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Where have Creative Compact Cameras Gone?

These smaller cameras really are not much larger than the compact digital cameras, however they offer more user control. You may find the lenses to be larger, heavier, and of higher optical quality. Typically all creative compact cameras offer the option of storing images in RAW format, usually proprietary but sometimes in Adobe’s standard DNG format.

The standard format, JPEG, is suitable for uploading your images to the Web, sharing them with friends, or getting prints. Unfortunately when using JPEG you might find there is a lot of shadow and highlight detail that was captured by the sensor which can be lost with a standard JPEG format.

When using the RAW format, the photographer has the ability to bring out the shadow or highlight detail by using an image editing program on a personal computer (or letting a professional lab do it and make a really great print).

Please take note: you shouldn’t purchase one of these cameras unless you are prepared to do your homework first. You will need to spend an evening reading the manual and learning the settings, otherwise the results will be the same as if you had used a simpler compact camera.

Panasonic LX2 (28-110mm F2.8-4.9 image-stabilized Leica lens; good for wide angle). Canon G7. 35-210mm F2.8-4.8 lens; no RAW capability; very bad noise at high ISO Ricoh GR Digital. This has a fixed focal-length 28mm equivalent lens that will be superb for wide-angle scenic photos. It is not clear if this camera is going to be sold in the United States.

This product category seems to have gone out of favor and therefore there isn’t much to choose from. Camera companies are concentrating their energies on the “SLR-like” category (below) and SLR category

Tags: Photography   Posted in Photography

Interested in some tips for Digital Photography?

Wedding photography is also concerned with the portrait photography for a bride. Most brides will have an individual portrait of them in their bridal dress taken to be displayed at the wedding and later at the bride’s home. If an entire package is bought, from engagement photos to reception photos, a bridal portrait is included. For many families of the bride, this portrait alone is one that they have dreamed of ever since the woman was a little girl. To capture this vision is very important and needs to be handled with great care and concern. The wedding photography business is a hot and lucrative occupation to be in. If attention to detail is given, a photographer can become well known and make a very good income by capturing intimate moments of a new relationship just beginning. Even though a photographer is behind the lens, the action they see will be caught for lifetimes to enjoy.

Which is better digital or basic film? This is a question that only the person taking the pictures can answer. Digital is a relatively new concept that with the right equipment can allow for easy photo sharing via the internet. A person can also send their digital pictures to a photo lab via the internet also. This allows for a family member several states away to pick up pictures quicker than having to wait for them to come through the mail. But, if a person thinks that digital photography is too difficult to understand, they may opt to stick with the basic film camera. Again, depending on what a person wants to invest in, the choice is strictly theirs.

By using digital photography, even the novice photographer has the capability to produce professional quality pictures at a fraction of the cost. Photography has been around for a long time, and people have always wanted their memories captured to last for generations. By using digital photography, the photography community has opened up the doors for photo sharing in every technological form if one has the right equipment. The first thing that a person must invest in when thinking of using digital photography is the right camera. In order to understand what constitutes the right camera for someone, a person must understand how exactly the digital camera works. A digital camera works is by using an electronic device to store and capture an image into binary data. In other words, the picture is turned into a form of information that can be understood by a computer’s electronic brain.

When you are deciding on a camera to buy it is really helpful to know certain key elements in the camera. Resolution is one of them: How much resolution you need depends on how you plan to use your digital camera. Obviously you plan to take pictures, but what you plan to do with the pictures is what matters. If you plan to take pictures only for online use, such as to e-mail to friends and family or to place on a web page, most any amount of resolution will accomplish this. However, if you plan to print large photos or need clearer pictures for business use, you will need more pixels. A good rule of thumb is to choose a digital camera with the highest resolution you can afford. At the very least, buy a camera with a minimum of 2 to 3 mega pixels. Beware of sales hype, which tends to emphasize high resolution over all other features. While resolution is important, there are many other features, which influence a camera’s output. Make sure the camera you choose has a combination of features important to you, not just high resolution.

When you are selecting a present for your child, they might want a digital camera. You should go for small but not horribly out of focus. The details on the camera should be able to pick up basic things. Even if your kid is aspiring to be a professional photographer you should worry about the price. While buying a digital camera for your child, it is understandable that you really do not want to spend a lot of money. There are lots of choices available in the market today. The price range starts from as low as $30 and can go up to $300. So, it really depends on how much you would like to spend on the camera. Start simple and upgrade if they grow out of the digital camera that you buy for them. Hey share them with the whole family!

