The Truth Bar

Digital photography lighting may utilize the same light as film cameras, but these cameras have very different ways of reading, interpreting, and dealing with it.

Digital photography lighting presents many challenges, not the least being that some CCD sensors still lack the broad exposure latitude of color films.

This means that some digital photos taken in strong light conditions, may have empty shadows and blown out highlights.

However, this is exactly where these cameras have the upper hand! They offer you the opportunity to test your understanding of digital photography lighting conditions, and to learn from previous mistakes!

Most digital cameras have preset digital photography lighting modes, or “scenes”, which have been carefully set up to deal with a wide variety of lighting situations.

To give an example: a camera such as the popular Olympus SP500 Ultra Zoom has 21 preset scenes. If a more challenging digital photography lighting situation arise, you can easily choose any one of these to get the perfect shot.

The ‘night & portrait’ scene is for shooting both your main subject, and an illuminated background in the night. This setting uses a slower than normal shutter speed.

Then there is the “museum” setting which is optimized for shooting without a flash (or sound!) in a museum, or art gallery - or when your kid is sleeping… This is where the versatility of digital photography lighting clearly shows itself.

With digital photography lighting, most cameras have various options for white balancing. This is the process of determining what will be the baseline white in your image, relative to which other colors are rendered.

Digital cameras boast options such as daylight, cloudy, shade, and tungsten. Most cameras also have an automatic setting for white balancing.

Many of these cameras also display a histogram to help judge exposure (under or overexposure) in different digital photography lighting situations.

What about lighting equipment? You don’t necessarily need expensive lighting equipment. For example, if you’re taking informal portraits of your family and friends, you can easily start with something such as the Screwfix double 500W site light set including a telescopic tripod.

To help you master both the technical and creative aspects related to digital photography lighting, Michael Freeman has written ‘Digital Photography Expert: Light & Lighting: The Definitive Guide For Serious Digital Photographers’.

He includes 350 photographs to demonstrate the most important techniques. He explains the full spectrum of light, how the camera measures it, as well as how to get color accuracy in your digital images.

If you want to fully explore how to use post-processing in Photoshop to achieve a variety of digital photography lighting results, you may want to study ‘Creative Photoshop Lighting Techniques, Revised and Updated’, by Barry Huggins.

Huggins explains techniques such as how to bring sunshine into cloudy day pictures, and to create underwater effects. You can also find out about light sources, and different types of light, such as candlelight and neon.

The message of these authors are clear: practice, practice, practice makes for perfect digital photography lighting!

For more information visit Best-Digital-Photography.com

Rika Susan of Article-Alert.com researches, writes, and publishes full-time on the Web. Copyright of this article: 2006 Rika Susan. This article may be reprinted if the resource box and hyperlinks are left intact.

Digital photography brings with it a whole new set of terms and abbreviations that requires getting used to if you’ve been using film cameras in the past. Many of the terms are totally unique to digital cameras and photography, and if you don’t understand them there is a good chance that you won’t be able to get the equipment that you really need for taking digital photographs. So let’s review some of the most important digital photography terms to help you understand them.

* Pixel - everything in digital photography actually begins with the pixel. Simply put, it is the very smallest part of a digitized image. You can think of it as a.dot that when combined with lots of other dots around it, makes up an entire photo image

* Resolution - this usually has to do with the total number of pixels in a photograph, and the higher the resolution, generally the sharper and better quality the picture is.

* Megapixel - this simply stands for one million pixels. The more pixels that make up a photograph, the higher the resolution and better quality the image will be. So a digital camera that takes a one megapixel image will usually not have anywhere near the image quality of a camera that takes a four or five megapixel image. And the differences become even greater when the photograph is enlarged.

* DPI - this stands for dots per inch and often applies to printers or monitors. For instance, most laser printers have a resolution of around 300 dpi, whereas most monitors display only 72 dpi. Photo quality inkjet printers usually come in at least 1200 dpi.

* Megabyte - this stands for an amount of computer memory that is somewhere around one million bytes of file storage.

