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How to Photograph Wildlife

Wildlife photography is a very exciting branch of photography, but it requires patience and dedication. It is very easy to become frustrated, but your efforts will be rewarded. Photographers may spend an entire day trying to get one particular shot! These tips are intended to either get you started photographing wildlife, or to inspire you to stick with it. There is a certain awe and beauty about capturing the natural world, particularly animals.

1. Be patient- this tip cannot be stressed enough. It is easy to get frustrated, but if you are willing to wait, you will be pleasantly surprised.

2. Keep your distance. A lot of times if you get too close, animals will not stick around. Whether you are in national parks, the wilderness, jungles, etc., it is crucial that you give animals space, and allow them to get close to you if they so choose (animals are highly curious).

3. Photograph wildlife in their natural habitat. Photographing exotic animals at the zoo is fun, but your photos will turn out better if you are able to capture wildlife where they actually live.

4. Try shooting wildlife with different shutter speeds. For example, if you photograph a zebra running with a fast shutter speed, you will get a clear image of the zebra in the act of running. Alternatively, a slow shutter speed creates a blurred effect.

5. If you are patient (this is where tip #1 comes into play), the wildlife may even compose a brilliant photo. Many times animals will create unique photo opportunities if you just observe them through the lens.

6. It will be in your best interest to purchase a zoom lens. Many times it will be hard to get close to wildlife, and a zoom lens gets you closer without putting you in danger and without disturbing the animal.

Remember to stay inspired by viewing the work of other wildlife photographers. You can search for wildlife photographers online or in photography magazines.

Tags: camera, digital camera, good photograph, graphics, light, media, multi-media, nature photography, photo, photograph, Photography, picture, pictures, shadows   Posted in Photography

Digital Photography Tricks for Portraiture

Have you ever concluded that learning photography would be hard or take years ? Well, there are many digital photography tricks that are easy to master and simple to apply. Your photographs can improve immensely from these easy ideas.

Let us talk about improving your portraits? There are a lot of simple tricks that will refine your portrait photos, here are a few techniques to get you started:

One of the easiest digital photography tricks to apply would be to have the subject rotate their head a little. Quite a lot of beginner photographers, I was guilty of this as well, would just direct the model to say cheese and would immediately snap the photo. Since then I have changed my procedure, I see how their head is positioned and ask them to tilt it just slightly, so that it is angled to to the camera.

A variation to this trick is to have the model rotate their body. With this trick, their head can be facing straight ahead, in this case their body adds an angle to the photography. This will increase depth of field in the photograph.

A third helpful trick to employ is to take some time when you start your photography shoot and talk to the model. Dont go in and begin shooting photographs. If you spend some time with the model and ask a few questions, inquire about a few of their hobbies and put them at ease, your photographs will appear less staged and a lot more natural.

Also, they may reveal an activity that they participate in and be able to put a prop with them in the picture that will capture more of their authentic self.

Some digital photography tricks can change the appearance of your model. Say you want your subject to look slimmer, shoot the picture from above them. If you take a photograph from below the subject, they will seem heavier.

Digital photography tricks dont have to be hard, try something as easy as modifying your angle. Move directly above the subject and take the photo viewing straight down. Zoom in to see only a portion of the face. Be inventive, that is what makes photography enjoyable. While looking at the subject and all the surroundings, think about what other photographers would do and invent a different way to portray the picture.

I hope that the above-mentioned digital photography tricks will improve your portraits at your picture shoot! Get out there and practice them and, as always, say Cheese (Chedder, sharp please)

Tags: beginner digital photography, Digital Photography, digital photography tips, digital photography tricks, easy digital photography, hobbies, learn digital photography, Photography, simple digital photography tricks   Posted in Photography

Lecia 35mm: The Pioneer

Photography has developed rapidly over the years with equipment and film working in tandem to pioneer new methods of taking pictures.

35mm film, also referred to as 135 film, can be used for still photographs and motion pictures. The 35mm camera was put on the market in 1934 and was a best seller by the late 1960s and still enjoys success today.

The typical number of exposures on a roll of 35mm film is 36. However, the number of exposures can vary depending on the needs of the photography and cost constraints. Disposable cameras can be found in 6, 8, 10, or 15 exposure quantities.

The American Tourist Multiple was first introduced in 1913. It was very expensive for the average consumer. In 1925, the 35mm Leica was released and created a boon for photography hobbyists and enthusiasts across the globe.

The Leica quickly caught on amongst photography enthusiasts. Its compact size, quality glass and German craftsmanship all contributed to the success of the 35mm Leica camera. The Leica became the standard for professional photographers, fashion photographers and photojournalists.