There are times when you may want to have an intentional blur in your photo - perhaps to show motion. But most of the time, the sharper your photo the better. Choose the right aperture setting - The aperture setting is how wide the shutter opens when you take a short with your digital camera. It is a trade-off. If you increase the shutter speed to prevent blurring, the shutter must open wider to let in enough light because of the reduced time it is open. If the opening is larger for a faster shutter speed, the you may loose some depth of field, which is whether objects close to your and further away from you are in focus at the same time. To maximize depth of field, shoot with the slowest shutter speed that is appropriate to the situation. If you’re shooting an object that’s not moving, set a small aperture. But if you’re shooting a moving object, you may have to use a higher shutter speed. You may loose some depth of field, but this may not be a problem if the object you’re shooting is what’s really important in your photo and not what’s in the background also.

For photographing fireworks in the sky or at any reasonable distance, switch it off! All flash will do is illuminate any smoke or dust in front of the camera and spoil the picture. But if you are photographing people close by with, for example, sparklers or torches, you can get some exciting effects by combining flash illumination and a slow shutter speed (above). The flash illuminates people and freezes the scene but the long (slow sync) shutter speed lets bright moving objects, like sparklers, leave long trails. Look for settings like slow-sync flash or use a slow manual shutter speed - say, between 1/4 and a whole second, with the flash on. And finally, Take as many shots as you can. Fireworks don’t demand highest resolution camera settings so you can use a lower resolution setting to get more shots out of your memory card.

Tags: Photography   Posted in Photography

Important Notes for your Camera

Experiment with exposure Digital cameras usually work best in sunlight, just like film cameras. When you move indoors, or into dim light, things get much trickier — just like film cameras. So experiment.

If you can, shoot your subject from different angles and with different lighting. If you can manually turn off your flash, do so. Other flash settings can also be tried such as ‘fill flash.’ Sometimes even a perfectly exposed picture can be improved with fill flash. Other times turning off the flash leaving the subject underexposed can add an element of drama.

You can take the same photo three different ways using three different exposure options and the result will be three totally different pictures. What’s even better is that all three can look good, but you have to experiment.

If at all possible, bracket your shots, with one shot slightly underexposed, one slightly overexposed, and one “just right.” Some digital cameras will do this automatically, but even then you need to practice. If you are expecting the camera to shoot one frame and it shoots three, there is an excellent chance the last two will look like they were taken by a very surprised photographer.

Special Features: Many digital cameras now come equipped with a variety of special features. Some of these include allowing you to take short QuickTime clips and the ability to record sound annotations. Even though some allow you to experiment with effects such as black and white or sepia-tones, focus on mastering the basics first before taking on the special effects.

Keep in mind that some of these tricks, such as black and white or sepia-toned images, can be done without the camera. Just load up a normal color image in Photoshop and, in a few minutes, you can have perfect black and white or sepia-toned photos. In other words, if you can do it easily in Photoshop, you might be better off concentrating on taking a good color photo, and worrying about special effects later on at your leisure.

On the other hand, you should try out other special effects. For example, if you pan your camera to track a car moving at high speed, the car will be in sharp focus but the background will be blurred, making an interesting picture. Or you can do the opposite: focus on a particular stationary object — a child flying a kite, a freshly-painted fire hydrant — and allow a speeding car to enter the frame. You’ll then have a sharply focused center of attention with the added benefit of motion.

Silhouettes are another nice special effect. Try taking a photo with your subject in shadow, eclipsing a brightly-exposed object in the background. Now try the reverse, a brightly exposed subject against a dark background. One can be just as interesting as the other. Getting a good silhouette with film is expensive, as you shoot a lot of frames with little or no reward. There is no cost with a digital camera, just a little time and patienceboth of which will be well worth it!

Tags: Cameras   Posted in Cameras

Editing Digital Photos, becoming a fun thing to do

Here are simple step-by-step instructions on how to come up with great panoramic images using Photoshop CS Photomerge: Open several images of a single scenery in Photoshop CS. Go to the File option, the select Automate, and then go to Photomerge. This will open the Photoshop dialog box. Check that the images you want to merge are in the dialog box. Next check the Attempt to Automatically Arrange Source Images box and then select Ok. The program will then automatically select the images one by one, and attempt to merge them into one panoramic photo. If your photos don’t quite match you may get an error because the program cannot merge the images automatically. If this happens don’t panic. It is still possible to arrange the images manually. If an errors does occurs, integrate the image or images that were not merged by pulling that image or the images from the top window into the panorama and arranging to the desired position. Photoshop CS will then integrate the image into the panorama automatically.