* JPEG - this acronym stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group and is now a recognized format for the storage of images is in most digital cameras.The JPEG format allows for quite a bit of image and file compression, making files that are in this format much easier to display on the internet and send to others by e-mail. However, the kind of image compression that is used by the JPEG format can also cause some loss of image quality and so is not suitable for high quality prints.

* Memory card - all digital cameras have to store the digital files on some kind of removable media, and most often it involves the use of a small memory card. These cards come in various sizes depending on how much storage space they have available. A few digital cameras are also able to store files directly on CDs instead.

* LCD - this stands for Liquid Crystal Display, and these are usually found on most digital cameras to help the photographer preview the scene before taking the photograph, and then review that image later on after the photo was taken.

These are the digital photography terms that are most commonly used today, and understanding them will help you better select and use the digital equipment that you buy.

Thad Pickering writes on many consumer related topics including digital photography. You can find a digital photography tutorial and the digital photography basics by visiting our Digital Photography website.

Anyone with the ability to use a camera correctly has the potential to sell their images. Picture agencies handle images of every subject and are always looking for emerging talent.

Pictures libraries and stock agencies are in the business of selling images. The don’t give you advice on how to take better images. Their purpose is business - they sell images to magazines, book publishers, the travel industry and many other industries that use images.

Many photographers look upon agencies as a last resort to sell their work; if you have been unable to sell any of your images, the chances are that most agencies won’t accept them.

If you are interested in an agency selling your images, you must be able to produce high quality images which are suited to the agencies market. Check out their website to view samples that are currently in use.
If you feel your work meets their standards and suits their customers - then approach them by e-mail or by standard mail.

But, before placing your work at an agency make a short-list of the agencies that seem to suit your work. Contact each agency outlining your work and which magazines have already published your images. If an agency is then interested they will ask you to send them samples.

If an agency accepts your work, don’t take this as a guarantee that your images will sell.

Don’t approach an agency until you have a large collection of images. Minimum first submissions can consist of anything from 50 images to 500 and regular submissions are normally required thereafter. Most agencies work on a commission basis - 50 % being the standard rate. If an image sells for two hundred euro - the photographer receives a one hundred euro fee.

When an agency takes on a photographer’s work, they normally require a four or five year retention period. Agencies normally sell the reproduction rights of a pictures - the image being licensed to a buyer for a specified purpose.

It may take as long as six months before an agency sells a picture belonging to you. First they need to scan your images if they are submitted by film; then they need to contact their clients and let them know that there is new material available - all of this takes time, so you must look at supplying a picture agency as a long term investment. It is only when you have several hundred images placed in a library that you’ll start to see regular sales.

Remember: agencies can’t sell images if there isn’t a market for them and placing images at an agency does not guarantee you sales.

TJ Tierney is an award winning Irish Landscape photographer and a freelance writer. If you are looking for some photo tips visit the photography directory he frequently writes for: http://www.goldprints.com To view some of his images visit his on line gallery @ http://www.goldenirishlight.com

Professional photographers rely on the flash on their camera to capture the action at a wedding or other social event. They are probably not aware of the effect of their flash on the faces of their subject. Here is an analysis of the effect of
different distances between the flash head and the lens.

The proper position of the flash is directly over the lens. This will ensure that any shadows from the flash will occur behind the head and body and not to one side. Of course, when shooting square format like Hasselblad, the flash can be fixed in that one position. For shooting with a rectangular format like Bronica ETR or Canon DSLR, the flash must be mounted on a swinging bar so that the flash can be positioned over the lens in either a horizontal or vertical shot.

I have determined through many tests that the ideal distance of the flash head above the lens is twelve inches. There are many advantages to using this distance. First, the unavoidable reflections on the forehead, nose, cheeks and chin are conducive to making the subject look good. The forehead reflection is positioned higher on the forehead, almost into the hair line and much diminished in strength. This leaves the flat portion of the forehead reflection free and retaining the natural color of the skin.

The shape of the nose is determined by the fall off of light along the sides and the position of the reflection on the bridge of the nose. When the flash is positioned closer to the lens, the bridge or indentation receives no highlight but rather the bony lower part of the nose is emphasized. The tip of the nose also benefits from the twelve inch distance of the flash head by appearing smaller and less intense.