In 1934, the Kodak Company launched the German built Kodak Retina, the first 35mm camera to use the modern film cartridge, familiar to camera users today. The next important innovation took place in the 1960s when Nikon introduced the Nikon F SLR.

The SLR camera, Single Lens Reflex system, took the world of photography by storm and hasn’t looked back since. These cameras were more intuitive to handle than its predecessors. Multiple functions such as a viewfinder, preview screen and a motor to advance the film.

Traditional 35mm film camera sales took a big hit when digital cameras first hit the scene. But with the advent of Digital SLR cameras, the 35mm seems to have weathered the storm and is regaining its popularity.

Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Fuji and Ilford are the leaders of the camera making world. These visionaries have all contributed to the evolution of photography and will undoubtedly be a part of future advancements. The traditional 35mm film camera will never be forgotten and has played an integral role in the popularization of photography on all levels.

Tags: 35mm Leica, digital camera, Digital SLR, film, Kodak, megapixel, Nikon, Olympus, Photography, Single Lens Reflex, slr   Posted in Photography

Pet Photography – Capture A Special Moment In Time

Every one of our pets is unique and holds a special place in each of our lives. Most of us have pets that are both our friends and family members, whether it’s a conventional pet like a cat or dog, or something less common like a bird, ferret, rabbit or snake.

Pet photography is one excellent way to capture your special moments with your pets, just like you’d take a photo to capture special moments with your children. You’ll look back on these wonderful images and remember how it used to be, even if your pet is now older or has passed on.

Animals play an incredible role in our lives, and are often role models for use to look up to. Who can’t admire the unconditional love and unlimited patience of a loyal canine companion. Her unlimited affection and sense that nothing is more important than playtime and pleasing your are unbeatable.

Cats are wise and sophisticated, and they know that no matter how stressful your day is, you need to take a little time out to nap and relax. Take a look at your cat and remember to emulate him – there’s nothing better sometimes than spending a little time on yourself and the people you love the most.

Dogs and cats aren’t the only ones that have things to teach us. Learn how to run freely with the wind from your horse, or how to treat every day as a new adventure and opportunity for exploration from your rats.

Pet photography is a great way for you to capture the essence of your interactions with your pets and their personalities. You’ll look at these great images and remember the sense of joy and fulfillment you’ve gotten from their presence in your life. Pets are an amazing addition to almost any family.

Even the most loyal pet presents some photographic challenges, however. That’s because it’s pretty hard to tell, your dog, horse, cat or rabbit that what needs to happen now is standing still for a picture. Most pets are either excited or nervous about new people.

This is why it’s vital to make sure that the photographer you choose is someone who has experience with animal photography. The right person can help convince your pet to do what they need to in order to get the picture, will be hard to frustrate, and should be willing to take all the shots needed to get the right photo.

Choose photographs of your pets alone in their favorite environment or in a carefully chosen setting, or get the whole family in on it and take a group image or two. No matter which option you choose, you’ll be choosing a great way to celebrate your relationship with your pets.

Pets don’t look the same as we do, but it’s hard to deny that they have a very special place in our families. If you want to preserve those great moments, take some time and arrange for high quality pet photography that celebrates your bond with your pet.

Tags: pet photography, pets, Photography, phtotography, Portraits   Posted in Photography

Learning photoshop with Video Tutorials

The spot healing brush made its debut in Photoshop Elements 3, but now an enhanced version of it is available in Photoshop CS2. The spot healing tool is different from the existing patch and healing tools in that it does not require you to make a selection or define a source point before using it.

CROPPING. Select the “Crop” tool icon from your Tools bar, then drag it downward diagonally from the upper left corner to the bottom right corner. Release the mouse and then use it to manipulate the image size with the crop “handles.” Hit “Enter” or “Return.” RESIZING. Go to “Image” in your top menu, then choose “Image Size.” Enter the dimensions you need and hit OK. (You can radically change the outer shape of the image by unclicking “Constrain Proportions” at the bottom of the page and entering different dimensions, then clicking OK.)

You can also add new colour stops to an existing gradient by clicking anywhere along the bottom edge of the preview bar. As well as editing colour stops for the gradient to blend between, you can also add different opacity settings to make it fade from solid to transparency. Strike a balance The Gradient Editor automatically places a midpoint between each colour stop to create a smooth linear blend between colours.