When you want to auction off your last minute items, or you have set up an online auction shop, the most common place to do it is on eBay. Bidding online is one of the most commonly used forms of buying anything online. Pictures are often used to say a lot about a product, you want to make sure to get a picture. Here are few tricks of the trade: Take photos of different parts of your product and try different angles. Photographing your product from many angles helps add depth and avoid a flat online appearance. Pick one main overall shot of the item, but also use other detailed photos or different perspective shots. The more buyers can see, the more likely they will buy your product rather than your competitors. Once you’ve saved all your photos to your computer, you can optimize your pictures for online viewing. Make sure your images are saved as JPEG files and increase the compression so that your pages will download more quickly on a user’s computer. Also crop your photos so that it is composed only of your product, eliminating white space and making your product look better. Edit your photo. Adjust the light and contrast to improve on your original photo. Make your subject stand out by adjusting the contrast between the foreground and background colours. You can also make certain parts of your picture lighter or darker to improve the overall look. Once you’ve practiced photographing your products using these tips, visitors will have a better shopping experience and will be more likely to bid on your items.

In earlier times, you took your snapshots with your trusty old Brownie, removed the film cartridge and dropped it off at the drug store for developing. After about a week, you picked up your prints. What you got was exactly what the film was exposed to. No cropping, no sharpening, brightness or contrast adjustments were available unless you had your own film processing and print studio. With the onset of digital photography, it has become possible for everyone to learn and perform successful photo editing. There exists a plethora of digital photography software that allow differing levels of image manipulation. With a decent digital camera, a computer with a quality printer, and one of the many versions of photo editing software, you can produce stunning photographs. You can crop for closer views of your intended subject, darken or lighten the exposure, adjust the contrast, sharpen the image, change it to black and white, sepia, or grayscale. Add a good scanner and you have the ability to edit your old standard photographs. That old faded photo of you as a child can be brought back to life with a few clicks of your mouse. With the right software, you can place objects from one photograph into another. Create a montage of any person containing their pictures from birth to present. That beautiful old Ford you took a picture of at the cruise-in brings back fond memories?

The release of the tenth and newest version of the graphic editing industry standard PhotoShop is called CS3, and it was released on April 16,2007. If you are a novice of the graphic editing and manipulation world, you are going to want to read these three HOT tips to help get you going. They are put together to help you to see that the world of image management is not really as daunting as it may seem right now. Plan ahead when naming workspaces so that in the future each will ring a clear bell in your memory. Multiple projects over time can get confusing to remember.

The first thing that you need to do is to choose a picture that you want to fix the skin color on and open in Photoshop. I do want to warn you that this will not totally fix photos that the skin color is off really bad. You only want to use the fix for photos that have a slight to moderate problem. The next step is to make a new Hue/Saturation adjustment layer on top of your original picture. You can do this by clicking on the icon below the layers that looks like a half colored in circle, and clicking on Hue/Saturation. This will bring up the Hue/Saturation window and make it on its own new layer. Next, with the Hue/Saturation window still open, you want to determine which color is overriding your skin color. Like I said previously, I seem to have the problem with the reds, so I am going to choose the reds for my picture. You can choose the color that you need to in order to fix the skin color in your picture. You can choose the color using the drop down menu in the Hue/Saturation window.

Screen test. Check your computer monitor and adjust it if you’re not getting a good picture. Most Windows PCs are set up wrong. For a complete guide to adjusting the display, go to http://twcny.rr.com/technofile and type “adjust” (without quotes) in the search field. Edit your images in a sensible order. First, save a copy. Keep that copy safe by moving it to a separate folder. Next, crop the image. Crop the picture, then adjust the levels, also called “curves.” Your software might do this automatically. Next, adjust the color and what we loosely call the “tint.” Then get rid of noises and blemishes (in the picture, silly, not in your nephew’s skin). Finally, save the image TWICE. Put the copy in a different folder, out of the way.

Everyone has to make the choice between traditional cameras and digital cameras. There are cons and pros for both types of camera. The difference between traditional vs. digital photography makes the taking of pictures more difficult. One of those time consuming tasks is the changing of film and installing a new roll. Of course, the quality of the photo is greater than a digital camera.

Tags: Photography   Posted in Photography

What to do when editing digital photographs

Image editors (also known as photo editors) allow you to create and modify graphics and photographic images. This includes tasks such as painting and drawing, color correction, photo enhancement, creating special effects, converting images, and adding text to graphics. Your image editor will probably be your most frequently used tool for working with graphics so it should be flexible and intuitive. Many software programs are available for enhancing and otherwise working with bitmap images, but unless they can perform all of the tasks above sufficiently, they should only be considered as companion tools to your primary photo editing application.