Cheek reflections are considered acceptable when they are centered on the upper portion of the cheek. With a lower positioned flash head, the reflection highlight the unattractive line of muscle from the cheek to the nose. The twelve inch flash position also enhances the cheek bones. Chin reflections lower down on the point of the chin are unattractive and make the chin look wet. Alternatively, the twelve inch flash position just places a small crescent shaped highlight under the lip. An added benefit also occurs in the form of a more defined chin line and the placement of some double chins in shadow.

Those terrible eye glass reflections are greatly minimized with the twelve inch flash. The flash highlight now appears near the top of the eye glass, completely avoiding the area of the iris and pupil. The eyes are the most important feature of the face and ugly flash reflections can wipe out the eyes completely. An added benefit is a slight darkening at the bottom of the picture, enhancing the composition with a natural fade out.

Remember that since most natural light comes from a position over the horizon the most natural flash lighting will do the same for the face. Don’t let convenience prevent you from capturing your flash subjects in the most attractive light.

Retired portrait and wedding photographer. Modestly, I was once awarded the title of Best Wedding Photographer in Passaic, Bergen and Hudson Counties in New Jersey.

If you’re a teacher or parent, you may be interested in creating some fun digital photography related projects for children. I sometimes plan fun and interesting photo projects for my son so that he can learn about photography and have a whale of a time too.

In this article, we’ll explore 3 interesting photo project ideas we can prepare for children, so read on!

Idea 1: Make a Photo Journal

One interesting photo project is to let the child create a personal photo journal. Ask the child to hang on to the digital camera for a few days, snapping anything that captures his or her fancy.

At the end of that period, help him or her to upload the pictures to a computer, then add some good captions or funny quotes. A simple, easy activity to do, which is also rewarding for the family too.

You can use a program like Microsoft Powerpoint to maintain the photo album or print the pictures and bind them into a hardcover book.

Idea 2: Create a Nice Jigsaw Puzzle

Here’s a good project to undertake if your child likes jigsaw puzzles. Print out a nice, large format picture, then stick it onto a large cardboard. Next, cut up the cardboard into small curved pieces anf voila, we have a homemade jigsaw puzzle.

Another way to do this is to use a cool software I found called Brainsbreaker. This program allows you to turn any digital photo into a jigsaw puzzel which you can solve on the computer. Neat, huh?

Idea 3: What Could This Be?
Another interesting photo project is to snap a picture of a common, everyday object - using a very odd angle or close-up view.

Entrust the digital camera to the kids, then ask them to sniff out ordinary objects to take photos of. Ask them to take the photos at weird, unusual, and otherworldly angles.

When they’re done, upload the pictures to the PC and start playing a guessing game. Ask the kids to guess what subject is being photographed in each mystery photo. You’ll be amazed at the answers you get! Snap a whole slew of such pictures and you’ll occupy the kids for the whole afternoon!

Conclusion

As you can see, there are many fun-filled photo projects you can create for kids. Take note of some of these ideas the next time you’re cracking your brains and thinking about how to occupy the children.

Gary Hendricks runs a hobby site on digital photography. Visit his website at Basic-Digital-Photography.com for tips and tricks on buying digital cameras, as well as shooting great photos.

Do you know what is best about a compact camera?

It’s size.

For all the acclaimed faults and for all the abuse compacts endure - largely from photographers that own SLRs and believe their equipment makes them better photographers - their size alone make them a worthwhile investment.

And, compact cameras don’t have to be restricted in use simply for the family holiday snaps. Oh no. Compacts have many of the creative features of more expensive cameras, such as automatic, semi-automatic and manual control.

But their size makes them a must-have for all photographers.

My compact is fairly large by today’s standards. But it still fits neatly into a coat or trouser pocket. And into the glove compartment of my car. And in my wife’s handbag. In fact, it will fit almost anywhere I would wish it to.

This means I can always carry it around with me. Just like my wallet or my telephone.

And that means I can take pictures when I want, if I want. And it especially means that when a great chance for an image DOES come along, I can never say “I wish I had my camera with me”.

With compact cameras, there is NEVER and excuse for not carrying it. And being so cheap, there is never any excuse for not buying one!

Eric Hartwell is an experienced photographer and owner of the photography resource website ephotocentral