Guide To Digital Photography

Wedding Photography: Making Memories More Alive for the Married Couples“1,2,3… Say Cheese!” One of the most common things we hear as we pose to have our photos taken. Needless to say, that every person makes sure that they have cameras with them on the most important events of their lives. Even as simple as your babies taking their first steps, you want to have it documented and captured. It does not only serve as an evidence but it is needed as every picture can represent achievements, happiness and most of all it makes memories more alive.Traditions to weddings and ImportanceJust as it is important to simple events, it is even more important to big occasions like the celebration of marriage. Yes, almost in every wedding celebration you will definitely be seeing bright lights flashing in all places where the couple is. It is already a tradition to have pre-wedding, during and post-wedding pictorials. Pre-wedding photos are usually done days before in places that can great sceneries. It can also cover photos, hours before the wedding as the bride undergoes a makeover and the as the groom gets ready on his own. Photos taken during and post-wedding are done on the same day. It is done spontaneously including the guests while making the bride and the groom the star in every photo.Wedding photography is always in this celebration. Some may hire a professional to do it while others settle to have one of their family members to do it on their own. Remember, time has evolved and technology has brought many changes. Manual cameras are out and digital cameras are in. Most of the professional photographers have the best cameras to allow you to have the greatest photos in all lighting conditions and they have great eye to take the best angles and focus of their subject. Any person will definitely be happy if they see a photo of themselves capturing their best forms. You can have this with the aid of these professionals. However, if one of your family members has talents in using digital camera, why not right? It will be an added bonus on your part because you can surely save money from it.If you ask, why do you need them? The answer is very simple. Ten, twenty or even 50 years from now if you are still alive, you will remember your wedding day. When this happens, you would want to look back at your precious memories and looking at the photos will make it more alive. Moreover, as you impart stories to your kids, you will be able to show them how wonderful your wedding was. The photos themselves are symbolic as they represent how a wonderful marriage life started with a simple love for each other.Wedding photography is one service that makes a simple photo look wonderful. Any couple will highly appreciate how photos are tweaked to make it more appealing to the eye. With the right tools and equipment, you will surely enjoy your wedding photos and without a doubt, you will be happier to display them on your rooms and your homes.SummaryYou can memories more alive in your wedding with the photographs. You should consider this one service on your wedding. It is one thing that you should make sure that you have on the wedding day.

If ever you have seen a picture that is blurred, it is most probably because the camera was shaken while the picture was taken. With traditional photographic film cameras, it was evident only after the negatives and positives were made. However, with digital camera, the captured image can be seen immediately on the LCD screen, and if the image has shaken, then it can be discarded for a new shot.

Digital camera shakes are common with new users. This is primarily because, new users have not fully understood that the shutter-release button must not be pressed twice, but pressed two steps down. The first step locks the focus and exposure while the second step takes the photo. This pressing of the button has to be smooth, otherwise the digital camera shakes and a blurred picture is the result.

The shutter speed also plays an important role in blurring the picture. The shutter speed is the amount of time the shutter remains open to allow light to reach the digital camera sensor. It is measured in seconds or fractions of a second. An image is exposed by the combination of the lens aperture and the shutter speed. A slow shutter speed needs a small aperture (large F-stop number) to avoid over exposure. With a slow shutter speed below 1/60th of a second, over exposure is adequately controlled, but the digital camera is likely to vibrate more, giving a shaky picture.

A tripod is extremely useful to eliminate digital camera shakes. It is generally used by sports photographers who use long telephoto lens, as it helps in close-ups, landscape and panning shots, for timed exposures, for shooting at slow shutter speeds, and for taking photographs in low or dim light conditions. Shooting a fast moving subject, like athletes, or wildlife, tests the photographer`s skill and the equipment. In such cases, camera shakes are most likely to happen, and thus a monopod or a tripod is always used. Digital cameras mounted on tripods always tend to eliminate camera shakes and give sharp results.

A great feature in most high-end digital cameras available nowadays is image stabilization (IS). IS is an anti-shake and vibration reduction technology and is common in digital cameras with long telephoto zooms of 10X and 12X. With IS, sharp images can be obtained even if the camera shakes a little, a slow shutter speed is used, shooting is done in low light conditions, or a tripod is not used. IS was originally developed for video cameras. It is now available in interchangeable lens, consumer and professional digital cameras, which use optical image stabilization. Sports and wildlife photographers use a tripod and IS technology together to get the maximum sharpness of their photographs; however, many other photographers turn the IS feature off while using a tripod.

Digital camera shakes can be eliminated or minimized by the utilization of the above techniques. However, the fundamentals of taking a good shot prove to be most effective in avoiding camera shakes, in the absence of tripods, or IS technology.