The display resolution of a digital television or computer display typically refers to the number of distinct pixels in each dimension that can be displayed. Some commentators also use this term to indicate a range of input formats that the display’s input electronics will accept and often include formats greater than the screen’s native grid size even though they have to be down-scaled to match the screen’s parameters. An example of pixel shape affecting “resolution” or perceived sharpness is displaying more information in a smaller area using a higher resolution, which makes the image much clearer. However, newer LCD displays and such are fixed at a certain resolution; making the resolution lower on these kinds of screens will greatly decrease sharpness, as an interpolation process is used to “fix” the non-native resolution input into the displays native resolution output.

There are many different photo-editing programs out there. Many people believe that the level of difficulty of the program indicates its quality. However, many programs are quite simple to use and are of high quality. Several programs will make adjustments for you based on one entered specification, whereas others require you to perform several steps yourself to get the desired effect. Depending on what you’re most comfortable with, whether it’s pressing a button and having the rest done for you, or doing it all yourself, not every program will be for you. Choose according to your level of experience and your needs in the program.

When photos are saved on a computer, they frequently become slightly blurred. They are not necessarily so blurry that you can’t see the image; they are merely not as clear as they could be. Just about all photo-editing programs have a tool that allows you to sharpen your image. When your image could use some sharper detail, this is the option you want to use. It makes for a much better-looking picture. Some cameras have the tool built in, though sometimes that is not enough, and it may have to be done again with your editing software.

Sharpen filters bring out detail in images by increasing the contrast of pixels next to one another. More advanced image editing programs offer several options such as Sharpen, Sharpen More, Sharpen Edges and Unsharp Mask (USM). Unsharp Mask gives you a lot of control over how an image is sharpened. Sometimes a photo will benefit from selective sharpening. You select an area with a programs selection tool and only sharpen the area. The important thing is not sharpen an image too much. The sharpening tool that is most useful for photographs is the Unsharp Mask, now available in most raster programs. The Unsharp Mask searches through your image looking for where colors change, and sharpens those areas. The Unsharp Mask is superior to any other sharpening because it makes decisions based on adjacent pixels, not random color changes, so it usually can find and sharpen just the true edges of color areas.

Digital cameras, even relatively cheap ones, take incredibly large images. However, looks can be deceiving and, while the pictures may look big onscreen, they may look disappointing when you try to adjust them for printing, emailing, or long term storage. They’re best left untouched, if possible, so that you have more flexibility later. All photo editing software will have a command for changing the pixel dimensions of an image. Look for a command called “Image Size,” “Resize,” or “Resample.” When you use this command you will be presented with a dialog box for entering the exact pixels you wish to use.

Cropping is the process of selecting and removing a portion of an image to create focus or strengthen its composition. Even the best photographers will often get back to their computers to view their photos and find that they are not ideal for one reason or another including distracting background elements, framing mistakes, or unbalanced images. While the temptation might be to delete such images the beauty of shooting in the digital format is that editing images after shooting them is relatively quick and easy. Cropping is one option for fixing such problems. This is usually done in photo editing software. Cropping images give you a second chance to frame your images. While you can never really add to the photograph to put more space around your subject (or recover the ear you clipped), cropping the image even tighter can take the focus away from the clipped part of your subject and make the image quite dynamic.

Tags: Photography   Posted in Photography

Silver Nitrate: Building the Photographic Revolution

While it is accepted that the first photograph was probably taken earlier, the official invention of photography was made in 1839 by French artist and chemist Louis J.M. Daguerre. In partnership with Joseph Nicphore Nipce, they expanded upon a discovery made by Johann Heinrich Schultz in 1724 regarding how a certain silver nitrate and chalk mixture darkened when exposed to light. The daguerreotype, or earliest type of photograph, was born.

Daguerreotypes are actually negative images that are exposed onto a mirror-polished surface of metal that has been coated with iodine-soaked, silver halide particles. In latter developments iodine was replaced by bromine and chlorine vapors, which allowed for shorter exposure times. This direct photographic process did not allow for the duplication of the image, however.

