Posted 28 July, 2008 by Carol | No comments
Today I was googling (yes, it’s an actual verb now) different photography sites, and came across a couple of links I would like to share with you.
I started drooling when I saw the Hallmark Institute of Photography’s 40-week long Photography School. I read about it on a blog that turned out to be their Mamiya Award of Excellence winner for 2008, Paul Nordmann. Check out the student galleries..they are so impressive!
I was discussing photography with a friend who said she wanted to learn how to use her camera, and I pointed her to Digital-Photography-School website as a great place to start. I love the bite-sized topics he has on his blog giving tips and “how-tos” for all kinds of different effects, as well as basic photography.
Scott Kelby, the founder of NAPP and Photoshop User magazine, and author of LOTS of photography books, has been hinting at a special event coming up on August 23rd, and he released information about it today! He is sponsoring a Worldwide Photowalk, an event where local photographers of all different skill levels get together and walk around shooting pictures for two hours, and then go and oogle over them at a restaurant nearby. I knew Bill would LOVE doing that (except for the heat), so I signed us up. It sounds like a lot of fun, and there are some really exciting prizes for the grand prize winner. More drooling.!
One more link I found recently has been sucking me in more often than I like to admit – the Wordle.net site. It is an AMAZING website where you can demonstrate the old saying, “A picture is worth 1000 words” literally! It takes any text you write (even from a website or blog) and makes a word cloud out of them, enlarging the words you repeat to emphasize them. Try it out for yourself!
Posted 25 July, 2008 by Carol | No comments
Whenever I browse the portrait photography in Flickr or on other photography websites, I notice what makes the great ones stand out from the amateur ones is the sharpness of the eyes, and the bright, white, shiny “catch lights.” The key to a good portrait is having the focus be on the eyes; the rest of the photograph doesn’t have to be in focus, as long as the eyes are, and those catch lights make the eyes sparkle and give them dimension.
I have found that many photographers I admire use a 50mm prime lens for portraits, because it gives a great depth of field, where the background is out of focus, and the eyes are in sharp focus. Bill has a really nice 50mm lens that is a GREAT deal…only around $100. I have been coveting this lens, but on my Nikon D40 it doesn’t have automatic focusing, and, unfortunately, my aging eyes make it difficult to focus on manual. I was determined to give it a try anyway, to see if I could get away with ordering one for myself, so the other day I was experimenting while visiting a friend. I found that if it was light enough outside, I was able to get it in focus some of the time. As sunset came closer, I couldn’t see well enough to focus on the eyes.
I took some pictures of my friend’s 3-month-old baby, and a couple of her other children, with awesome catch lights and sharp eyes. If you look closely, you can even see my shadow in his eyes! Infants’ eyes are always so beautiful–they’re HUGE and sparkle, and they tend to just stare right at the camera, while the older kids get bored so much more quickly! Here are some examples of the 50mm lens and those awesome catch lights! You can find some tips on how to get them from digital-photography-school.com, a great site for learning more about photography! Here’s the link: An Introduction to Catch Lights
Eyes That Sparkle
Posted 12 June, 2008 by Carol | No comments
Having a large family, we know how difficult it is to get even ONE good family picture where everyone is looking at the camera and smiling. Thankfully, Photoshop can save the day, or portrait in this case. I was editing a group photo and couldn’t find any one photograph where everyone looked good, so I chose one that had the most people smiling, and replaced the silly looking faces with the same person’s smiling face from another shot, then rotated the replacement until it fit into the original photo. I erased the original face with a soft edged brush so that when the layers were merged, it looked picture perfect! I read a tutorial from the Digital Scrapbook Magazine that describes this process.
