Archive for the ‘Photography’ Category

One of the most important reasons for packing a massive memory card is to enable you to shoot at your camera’s highest resolution. If you paid a premium price for a 6 megapixel digicam, then get your money’s worth and shoot at 6 megapixels. And while you’re at it, shoot at your camera’s highest quality compression setting too. Why not squeeze more images on your memory card by shooting a lower resolution and low quality compression settings? Because you never know when you’re going to capture the next great image of the 21st century. And if you take a beautiful picture at the low 640 x 480 resolution, that means you can only make a print about the size of a credit card, not exactly the right dimensions for hanging in the museum. On the other hand, if you recorded the image at 2272 x 1704 (4 megapixels) or larger, then you can make a lovely 8- x 10-inch photo-quality print suitable for framing or even for gracing the cover of Time magazine. And just in case you were able to get as close to the action as you had liked, having those extra pixels enables you to crop your image and still have enough resolution to make a decent sized print. The point is, if you have enough memory (and you know you should), then there’s no reason to shoot at lower resolution and risk missing the opportunity to show off your work in a big way.

The use of light in a photograph can be the deciding factor of whether that picture will be spectacular or terrible. When you use your camera to automatically chose aperture and shutter speed, what your camera is actually doing is using the built in light meter and measuring how much light is being reflected to the camera. 

But that doesn’t mean that’s all there is to it. You should also think about the angle of the light entering the frame, what kind of shadows you want, and whether you want to use fill-in-flash (using flash to light the subject if you have a really bright background). If you are shooting at night you can create all sorts of cool effects like lights in motion, pictures with moonlight, or silhouettes like the one shown here. The following are just some examples of all the possibilities.

The angle of light should be taken into careful consideration whenever you feel like you want to create a specific effect. Shadows can be very powerful when cast over half of someone’s face. In this photo on the left the light is striking the statue’s face from the rear right of the camera and this adds more depth to the picture. It also adds more coloring because if front-lighting was used his face would likely be over exposed, and if back-lighting was used his face would just be black like a silhouette.

The effect of rays of light indoors and outdoors. can be very spectacular. A brilliant part of some great photographs is the ability to see actual rays of light. Whether it be in the setting of a brilliant sunset, light pouring through a window or from artificial lights it can look very impressive. Usually the only way to obtain something like this is a narrow aperture (high f/stop) and a very slow shutter speed.

Silhouettes are another interesting example of using light. The way to create a silhouette is to have significantly brighter light coming from behind the subject. In doing this it is important to take your camera light reading off of the background instead of the subject in order for the camera to adjust for an exposure based on the backlight. If you do this the subject will be successfully underexposed like in the picture at the top of this page.

If you keep experimenting with different ways of using light you will find that you can get very interesting results. The longer the exposure, the more fascinating the results with light most of the time. In the picture on the right, this is a long single exposure and yes that is the same person in two places. If your wondering how this was possible, here’s how. 

The shutter speed was set for around 30 seconds, the camera was set on a tripod and someone stood next to the camera with a flashlight. The subject then stood in one place while the flashlight was pointed at him and moved in an up and down motion. After around 15 seconds the flashlight was turned off and the subject was told to move to his left. Then the flashlight was pointed at him again and moved up and down until the camera finished the exposure.

Image Editors Compared

A common request my web team receives is to do some sort of simple image editing for a clients website. I also sometimes hear that someone is getting Photoshop installed so that they can edit images and add them to their web site themselves.

This is crazy when you consider how much Photoshop costs and the learning curve to use it properly.

In this new era of web-based applications I thought it would be worthwhile to see if there were any online image editing tools that would meet these requirements and maybe more.

The Options

I looked at the following online image editors:

Online Photo Tool
Fauxto
Picnik
Snipshot
Cellsea
PXN8
Phixr
VicImager
Picture2Life
NetImager
ImageAuthor
nexImage
LookWow

My Opinion

Overall, I was very impressed with what’s available when it comes to editing images online. By and large the tools were easy to use and had an impressive array of features.

The majority of the tools had solid basic image editing functionality — crop, resize, adjust color, brightness and so on. Some had unlimited levels of undo and redo, which was especially handy.

Some of the features available were up there with full-blown graphics tools. For example, Cellsea included the unsharp mask function for accurately adjusting sharpness.

Two of the image editors (NetImager and nexImage) allowed you to use layers to apply your changes and effects in a non-destructive way, which was a nice feature.

The tools were integrated to varying degress with online image storage services like Flickr and Photobucket. Some also enabled you to view all the images from a web page and then choose which one you wanted to edit, although apart from Cellsea, this was done via a bookmarklet.

The tools had varying capabilities when it came to uploading and saving images from/to different formats. However, between them all you could probably upload and save an image in most of the main file formats (e.g., JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFF, PDF, EPS).