The basics of good photography should be followed. You should hold the digital camera with both your hands. You should keep the legs apart with the knees slightly bent forward. Your elbows should be braced with your body and your body braced with some support, if possible. You should generally frame and compose the picture with the viewfinder and not the LCD screen. You should not jab but lightly press the shutter release button two steps down, and during that time, it would be beneficial to hold your breath to prevent any movement of the chest and hands. With this basic technique of good photography, you can be sure that your digital camera will not shake and no picture will be blurred.

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   It starts from the moment you step out to start your day,  take an extra moment and have a look around, not at the usual, cars in the drive way,  a distant glance at people coming and going, a quick look at the weather, then off to the hustle bustle of everyday living, but at the things you have been missing!.

 You may discover there is alot that you had in plain sight you had not noticed before,  Let your senses guide you to some amazing things, (I should add here, its all free).

Next time you open your door, pause, listen, look a little closer.  You worked so hard shovelling, weeding, planting, watering your garden, why not get some beautiful images of the fragile flowers that greet you, (if you don’t have a gently blowing garden, that’s another topic, you need to look into!) “the beautiful images are worth the effort”

On a cold winter night you can look back and anticipate spring with a new urgency to get more inspiring shots of nature, that offers up some pretty amazing sights

I would suggest  to add a few birdhouses throughout your yard, you will be rewarded, the birds you will aquire can entertain for hours, especially in the spring, the baby birds appreciate an easy food sourse and will keep returning throughout the season, you may even get a visit from a squirrel or two, you may get them eating right out of your hand!, they like a quick meal too!.

 In stead of your usual route to work or the mall, wherever you are going, take a different route!, a drive through a local park will present you with more than a few photo opps. Sights that can take your breath away when captured with your digital camera, an early sunrise can turn into yout favorite fine art gallery in your living room, or on the way home a beautiful sunset can complete the grouping! With the ease of editing and framing in our digital age this is not hard to do!

Oh, and that special occassion gathering, with a little planning can turn those treasured memories into photographs that would rival a proffessional photographer, but watch out you may make money along the way, when your long lost relatives are calling “you” to photograph their next special occasion, snap away and enjoy, “your new found love of photography”!

Stock Photo Portfolio Sites

A stock photography portfolio site is a site where people are able to buy as well as sell digital photos. To dedicate your time to such a site, you have to be truly interested in digital photography, enough to want to go out and take hundreds of photos everyday. Stock photography sites are useful not only to you, but also to a plethora of others as well. Buyers need stock photos in order to make their web pages, advertisements, art mediums, and anything else that requires visual aid. Those that benefit from buying your photos range from independent companies, personal businesses, and any other business that don’t want or don’t have the resources or funding to hire a professional photographer. Also, stock photography sites are a big help to freelance photographers. This is a way for digital photographers, like you, to make money or earn a living selling the pictures that they take. It depends on the work put into the site, but you can make anywhere from $1 to $500 per month, per site with payouts around 25 cents to dollars per photograph. How much you make really depends on your effort and the time you take shooting photos. To make around $500 dollars per month, however, you’re going to need a good digital stock photo portfolio that will show the quality of your work.

As a freelance photographer, you are going to need to know exactly how to set up a stock portfolio. The first step is to take hundreds, and eventually thousands of pictures. For how many photos you’re going to end up taking you had better love to take photographs. You will have to go through the process of eliminating photos based on lighting and angles and any other nit picky stipulations that make a great picture. You’ll end up taking many photos, with over half of them turning out badly. When you realize that you’re happy with the process of taking your pictures then you can begin to build your freelance portfolio.

How many pictures you need for your portfolio

One of the best ways of accomplishing this feat is to set a goal for you. This way, you won’t be discouraged when you first start out and you don’t just snap your fingers and produce hundreds of photos after only one session. You need to be able to get up everyday and complete a freelance photography session of at least 20 to 40 pictures. However, out of those photos you need to pick out 10 to 20 from the bunch that are of better quality than the others. Eventually, you’ll be able to better identify angles, lighting, and concepts for your freelance photography.

Once you reach a quota of about 100 pictures that you have taken, with no more than 3-5 repeated ones, you should be able to compare some of the more recent photos with the pictures at the beginning and notice some improvement. If you are consistent with your photography sessions, you will become a lot better and have a lot of work and original freelance photos to show for it. Eventually, through hard work and dedication, you’ll have the ability to shoot a hundred photos in one sitting and only throw out a few.

What to take pictures of

What you want to accomplish with your freelance photography is a collection of quality pictures. Like the saying goes, “quality over quantity.” Businesses that are going to be looking at your photography and perhaps purchasing some of them will want to be able to depend on your originality and quality. To ensure that you produce pictures of a good quality, you should shoot subjects that you’re passionate about. If you take pictures of sea otters and you don’t particularly like taking pictures of sea otters, then you will be less likely to make sure that the picture looks good.

