As promised from last weeks post on Youtube, I promised to share the “how to” on the creation of the little teaser video for transitioning from a black and white photo to color. For those that don’t remember, the video is here: Continue reading “Creating the color video”
Tag: Video
Aspect Ratio adjustments explained
I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve gone to print pictures I’ve taken only to find that I had composed it in a way that a portion of the image was lost when printed because it had to be cropped out to fit on the paper. Today I am going to share a technique in Photoshop that will help you get around that pesky limitation.
First a little background – the reason why we are losing part of the picture is because we are changing the aspect ratio. What is aspect ratio? Simply enough, it’s the relative size of the long side of the picture to the short side. Aspect ratios are often referred to by their lowest common factor. So, a 4×6 print uses a 3:2 aspect ratio. (Aspect ratios usually are stated with the larger of the numbers coming first…) An 8×10 has an aspect ratio of 5:4. Want to print a 16×20? Guess what – it’s got an aspect ratio of 5:4 too! Here are some of the most common aspect ratios that you see in photography:
4:3 – Point and Shoot Cameras
3:2 – 35mm Film cameras and most APS-C sensor cameras (SLR’s)
1.81:1 – APS-H Mode (High Def)
3:1 – APS-P (Panoramic)
So, with an SLR camera, since your sensor approximates an aspect ratio of 3:2, getting an 8×10 print means you need to keep your subject matter in from the edges because when you crop to the new ratio, at least one of those edges (and a little of the other) will be lost from the crop. So, having now explained “why”, let’s now look at the “how” (as in how to fix it!) in the delayed tutorial for the week:
Sharing your photos online
Posting your photos online has become an almost expected step in becoming known as a photographer. People want to see your website. You are judged on not only the quality of the photos but the quality of the website as well. So, when I found a plugin made by a company called Cincopa that lets you insert browse-able galleries into your posts, I was intrigued. I signed up for a free service, and shortly after signing up, ran out of bandwidth. (200MB/month limit). Continue reading “Sharing your photos online”
An exercise in silence…
As creatives, we often can find ourselves just not seeing anything new…even if given a theme to go out and discover. In times like these, it’s sometimes beneficial to stop looking outward and start looking inward. I am not talking about Yoga, meditation, or even pontificating the meaning of life. Although these are equally viable options for getting out of a creative rut, I am talking about looking at your own past work. While we all have done this from time to time, I found a recent little twist on this practice helpful. Look back at your work with a theme in mind.
The monthly contests here encourage everyone to go out and capture new work with a theme in mind, and creating new work is always a good thing, but sometimes, when given a theme, and then looking back at archives, you can find new meaning in older images, when looking with a different perspective.
For instance – I was reading an article over on Nikon (yes, I read Nikon’s website – we all know it’s the photographer and not the gear by now, right?) about the value of sounds. The article was talking about pet photography and that you can get certain expressions if you catch the right sound (full article here:). It got me to thinking – what would the lack of sound look like in an image? So, I decided to close my eyes and try to imagine what a photo of silence would encompass: the serenity of a flower, the peace of a beach or the darkness of an evening or morning sunrise or sunset when it’s just you and the landscapes, even the chill of the day with snow covering everything in a blanket of quiet.
It gave me such a burst of inspiration from my own archives that I decided to go through and pick these specific ones out with the idea of “silence” in mind… Of course I couldn’t just leave something like this alone – so I added a little taste of music that I thought would be appropriate:
This is, of course, just my own interpretation. What are your thoughts when you think of a series of images that captures “silence”? Would you set it to music? How many images would you include? Here I had 8 images…was it too many or not enough? Sound off in the comments, as it’s really the viewer thoughts and input that is always so valuable!
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Droid 2
So, the Droid has been in use for about a week now…and I gave some initial feedback on it yesterday, but thought it might be helpful to give a short video on how to tether the Droid to a computer. It’s pretty straightforward, so here you are (special shout outs to Rich Charpentier for requesting it)…
As you can see – nothing too difficult or fancy to tether a Droid, which makes for great file manipulation and transfer, which means photos are also easily archived across multiple platforms! How are others tethering their smart phones? Just as easily? I didn’t like the Touch having to go through iTunes and be “licensed” on each computer. Thoughts and feedback welcome in the comments!
Don’t forget – I am also sharing pics daily on http://mydroidpics.com Won’t set the photo world on fire, but you can get an idea of the quality of images coming off the Droid! 🙂 Happy shooting all and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!
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It's Official – CS5 has been released!
Yup, the day it became available for purchase/download, the trials also became available – a first for Adobe! I’ve already downloaded it and am starting to play with it for the first time (was not a beta tester). Suffice to say, it’s pretty slick and yes, as I said yesterday, I am getting the upgrade! Rather than show you screen shots and pore over the list of new features which has been done ad infinitum, I did a short video of some of the settings I like to adjust on an initial install. So, here is that video straight from YouTube!
