Photography tips

One of the Great things you can do with your photos is to turn them into your own personalised greeting cards. One of the places where I get prints done had a very attractive price, so I thought why not put together my Own cards for christmas.

In one of the photography forums I visit there was a bit of discussion about taking photos of Christmas trees, so after reading the info I decided that I would have a go at it myself and try and get a suitable picture of my own christmas tree for use on my christmas cards.

A few days ago I grabbed the camera and put the flash on it and went outside to try and get a picture of my cat. The cat was on the roof looking over the edge at me and it would have made a pretty good photo.

As usual, by the time I got back outside the cat was nowhere to be seen.

Well, today I was looking to get a specific photo and spent a few minutes setting up the scene. I took around 15-20 pictures with some small variations in the composition, lighting etc. Well, then I loaded them onto the Computer and started looking to see if I got what I set out to.

Well, I can say that I was not really very happy with any of them and to get something useful I would have to pull a rabbit out of my hat.

As I mentioned in my last post, I am going to present a few of the photos from the Street Parade. I selected 4 images out of the ones I took and I'll discuss them in detail. I will look at the composition of the pictures and why I liked or disliked them. So, lets cut the crap and get to the pictures. (More)

Yesterday, I grabbed a Camera in the hope of getting a few worthwhile shots of A local Street Parade. The Parade is Where Santa Arrives at the Local Shopping Mall, and several Local Community Groups participate in it.

I only Took 1 camera with me with the 14-54mm Lens on it. I soon realised I should have also had my other Camera with the Longer Lens as well. It just made it a little more difficult to get some shots - I had to wait for the parade to get close to me to get the shot.

I have avoided photographing anything where I needed to use high ISO settings. I have always been concerned about how noisy the phots turn out, and how much effort in post processing it might take to get any sort of reasonable pictures from the effort involved.

Well, Last night I took the plunge in a big way - A friends band were performing at a local Pub. I asked them if they wanted any pics and they jumped at the chance! so, I grabbed my bag and went along to see If I could get some shots.

If you read the last post, you know a little about cropping, resizing and compressing your photos for use on a computer or website. well, now I am going to go thru a few things to get the best possible print from your digital files.

You are going to hate me again, because we have to do some basic maths to understand how much we can crop a photo and how big it needs to be if it is going to be printed. we will get to this in a minute or so. First, I will assume that we are going to prepare our pictures and take them to the local photo lab to do the printing for us.

Most of our digital pictures will only ever be shown on a computer screen, and I'll discuss some of the aspects about some of the things that you will want to edit.

Remember how I mentioned Picassa, well, if you have not got it, then go and grab a copy. The examples I will use will be easy to understand if you can see them for yourself. I don't have every bit of software for every digital camera, that is why I choose (cheap) 3rd party programs when they are suitable to do a job, and it means you only have to learn how to use it once.