Become the king of the keyboard by discovering more new shortcuts. Taking advantages of keyboard shortcuts to rapidly access tools in the toolbox. Locating Keyboard Shortcuts. Photoshop is more than happy to give up its secrets A good place to start hunting down keyboard shortcuts is within the Photoshop interface itself. Open the main menu, and take look at a few of the commands. Next to each one you’ll find the relevant keyboard shortcut listed if one is available. Another comprehensive list of shortcuts can be found in the Photoshop Help files. Killer keyboard shortcuts Mac users should treat the [Alt] key as the [Option] key and the [Control] key as the [Command] key

Photoshop offers blending options unsurpassed in the design industry in your “Layer Style” dialog box, you will first find “General Blending” options, which are often enough for any task. Experiment with the Blend Modes and their opacity to see just how incredibly flexible the normal Blending Options can be. To find your advanced blending options in Photoshop, double-click a layer or click the “Add a Layer Style” icon at the bottom left of your Layers palette, and then choose “Blending Options.” Your “Layer Style” dialog box will appear. At the bottom of the Layer Style box, you will find, under “Advanced Blending,” something called the “Blend If” tool. What is the Photoshop “Blend If” tool, exactly? Blend If is a “smart” blending tool. You can use it to blend images or create a more transparent image with almost infinite precision. This one tool is so flexible and handy it behooves any serios Photoshop designer to learn to use it, and use it well.

Like Microsoft, Adobe’s business is built largely around packaged software, installed locally on users’ PCs. Likewise, Adobe’s plans to diversify its business with online services mirrors a large-scale effort at Microsoft to introduce a combination of software and services. As online applications become more functional, Adobe is seeking out areas where Web services can fill out its product portfolio, Chizen said. The company intends to offer entirely hosted applications, as well as “hybrids,” in which Adobe uses the Web to introduce features to desktop products, such as Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. We recognize there is a customer there–we recognize they are not going to pay us, necessarily, directly. But we could use ad revenue as a model. Google has demonstrated that it works pretty well for certain types of applications.

Just knowing the basics can do wonders. Start with your “Auto Color” command. (Click “Image,” “Adjustments,” then “Auto Color” from the top menu.) Photoshop has configured the Auto Color tool to transform photos to preset values, affecting the overall tone and levels of the photograph. After that you will probably want to enhance your photo further. Photoshop gives you a cornucopia of options for endlessly fiddling with your pictures. Try your “Levels” button (click “Image,” “Adjustments,” then “Levels”). A dialog box pops up labeled Levels. In it you can use the top slider bar to control the brightness of shadows, midtones and highlights. The bottom slider bar affects your overall output levels. You should get your levels the way you want them before you move on to directly transform colors. You can also correct your brightness levels using “Curves,” in the same menu. Experiment with it and you’ll see how it works.

Tags: free downloadable adobe photoshop, free photoshop 6, free photoshop download, free photoshop downloads, learn photoshop, learn photoshop cs3, learning photoshop, Photography, photoshop 6 download free, photoshop cs3 learn, photoshop guides   Posted in Photography

15 Ways to Make Money with Digital Photography

Beginning photographers often overestimate how difficult it can be to make money as a photographer. In reality, there are dozens of ways to make money through digital photography. Here are 15 great ways to help you kick start your photography career.

Method #1 – Selling Stock Photography: Selling stock photography is easier than you may think. Just take some of your best photos and submit them to stock photography sites. They will be reviewed and if it’s a good photo, it will hopefully be accepted. You’ll get paid about $1-2 every time someone uses your photo.

Method #2 – Screensavers: Screensavers are a big business online. You can make a whole lot of money online by taking a group of photos and making them into screensavers. You can sell them on screensaver websites or eBay.

Method #3 – eBay Sellers: Speaking of eBay, eBay can be a great source of business. eBay sellers often have very poor photos of images they sell over and over. Set up a local service photographing eBay items.

Method #4 – Wedding Photographer: Wedding photography is one of the most popular, profitable and competitive photography fields out there. To get jobs in this area, it’s important to have a very impressive portfolio.

Method #5 – Restaurant Photographer: Restaurant menus often need to have appetizing photos taken for their dishes. They also often need photos of the restaurant itself for marketing materials. Restaurants can be a great source of business for the budding photographer.

Method #6 – Real Estate Listings: Real estate agents need listing photographs of new homes they’re listing. Get yourself a few real estate agents you work with regularly and you could quickly be booked with work.

Method #7 – Insurance Photographer: One of the most tedious tasks of getting insurance is having everything in your home photographed. For highly paid professionals, they would often rather pay someone to do the work than do it themselves. Positioning yourself as an insurance photographer is a great way to get started with paying gigs.

Method #8 – Online Dating Photographer: Both men and women often want to have great photos of them taken for online dating profiles. This is a great way to make some quick cash.

Method #9 – Consignment Art: Places like Cafes and restaurants would often love to showcase your artwork. It gives them art on their walls for free. In exchange, you get exposure and potential buyers for your art.

Method #10 – Sporting Events: Local sporting events such as little league games or high school soccer games would often love to have photographers photograph their games.

