Crop Corner

Many classes and tips about photography, talk about improving the fundamentals of how to take better photos.

I was inspired by this article by Jim Altengarten, an educator in photography, in which he talks about ten principles of how to take better photos.

His top 10 photography tips include:

1. Believing is seeing
2. Take five or more shots of any scene
3. Keep your mind open
4. Use every lens in your bag
5. Photograph your values
6. Use one of the seven exposure values that are available
7. Be childlike
8. Stay out late… get up early
9. Know when to pull the trigger
10. Practice, practice, practice

What I liked about the article was that he really made me think about how to get in the right frame of mind to capture a scene. Although I’m still a one lens kinda-gal, and I fumble with the manual settings on my camera, I still took away some valuable lessons.

One of the great things about digital cameras is the instant gratification they give - you can immediately look to see how the picture came out - and whether you need to reshoot.

With kids - it’s almost a necessity! Also, the theory goes, that you only have to pay for the good shots. Well, why is it August and I just sent some of my 2006 photos to be printed?

I guess it’s no different than the rolls of film that sat in the drawer for months before they got developed. It just feels like the extra step in selecting what pictures to have printed slows down the process… Oh well…

As an amateur photographer, I think it’s interesting to read about how professionals setup for their photo shoots.

Here’s a good article from ePhotoZine about how a professional setup for a calendar photo shoot.

Things I learned:

• even professionals sometimes have unwilling subjects and need to have quick action
• a simple process to use to create black and white images
• a skylight can be used to light photos from the top

You're attending a photography workshop when you look around. You have the impression that everybody else has a bigger, better camera than yours--longer lens, newer, more expensive, more features. You feel inadequate. Tail between your legs, you slink back home to engage in your other hobby--cooking. You prepare a great meal and serve it to your friends. They love the food, and one of them says, "Gee, that was delicious! How did you do that? You must have a great oven."

In November of 2001, I did a review on the Adobe GoLive 5 web design program, using my own web site as an example of how well it worked. I've been using Adobe web design programs ever since the introduction of PageMill, their first one, and I've been impressed with each new version. GoLive CS is, by far, the best upgrade yet and the easiest to use to create web pages. If you've used Adobe's web design programs before, you already know that once you have the basics down, creating a simple web page (a page with photo images, information text such as titles and descriptions, and page links) is easy. From there on, GoLive CS just gets better and better, offering all kinds of fancy features you can add on as you go.

Photographer who didn't know what to do with all his photographs... Photo albums are still a good way to show photos to one person at a time. Oops, wrong space story. Ours is a story about the space photographers need in order to store the photographs they've taken. All photographers eventually run into this dilemma, so you might want to begin thinking about a solution now. Back when photography was in its infancy, photo negatives were often in glass plates. Storage was a real hassle in those days. Contamination and breakage always posed threats to the images. Later, negative films were invented, and photographers had to worry about fading, fungus, fingerprints, and scratches. Finally, someone devised a paper negative sleeve that helped greatly. You can mark on these sleeves and then file them in some sort of order. There are boxes you can use to store both black-and-white and color negatives of all sizes.

There is never a shortage of Photoshop books to learn from, but a few are a lot more worth spending your money on than others. The Photoshop CS book for Digital Photographers, by Scott Kelby is for sure one of those. If you are going to buy any new Photoshop book, make it this one, and you don't have to be a digital photographer either. This book covers everything you will need to make yourself a top Photoshop Guru, and you will be turning out images to match any digital pro. As with all of Mr. Kelby's books, this one also shows you not only what tools to use for each effect, but it includes all of the settings for those tools. It couldn't be any easier to learn from unless the book somehow actually "did the work" for you. This 375 page soft cover book is for intermediate to advanced users and retails for US$39.99 and is published by New Riders.

Lasers and the sun are the two brightest lights that your eyes will probably ever have to confront. Therefore, it would make sense that anything that makes them even more intense would be dangerous--right? And using equipment--such as a telephoto lens--that increases their size makes them more intense. You wouldn't think of placing a magnifying glass between your eyes and a very bright light before looking into it, would you? Likewise, if you look directly at the sun through a telephoto lens on your camera, you're essentially magnifying the effect of the light. However, you don't have to use a telephoto lens to capture a dramatic sunrise or sunset shot. In fact, you don't even have to include the sun in the photo itself. I've used wide-angle lenses to good effect in landscape sunrises and sunset shots. If you have good cloud formations, sunsets are more spectacular when the sun is already below the horizon.

The extent of my photo retouching is to typically correct red-eye, change the contrast, and if I’m feeling adventurous, blotting out some aspect of the picture that doesn’t belong.

When I read this tutorial about removing wrinkles, I had to laugh. I’m not quite in need of this yet, but I’ll have to keep it in my back pocket!

1) You're using a 200mm lens with a maximum aperture of f2.8. 2) You want to shoot the scene at f8, because there are elements of the scene you want to be in focus that are at different distances from the camera. 3) Two elements in the scene are far enough apart that both will not be in focus at f2.8, but they will be in focus at f8. When you focus your lens on an element in the scene, you're seeing the scene through the viewfinder at its maximum aperture of f2.8. The camera is designed in this manner for several reasons. Most importantly, it allows the viewfinder to operate at its brightest setting to facilitate your viewing the scene. It also allows the camera's autofocus mechanism to obtain enough light to work effectively. If your lens has a maximum aperture of f4, you would view the scene through the viewfinder at that setting, which is one stop darker. If you have lenses with different maximum apertures, try looking through them at the same subject to see if you can discern the one-stop difference in brightness.