However, if you take pictures of things that interest you then you are more likely to take your time and produce quality work. Finding a subject that you’re passionate about and expanding on that topic then you’ll make sure and find your photography niche. It’s recommended that for your first set of pictures you should choose one or two niches for your collection. This will narrow down the competition because if you take random pictures they’ll be white noise against the other photographers.

You need to be able to narrow down your subject matter in different ways than you are used to. Instead of just thinking about subjects like macro, portrait, geometric, or cityscape you need to be able to think in subjects such as decadent, noble, sensual, blue (colors), or futuristic. This will bring those businesses that are looking for a particular niche right to you.

Other things to know

Don’t include any signatures, marks, or logos on your picture to confine ownership

Make sure for modeling pictures, that the model signs off on submitting the photos be sold

Always have enough space on your digital camera; don’t be caught off guard

Keep researching and learning from those that are already more experienced in digital photography or, invest in and Ebook to help get started

The newly launched www.MyPhotosoft.com site will provide answers to many such questions with its detailed reviews on various digital photo software programs.

When asked how this idea developed, Nataly Tikhonovich, the MyPhotosoft editor, said, “This site started with the first single step of any journey — buying a digital camera. The first thing I did with my pictures — I tried to remove the red eye effect. First with the camera’s accompanying software, then, naturally, with Photoshop. The new facility and knowledge were coming to me as an avalanche – adjusting colors, shooting raw and converting, adjusting raw photos in a converter and almost forgetting about under- or over- exposure. And learning the myriad of possibilities Photoshop provides. You try them. You learn more and more, and at some point, people around you start saying ‘That’s great! How did you do it?’”

“That is when I thought of sharing observations, thoughts, knowledge and ideas with others. Not only with those who are around, but to all kinds of people everywhere. Those who are just starting out with digital photography will get much benefit, and even those who are already professional might discover a program they haven’t tried.”

MyPhotosoft.com is aimed at finding answers to its users’ questions and helping them to find their way among the multitude of photo software programs. It features an original, even exclusive, series of full-length reviews of various digital photo software with lots of example images, comparisons of similar programs, their performance, and ratings.

”We intend an individual approach to every review. We plan to demonstrate use of the programs so our users will see the results right on the screen. Tutorials and tips on Photoshop and other photo editors and plug-ins are there, too,” Nataly says.

The site has free registration and all members have an opportunity to upload images, write comments, discuss articles. They can bring their opinions and ideas.

USING SPARE CAMERA, PARE TIME TO MAKE EXTRA CASH

MY EXPERIENCE OF PHOTOGRAPHY MAKING MONEY

There are a lot of articles which are talking about how to make money from your photograph and camera. The reason I am writing here is to give out my true experience of using photograph to make money. I hope this article has some practical help to those people who have interests to use their spare time and spare resource to generate some extra income. This article is not a sort of advertisement or course to teach you to get quick money. It is only a practical guide to the people who like to try some different things, of course, if you have some photography background and art talent, I am sure you will be very interested in my experience. If you invest some serious energy and time on what I did ( I am a lazy person), maybe you can make a good living though this.

This journey started when I got my first digital camera. It is first time for me to have so much passion to take photo. My first digital camera is SONY Cyber Shot 5M pix compact digital camera. I took a lot of photos and stored them in my hard drive. One day, when I clean my hard drive, I ask myself, how I can deal with so many photos. Some of them are actually pretty good, like professional photograph. I used Photoshop (an image process software package) to process some of them and decide to sell them to make some money. And I found a stock photo web (I will introduce it later) and uploaded them. After several weeks, my photos start to generate income for me. Several months later, the photograph becomes my major hobby. I spent a lot of money to buy Canon EOS 350D digital camera to take more photos.

You must ask what can I do if I haven’t got any digital camera? Do not worry, just use your existing resource, I believe got 35mm film camera on hand. These days, a multi-functioner which includes scanning function doe not cost you over 100 dollars. You can get one scan your hard copy and digitalize them. Or, you just buy a digital camera. Digital camera get cheap and cheap today. It will save you a lot developing cost and you can make any amount of practice. You must say I have no confidence to make good photos. I will say, I can do it, you can do it, everyone can do it. Your photos do not have to be perfect as a professional photographer did. And there are lot of references can help you to start take photo. For example Digital Photography Beginners Guides is a really good 4-parts e-book to teach you step by step.

You must ask what I can shoot. You can shoot everything eg. people, static things, animals, pets, flowers, architectures, abstract things and so on. My experience is take my camera to everywhere, thus, I can take photo any time. If you are specialized in some realm, it could be even better. There also some resources you can make reference such asNew Pet Photography EBook

Now, I will introduce the stock photo web I used for sell photos. If you search on search engine, there are a lot of stock photo website now. I tried some of them. I think this is the best one, which is FOTOLIA

There some reasons I choose FOTOLIA

1. It is absolutely free to register. After register, you can use your account to buy some photos and you can also sell your photos.