In America, in 1839, Robert Cornelius worked with his father in silver plating and metal polishing. After being approached by Joseph Saxton, Cornelius moved into the young field of photography, using his extensive knowledge of chemistry and metallurgy to make a daguerreotype and turn it into the first photograph. It was a self portrait and the first human portrait to be produced. Cornelius ran two photographic studios in America in 1839 and 1843 until he eventually tired of the trade and returned to his family’s gas and lighting company.

Silver nitrate is an easily reproduced compound that has become the foundation of photography. 1841 saw Englishman, William Henry Fox Talbot introduce a new process that involved sensitized paper that had a coating of silver iodide which produced a negative image when exposed to light. The paper was semi-transparent, which could be laid over sensitized paper to produce a positive image or direct copy of the original.

Originally, silver halide, formed through the reaction of halide and silver nitrate, was diluted in a solution of gelatin which was bound and carefully controlled. Gelatin was an enhancement over the previously used egg whites which produced sharp images but were easily damaged. In later upgrades, Dr. R.L. Maddox solved this problem by figuring out a way to prepare gelatin dispersions of silver salts on glass plates.

In 1887, George Eastman prominently introduced the Kodak system, wherein a silver halide-in-gelatin dispersion was coated on a silver nitrate base and then loaded into a camera. With this system, a person could take up to 100 pictures at a time. When they were all exposed, the person simply returned everything - camera and film, to be processed in Rochester, New York and modern photography was born.

Tags: Photography   Posted in Photography

Photography Through the Ages

When you see videos of the early developers of photography, it’s pretty funny especially in light of photography today. In those old movies, to get a picture, the camera was as big as a computer is today. The photographer had to put his head under a sheet and hold up a huge tripod which exploded with smoke and fumes to make the flash. Today photography could not be more different. In the movies, we used to be astonished when spies had cameras in their watches or the soles of their shoes. But now it is common for almost everyone to have a camera in their phone and to be able to pull it out and snap a photo virtually anywhere.

But there are some genuine reasons to at least incorporate digital technology into your professional photography game plan. These reasons are compelling enough that more and more we are seeing the big studios going all digital. So if you are running an independent photography business or if you are “just” a photography hobbyist (and thank God for the hobbyists), you may have to think through the value of moving to digital processing yourself. The amount of fuss and sheer “stuff” of doing a shoot digitally is dramatically less involved than using the older technologies. Witness how the digital revolution in photography has revolutionized the personal camera world. Now people can take as many pictures as they want and have them to review virtually instantaneously.

Probably the biggest leap forward in the use of digital photography is that you can do re-shoots quickly, easily and for virtually no cost. If you conduct a portrait session with a customer, you can have the “stills” of the session available almost as soon as the session is done. If a shot was good but not perfect, you can correct it and re-shoot immediately saving huge amounts of time and improving the chances you will get the portfolio you want and that the customer wants on the first session.

The developments began to come along pretty routinely as photography began to mature and become more sophisticated. Color photography was developed in 1861 by a scientist named James Clark Maxwell. Up until then all photographs were black and white or monochrome. Color photography was a huge leap forward but it really did not start to move into the public arena until two brothers named Lumire in 1907 invented the color plate. Over the decades to follow, photography moved forward steadily and moved out of the world of science and then journalism and into each of our homes. But the revolution that has turned photography into what we know it to be today occurred in 1981 when Sony invented the first camera that worked without film. The digital age was upon us.

It was Kodak that again got the lead on the marketplace by getting the first digital camera out on the market in 1990 when they developed the Kodak DCS 100. As with all technology, early digital cameras were large (by today’s standards) and much more expensive than we are used to now. Innovation in the field of photography has continued to march almost as fast as people could keep up. When digital cameras were offered that gave us a port to be able to download them to our computers, the internet explosion of imagery was fueled.

Further development coming virtually every year since 1990 included the rapid and phenomenal expansion of memory in digital cameras along with the concept of swappable storage drives. This changed the way people took pictures because now the number of pictures someone could take was virtually limitless. The expansion of memory also gave developers the ability to add video capture to the same devices as were used for photography so that virtually anyone could become a cameraman with that tiny camera that could by this time fit in their shirt pocket. Much of the fun of internet sites like YouTube can be attributed to the ability of the average citizen to take video anywhere, anytime and at no cost to them.

Good evidence comes from the credit some great art experts have given to photographic exhibitions in the fine museums in the world. The very fact that photography is considered art by those who know may be evidence enough. So the conclusion must be that because the arguments against the artistic value of photographs are weak and people who know consider photography to be art, then we are safe in viewing what we do artistically too. And that opens up that side of your soul to express yourself through the medium you love the most - photography.

Tags: Photography   Posted in Photography