Archive for September, 2008

The most frustrating part of photography is missing a beautiful shot, and every photographer will testify to how depressed it makes them feel when they have done all the necessary ground work.

The conditions which cause this are as numerous as there are potentials for perfect photographs.

There are no fail safe solutions, but learning a few techniques can minimize the chances of missing a beautiful shot.

How to prepare against missing a perfect shot?

Camera bag: It sounds silly, but if you lug around a cumbersome, complicated camera bag, you increase your chances of missing the shot while searching for necessary accessories.

Though a camera bag should carry all the accessories required for a photo shoot, you cannot waste time by removing every item in the bag every time you get to a new location.

Select a bag that has easily accessible flaps and zips which make spontaneous shots easier. When packing the articles in the bag, arrange them in logical order. This will help you to remove them as you need them at a busy photo shoot.

The urge for most people, when visiting a new place, is to try to capture every beautiful frame with their camera.

The problem, however, comes later when they discover that they have failed to capture the original beauty, as photographs can never be as perfect as the real thing.

Capturing a memorable image of a new place is difficult enough, but doing it while traveling is even more difficult.

The challenge for photographers is to capture the original essence and show some variety in the picture.

If traveling photographs don’t have variety, they look mundane and fail to reflect a new experience. Here’s how to add variety to your traveling pictures and keep them eternally exciting:

1. Think differently: Take a few minutes to ponder your usual modus operandi when traveling. When left in a new place with a camera, do you immediately start photographing every tourist attraction? If you really think about it, you’ll realize you are just one of many of a crowd of people targeting the same mundane subject, which is available online anyway.

Try to think differently and look for anomalies in the surroundings, or unusual aspects of the famous location which would go unnoticed by the untrained eye.

Do you aspire to taking portrait images? Many times, an apprentice photographer makes a mistake by setting the camera in portrait mode and then clicking immediately.

However, this will not give you top quality images and you will not get much satisfaction.

Whether you use a DSLR or Digital camera, you probably have portrait mode in the camera settings.

By setting the camera in automatic portrait mode, you get the flexibility of clicking the images in portrait mode. Even a person who is not at all familiar with the camera and its setting can take portrait images this way.

While setting the camera in automatic mode is all done for you, you do not have the flexibility of adjusting the camera for adding an elegant finishing touch to your shots.

You can set the camera in manual mode and take portrait images of top quality.

If you are setting the camera in manual mode, you need to take care of all small settings that make portrait pictures look more effective. You need to look after aperture, shutter speed, ISO, white balance, flash, focusing etc; all aspects that contribute to the effectiveness of images.

Ever spoiled one of your best shots because of camera shake? One of the most annoying, and preventable, hazards for amateur photographers, are blurred images caused by an unstable camera.

Like most workmanship problems, the root cause is the user and how s/he uses the camera.

The easiest way to reduce the possibility of a shaky camera is by setting up a tripod, which will create a stable platform and control the shakes.

However, it is not always possible to carry a tripod as it is heavy and cumbersome.

Another common cause of the shakes is a camera with a low shutter speed setting. The tiniest movement of the camera can spoil the shot; the easiest way round this is to make sure you don’t press the shutter release button too hard or too quickly. Pressing the button slowly will ensure the camera is more stable when the film or digital sensor is exposed to light.

As many digital cameras do not come with the facility of placing them on a tripod before shooting, handling or holding the camera correctly and firmly is paramount to reducing camera shakes and blurred images.

One of the biggest challenges photographers face is shooting in midday sunlight, because you have to deal with the shadow of the object, dark blow-out in the image and lens flare.

If used in the correct way, lighting can enhance the picture, while the opposite is true if you lose control over lighting [Lighting techniques], i.e. ‘lens flare’.

When harsh lighting enters the lens, it gets distracted and produces different textures in the images. These patterns of lighting are known as lens flare, or unwanted lighting which disturbs the image texture and background.