2. It is very easy to register. There are a lot of stock photo web site require you to provide photo ID. FOTOLIA does not require your photo ID. So, you can get instant access to your account after register. This point actually attracts me to give up the others, because I am a person who does not like to give my photo ID to someone I don’t know over Internet.

3. The photograph approval is very fast comparing others. If you have tried other stock photo web you will find FOTOLIA is really fast.

4. And your photograph are very easy to get approval. This is really important to us. Because we are not professional. Only if our photograph to meet commercial requirement, FOTOLIA will accept.

5. FOTOLIA has good marketing, therefore, your photograph will be sell very fast. The speed level is much higher than the others.

6. There are millions photos in stock and millions user to use FOTOLIA

7. The payment method is flexible. You can choose FOTOLIA to pay check to you. But, what I like is FOTOLIA does accept PayPal. If you have a PayPal account, it is very convenient to receive your payment. Many other stock photo webs do not recognize PayPal.

8. FOTOLIA assigns a unique link to each photo you uploaded. It is very convenient to promote your work.

9. You do not have to do promotion, because FOTOLIA has very good marketing online. However, you can still do marketing by yourself to dramatically increase your sell.

Statistic shows, generally speaking, each photo can make one dollar profit per year. You must say: what, you got be joking, one dollar a year. Please do not ignore this one dollar. If you take, to say, 10 photos a day, ( I believe you can. Usually, if I go somewhere for travel, I usually take at least 3 roll films. After getting digital camera, the amount I take is much more than before during one trip. If you go somewhere average two weeks. You take, to say, 3 rolls: 24×3=72 or 36×3=108, or 140 digital photos) one year, your will take 3650 photos, they will generate at least 3650 dollars. FOTOLIA also allow you to sell extensive license of your photo. It will make much more profit for you. And the most important is that your sales will not stop there. Your photos will be sold again and again. So, if you continue to upload photos for several years, you can imagine that, what will happen? Assume you upload same amount of photos per year. This will not increase your workload. The profit of the first year is 3650 dollars. In second year, you will get 7300 dollars in cash. In third year you will get paid over 10,000 dollars extra income. And it will be over again and again, never stops. Go to FOTOLIA to register and get free account now and start sell your photos.

As a freelance digital photographer I know that sometimes a picture can sell better with filters or effects. It depends on what your taking pictures of, but sometimes a digital picture can look rather bland and totally lacking originality without effects. A digital picture has to be easily noticed by buyers and sometimes a digital camera cannot do this alone. The solution that a lot of freelance photographers have turned to is Photoshop or a Photoshop-like program. Photoshop can drastically alter a pictures appearance or change dynamic features for an edgier look. Either way, you shouldn’t be afraid to experiment in order to improve your online sales. I will show you a couple of effects I use to spice up my digital photos and increase my profits. For a more comprehensive tutorial check out photoshop and photography lessonsMake Your Photos Glow

The filter diffuse glow will give your pictures a surreal or heavenly look. First, I will tell you where to find it (I am using photoshop). Click on FILTERS – DISTORT – DIFFUSE GLOW, before using this filter make sure that you have the proper color in your palette. If you have blue in your bottom palette, your picture will diffuse glow blue. I usually only use white but you are free to experiment. This effect can only be used on certain types of photographs in order for it to look decent. I wouldn’t recommend trying this filter on freelance photos of people. A good time to use this filter is taking pictures of lights or nighttime photography. Adding Noise

This is a simple filter that doesn’t make any radical changes but adds a lot of depth to your digital photography. Noise will add speckles making a photo look like the photo is taken with a vintage camera. It is very easy to use, go to FILTERS – NOISE – ADD NOISE. Play around with the settings and I usually click the MONOCHORMATIC button to turn your noise into black and white. This can be use on almost any picture, but I don’t recommend using this on macro photos or any digital photos with a lot of detail.Outstanding Colors

A neat trick is to desaturate your photo except for a color or two. This will making a certain aspect or color stand out in your photo. It will give the picture a timely look and easily attract eyes to certain parts of your photo. This technique is a little bit harder, involving a few steps. Start off by going to SELECT – COLOR RANGE in the top menu bar. Now you should see your photo in a small box, use the eye dropper tool to select the particular color you want to stand out. Click on the “+” eye dropper button if you want to add another color. When your done click OK, and then, go to SELECT (again) and click on INVERSE. This will select everything but the colors you have chosen. Finally go to IMAGE – ADJUSTMENTS – HUE/SATURATION and slide the saturation slider down to the desire amount. The finished product will be a few outstanding colors and duller backgrounds.