Method #11 – Church Directories: A church directory is an album that contains photographs of all their members along with their contact information. Church directories are quite common among churches in higher end neighborhoods. You can easily sell your services as a photographer to help create church directories.

Method #12 – Create T Shirts: T shirts have been and will continue to be great sellers online. Taking photos, putting them on shirts and selling them on eBay or T shirt websites is a great way to make money as a photographer.

Method #13 – Craigslist: Craigslist is a great place to find paying gigs. Hundreds of photographers are using Craigslist to connect with clients. It’s the most trafficked classified website on the internet.

Method #14 – Take Portraits: Portrait photography is a highly profitable business models for photographers. There are two ways you can go about doing portraits: Setting up your own practice, or working with another studio.

Method #15 – Photo Blogging: You can build a small but loyal following simply by posting your photos online on a regular basis. Art lovers who love your style will often subscribe to your blog and keep coming back again and again.

Now you have plenty of profitable ideas you can use to start making money as a photographer. Whether you want to do it part-time for extra cash or make it your full-time work, there’s plenty to choose from.

Tags: business, hobby, home-business, Photography, photos, work at home   Posted in Photography

Batch Processing with Adobe Photoshop

If you are not quite familiar with Photoshop, this program has these wonderful little features called Actions. These Actions have many different uses from creating remarkable effects to maximizing your productivity and of course they can always be counted on to handle the common and tiresome tasks that are nothing more than time consuming.

I recently had the pleasure of a little thing called Batch Processing. I’m a dedicated designer, but there was no way I was going sit in front of my computer for hours changing the Hue/Saturation for every single image for my forum. What is Batch Processing, you say? Well, it’s something that processes a batch,and I’m going to show you how to do it.

When you’re creating an action you need it to do one thing: Something. In my case, I needed to change the Hue/Saturation for 75+ images from blue to my “trademark” teal. Maybe you need an action for a different purpose, but humor me and tell yourself, “Hey, I need to make my image the same color as hers!” Next, you’ll need something to work on. Get a small image, like an icon, preferably the one I’m using for this tutorial.

Next go to Windows – Actions, making sure it is checked. If checked, you should see a tab in the Layers Palette appropriately labeled Actions.

Click on the arrow button to enter the Actions menu and then “new Set.” This will create a folder for your newly created action (the folder is not mandatory, but it does help with organization.)

Go back to the Actions menu and select “New Action.” I’ll give you three guesses as to what this does. Now, before recording an action you need to figure out the steps you’ll need to take and the order in which you’ll need to take them. Since this is a pretty simple action you can do this is your sleep eventually.

Now for the recording part. There will be a small circle icon between the square and the triangle at the bottom of the palette that you will need to click. Now Photoshop will record everything you do until the end of the Action. If you have an error, simply stop the Action by pushing the square icon and go back to your last step taken.

For my action, the first thing I need to do is change the Mode of the image to RGB, since .gif files are saved in Index mode which don’t take too kindly to colorization. So with the action recording, go to Image – Mode – RGB. Now take a look at your Actions palette, it should look like this:

Next, strip the image of the current color in order to apply our own color easier by going to Image – Adjustment – Desaturate.

Now that we have a naked grey image, we need to add some color. Make sure your action is still recording and go to Image – Adjustments – Hue/Saturation. I have the settings for my teal color saved in a .ahu (Hue/Saturation) file already so all I have to do is click Load and select Teal.ahu, but since you don’t have that you’ll have to use the sliders. Use these settings for my color:

Our final step is to save it for the web. Make sure your action still recording and go to File – Save For the Web and set your file type and optimization settings. I use the standard GIF settings. Select your destination directory and save.

Stop recording and say “Yay, I made an action!” because you’re finished. Now to put your newly born action into… ahem… action, we’ll do a Batch Process. What this will do is take all the images in a specified directory and apply whatever changes were recorded in the action. Just for the sake of the tutorial, create a directory and drop some images into it, or just duplicate one that you already have.

Go to File – Automate – Batch and make sure the name of the Action Set you just created is in the first dropdown list and the name of the Action is in the second. Set the third dropdown box (next to Source) to Folder and use the Choose button to find your duplicated or created folder of images. For destination, you can either leave it set to it’s default “None” to have the action applied and saved in the source folder, or save the “actionized” images into a separate folder. Once you have everything configured to your liking, click OK.

The hard part of the job is now done for you! All that is left is to relax and watch your pictures color themselves thanks to Actions and Batch Processing.

Tags: adobe photoshop, editing photos using photoshop, get photoshop, hobbies, internet, learn photoshop fast, Learn Photoshop now, learning photoshop, Photography, Photoshop, photoshop guide, photoshop tutorials, software help   Posted in Photography