The Easter Egg had some cool trivia too. For instance – does anyone (outside Adobe) know how many babies were born to members of the team during production? WHo is the queen of the tenth floor? Is the wizard still there? If so, where is he now? Neat little nuggets just waiting to be discovered all in CS5! Got the answers or your own nuggets? Sound off in the comments! 🙂
Also, a final reminder about the April giveaway – some lucky participant will win an Expo Disc from the folks over at Expo Imaging. Get your balance-themed photos in before midnight tonight to have a chance at winning! Here’s the link: April Giveaway
CHDK is Cool!
So, while debating the intervalometer cost implications for my SLR – I decided to give the Canon CHDK a run for its money. After downloading the CHDK for the A590 and making sure it didn’t break the camera I went out in search of an intervalometer script. I think it’s a VB script, but can’t be sure…nevertheless the results were kind of fun!
I tried to include as much info in the teaser as possible, but if anyone has questions on how I did all this, feel free to share your questions (or feedback if you prefer) in the comments or vial email! Here’s a dry run of my daily commute home (if only the real time commute went that fast!):
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Happy shooting! If you have your own time lapse productions, feel free to link them in the comments too! See you back here again tomorrow… 🙂
Lightroom 3 Beta 2
As teased a few hours ago (Mon night – see previous post), Adobe has released a second beta of the forthcoming Lightroom 3. Since there’s not much out there on it, I figured I’d give it a whirl to share a couple screenshots of what you can expect to see. Here’s the Beta 2, installed on the Mac: Continue reading “Lightroom 3 Beta 2”
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Borders and Logos, it's Photoshop, Oh My!
That’s right, we’re back to a photoshop tip again on the blog, and this one comes courtesy of question I read in the NAPP community forums. The person there had asked about pricing on some photography for a large company’s set of employee photos and his concern was about the post production time in creating the border and logo that the company wanted on each.
The community quickly sprung to action, pointing him in several directions, and it occurred to me that I had never done this sort of tutorial before! It’s not too difficult but there are some pitfalls to be aware of when dealing with borders and logos in photos, especially if you are trying to program these steps into an action or script. Suffice to say, I figured this was as good a time as any to jump back into Photoshop and keep the digits (and brain) fresh! So, here’s a new video tutorial on creating borders and logos! Enjoy!
Your thoughts and feedback are welcome and encouraged as always! Thanks for stopping in, have a great week, and be sure to stop back in tomorrow for more photo goodness! Oh yeah, and don’t forget the March contest is in full swing where the winner will go home with one of these super cool Cheetah Quickstands – the theme is wild and the link for submissions is here! Happy shooting and we’ll see you tomorrow!
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Against my better judgement…
For those of you that have been following the blog for a long time (and let me know who you are, because I want to ask why!), you may recall that I used to put out video tutorials on how to do various things inside of Photoshop. After plodding around with that for a while, I came across the gurus of NAPP and realized that several were already doing it, and doing it much better than I ever could. So, rather than re-inventing the wheel, I abandoned the video tutorials in favor of just sharing my “wisdom” in the form of the written word (blog posts and articles) and audio tips (which are now part of the Learning Digital Photography podcast).
Well, when I recently twittered with excitement over the newly released calendar of some of my favorite images for 2010, someone asked me about the template I used to create those images. I honestly answered that I didn’t really use a template as the website www.lulu.com just let me upload the images and they handled the rest. On realizing that they were talking about the images on my Photography Website, I recalled that a template was used for those images. I could have done a written post about this, but those take a lot of time to put together (lots of screen grabs, lots of writing, and lots of uploading), so I instead decided to put together a new video on how to create a template for your photos inside of Photoshop. The video may take some time to load, so please be patient as this is a self-hosted video production! 🙂
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Keep in mind – this is just one way – in Photoshop there are always many ways to reach similar results, and as the old adage says, there’s more than one way to skin a cat! Anyway, this is for you @mitz! Enjoy, happy shooting, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow! Oh, and lest we forget, there are very few days left in the January giveaway! For your chance to win a free copy of Photomatix Pro from the folks at HDR Soft, get your Circle-themed photos in the Flickr Contest Thread by midnight on Friday (Mountain Time – GMT-7).
P.S. For those that like my videos and want to see the archives, check out the Learning Resource Page from the sidebar for more materials. And as an additional side note, this is post #600. No fuss, no muss, no fanfare, but yet somehow I landed back on video tutorials – which is kind of how it all started! Somehow, ,ind of poetic, eh? 🙂
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