things. We do, however, want to know if we have done them because, if we’ve totally blown either one, the resulting image will be useless.

As always, there are exceptions to every rule. At times, we may want to push the highlights a little to bring out some detail in the shadow areas, and sometimes we may want to underexpose the shadow areas a little to tone down a washed out highlight.

If we read the histogram it will tell us whether or not we’ve achieved the results we were looking for, so we can confidently move on to the next shot.

How to Read the Histogram

In the simplest of terms:

The left side of the chart indicates pure black; the right side, pure white; the center of the chart is the mid-range. So:

If you look at the histogram you’ll see the background is white. The indicators – the peaks and valleys – are black. The position of the bulk of the indicators and their highest peaks should, in most cases, be close to the center of the chart. If this is the case, you do, for all intents and purposes, have a correctly exposed photograph.

If most of the peaks and valleys are all the way to the left and disappearing off the chart, you know you have underexposed the image and the shadows will be blocked out, but you will have detail in the highlights.

If most of the peaks and valleys are all the way to the right and disappearing off the chart, you know you have overexposed the image and the highlights will be washed out, but you will have detail in the shadows.

Below is a list of some of the other things the histogram can do for us, most of them in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. Obviously, we can’t discuss them here, but you do need to understand just how important the histogram is and how it can help you to improve your photography – digital or film.

· Improve contrast

· Tone down highlights

· Balance Color

· Open shadows

· Lighten or darken the final print

None of these things can be done when you’re out in the field. You can, however, set your camera to its review function so that it will display the histogram and you can leave it there. Now, when you take a shot you can quickly check the histogram and know immediately if you’ve overexposed or underexposed the image. You’ll also know if you’ve washed out the highlights or blocked the shadows.

Suppose you decided you wanted to overexpose the highlights a little in order to capture some detail in the shadows? Or, maybe you wanted to retain the highlights and let some of the shadow areas go dark. Whatever the effect you wanted to achieve, you’ll know almost immediately if you got the results you were looking for.

If you missed the shot, you can shoot it again. If you have what you’re looking for, you can move on and shoot the next image. If you’re shooting the same subject, but maybe from a different perspective of viewpoint, and if the lighting hasn’t changed, you don’t need to look at the histogram again; you already have the information you need and can continue shooting with confidence.

Often, especially in high-contrast situations, I’ll check the histogram after every shot. Then again, when conditions are not so extreme, I’ll check it maybe only once in every 50, or so, shots. I do, however, always check it on the first shot of a new location. That, my friends, is crucial. More times than I can remember, that simple step in my routine has saved me from blowing an assignment.

The histogram is an amazingly useful tool. The more you use it, the more you’ll like it. Best of all, your photography will improve significantly.

Quick Tip:

Though not as useful as reading and understanding the histogram – but extremely so when you are in a hurry – there is another tool available in most digital cameras. You can set your camera to show “blinking highlights”. Do this, and when you look at the review screen, you see the image just as always, but if there are areas where you’ve overexposed and blown out the highlights, they will blink either red or white, depending upon the brand of camera.

(c) Blair Howard
All Rights Reserved

RESOURCES:

Understanding Exposure: How to Shoot Great Photographs with a Film or Digital Camera (Updated Edition)

Digital Photography Masterclass

Exposure Photo Workshop: Develop Your Digital Photography Talent

Related posts:

1. Free Guide Ends Your Digital Photography Frustrations
2. Choosing a Digital Camera
3. Five Top Tutorials for Digital Photographers

CBC’s Marketplace has a excellent article on Photo Contest Scams. Read the article One winner + 70 second place winners = something fishy HERE.

There is a long list of “I’ve been scammed” reports at the Rip Off Report website.

Warning signs of a scam:

• The contest is free to enter (this COMBINED with the following)
• The only purpose of the website does is “the contest.”
• Very soon after entering, you receive a “you’ve won!” notification
• They ask for money in several ways. For example, payment for a bio or listing, or they offer your photo in a commemorative plaque or most often they offer to sell you a very expensive book.
• Especially watch the “cute pet” and “cute baby” contests. These grab you because of your emotional connection. Don’t let that get in the way of common sense.

Please note that many legitimate photo contests charge an entry fee. This fee is to cover costs of administering the contest and funding some of the prizes.

Why are many contests FREE to enter? Companies or websites promotion themselves or their products often run contests as a effective promotional tool.  Photography and writing organizations and groups often run free contests as part of their mandate of promoting the profession. Some contests are run as a “continuing legacy,” grant or scholarship.

If you are suspicious about a contest see if you can figure out why the site or company is running the contest.  For example Photo Life — Showtime is a contest run by Photo Life magazine.  The contest is an ongoing promotional tool for its readers and subscribers. AND its a great way to profile reader’s work and fill space at a relatively low cost!

It is often the combination of free, followed by a request for money (no matter how that request is disguised) that signals a scam contest. Use your best judgment when entering contests, in the end the statement “buyer beware,” is your best defense. Stay alert and look for the warning signs.

Note:  We try our best to not include anything that screams “scam” at us. You may be surprised at how many contests we disallow!  At the same time it is a judgment call … for example we do include photo contests that “grab rights” because many photographers WANT to enter them.  As much as we wish we were, we are not gods or censors. We do NOT guarantee the legitimacy of the contests listed in the database.  Deadline Photo Contests … Ongoing Photo Contests.

IF you feel uncomfortable about the small print in a contest … don’t enter it.  There are new contests every day. Wait for one that is right for you.  If they ask you for money AFTER they’ve told you you’re a winner  … RUN FAST and hide!

Be sure to check out our Photography Contest Listings … right now we have over
20 Deadline Photo Contests … and 10 Monthly and Ongoing Photo Contests.

Melanie

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