While every photographer tries their level best to control lens flare in their images, most apprentice photographers need guidance on how to reduce it, as photo editing software is not capable of performing the correction. Here’s how to go about it:

Eliminating lens flare in images:

Lens hoods: Professional photographers’ main tool to cut down lens flare is the lens hood, which are separate attachments which come with many digital cameras and DSLR (Digital Single Reflex Lens) cameras.

Even after the revolution of digital camera also, there are some photographers who click their images in film format.

Film format means taking images with the help of negatives.

Do you remember the processing method of these negatives? This is a time and money consuming process. You need to print every photo and then choose best photos from them.

This is an old method; now you have an innovative product to cut down your money and save your time in processing unnecessary photos.

The product is VuPoint 35mm Film Scanner. You can keep your negatives in this scanner and format these negative images into digital image and select the photo which you need to print.

You can scan these negatives and slide them as digital photos, thus making sharing an easy task. You can print them, email them or upload them in some online sharing sites.

The old slide scanners were very slow in operation and costly too. It also re-corrects the color balance and brings life to the faded negatives.

This is also easy to use. This compact USB scanner allows you to roll a strip of negatives or color slides and transfer them into 5.0 megapixel pictures. The output of the images can be in JPG or TIF formats.

This comes under journalism, where images are used to form news. Images tell us the news, without the help of words.

Photojournalism is also referred as still images or broadcast journalism. You must have seen in a newspaper or magazine, where a single image will be able to tell us complete story related to the photo without the use of words.

For Example: The first sight of the image tells us that a mother is waiting for help. If some tags are attached to the photo, such as it is taken in so and so country after a disaster, you can understand the level of disaster, which made mother and children homeless.

There are different variations in photojournalism- the first type is where the images are used in article or news to support the editor’s words.

For Example: If the above photo is attached in news article which is explaining the negligence of the government, this photograph makes the reader understand that the government has failed in providing the people with proper shelter.

If this image is attached in the matter which is describing about the disaster happened in a country, it explains the level of disaster that affected the country and made the mother and children homeless.

If you are aspirant to find career in photography, then this is for you. The photography [Photography techniques] cannot be explained in simple or shortened terms. There are several objectives in photography, which are associated with different fields in photography.

Photography is something, which does not need any words to explain feelings or make you understand about a product. Advertising photography is used to stimulate these desires to an act and purchase. A mature and experienced photographer will explain the exact idea in the photograph without the use of words.

As the name indicates, Advertising photographs are taken for advertising or promoting a product. It may be a baby product or a Luxurious car, you need promotion. So, advertising photography is always in a golden phase.

The subject or model which is used in the advertising photography promotion can vary from a living human being to a non-living thing. Different models which are used in advertising photography are animals, non-living things, and human models, which include adults and kids.

Advertisements with animals: Who are not attracted to cute little animals, which look at us with their cute and adorable eyes? Animals are commonly used in the advertising photography to promote their own food products, luxurious spas, clothing and other accessories.

Applied carefully, High Dynamic Range-technique (HDR) can create incredibly stunning pictures which blur our sense of the difference between reality and illusion.

“In computer graphics and photography, high dynamic range imaging (HDRI) is a set of techniques that allows a greater dynamic range of exposures (the range of values between light and dark areas) than normal digital imaging techniques.

Here are 25 stunningly beautiful HDR photographs.

( photo by klados25 )

( photo by Rickydavid )

Did you ever give a projector presentation? No, Not with the help of PowerPoint! Do you know that there is another probable method or olden day’s method that is used in giving projector presentation?

You must have seen somewhere that collection of 35 mm white framed slides is placed in round housing carousel for giving a projection or slide show.But these slides consumes lot of your time.

You need to change these films into digital [Digital Camera] form for making the presentation easy.

There are many people who live in era of power point and still gather slides from attic in giving the presentation.

You need to change these slides into digital form for enduring your work for more years. How to change these slides into digital form? The answer is Veho Film and Slide Converter.

You just need to plug this converter to the laptop or computer USB and then start the conversion process. The in-built camera clicks the images in the slides in 5 MP and provides you with top quality pictures.

Film scanner and slide scanner are built in compact Veho Film and Slide Converter and save you much space at the desktop.