TPB Monthly Round Up #2
February 29, 2008
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It’s time for TPB (The Photographer Blog) monthly round up, I can’t believe it’s the end of the month already.
This month I have enjoyed exploring other photographers sites, here are three of my favorites:
Natalie Norton Photos, I first read a guest post that Natalie had done on the Digital Photography School blog. I like her style, she has a refreshing view towards photography and obviously loves taking photos. I also like the fact that you can see her journey with photography and how she has grown as a photographer.
The Blog is Found is the blog for The Image is Found website by Nate and Jaclyn a married couple who are professional photographers and this blog is a journal for all of their professional work. Which gives a great insight into what it is like to be a professional photographer with a personal touch.
And then last but not least a site that I found on Stumble Upon called The Visual Record. It’s got loads of information and some great photographs.
I do love Photographers blogs I think it’s a great way to share your photography and get to know other photographers. But they are so hard to find, or I just haven’t been looking in the right places!
Mandy
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Looking at Size and Quality Settings
February 27, 2008
Have you ever wondered why every time you transfer a photo to your computer it is so large. And wondered why, I know I have. Is it a camera setting or the photo editing software that you are using?
Size Setting
But then I noticed I have a size setting on my camera, in other words setting the number of pixels that can be used in the image.
My camera’s default setting is 2560 x 1920 pixels which is also the highest setting without interpolation. Once in the photo editing software it is 90 x 67cm with a 28.346 pixels/cm. That’s huge. I also have some other pixel options on the camera and they are:
3072 x 2304 (interpolation)
2048 x 1536
1280 x 960
640 x 480
The more pixels the better and sharper the image will look and thats also why the photos come out so large, the more pixels the bigger the file size.
Quality Setting
Underneath the size setting I noticed a quality setting for images. Which gives me a choice of:
Fine - low compression rate
Normal - Normal
Economy - High compression rate
Conclusion
At the end of the day I want to take photographs that are high in quality and look sharp enhancing the detail in the shot. So the setting I would keep as high as possible and play around with the normal or low compression rate.
I think these settings are geared towards increasing the amount of images that you can take on the camera. And that would only be useful if you have a small memory card. I use a 1gb memory card and that is plenty for me, I can take up to 1,000 photos on my camera using the 2560 x 1920 size setting. Although that may change if I use a low compression rate I can’t see it changing the amount of photos I can take drastically.
Mandy
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Image of the Week #10
February 25, 2008
This week in image of the week:
This is a photo I took recently near to where I live, the sun was just setting. Shooting into the sun has silhouetted the scene nicely and I used the grass in the front of the picture to give some depth to it.
It wasn’t a planned photo I was just taking a walk, so I only had my camera with me. The only problem being it was a very windy night and it was hard to keep still, so I steadied myself on a fence to take the shot (into the wind!).
Mandy
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Do You Have a Flickr Account?
February 22, 2008
I have to admit I didn’t know anything about Flickr until very recently. The first thing I learned was that it is part of the Yahoo Group, and I learned that when I heard about Microsoft putting a bid in for Yahoo.
So why am I interested now?
Well it’s not because Microsoft may be taking over. I am going to be starting my own photography Project 365 and I was trying to decide how to share the photos. This blog is all about my journey as a photographer so the fact that I wanted to share them wasn’t even a question, but where is the best place?
I did think about sharing them on the blog as that was the obvious place, but Project 365 is about taking a photo a day for a year, so that’s a lot of photos. So just adding the photos in between the other posts seemed messy, I felt that the project is big enough to need some separate attention.
But at the moment this blog is still new, building and finding it’s feet, so I don’t feel it’s right to start another blog or photoblog in case it took me away from here.
So I started to look at photo management sites. And the most popular one that you always hear about and everybody seems to be part of is Flickr. Now I don’t know why I have never considered using a photo management site before, I suppose I just haven’t felt the need. But it makes a lot of sense now, I can upload and share my Project 365 photos and link to them from this blog. I will also be doing monthly updates here about how I am finding the project, so joining a photo management site seems a much better solution.
Flickr
As I said earlier Flickr is owned by Yahoo which means you can use your Yahoo ID (if you have one) when you sign up. They say it’s most likely the best photo management system on the internet with millions of users and all types of photographers. I’m most interested in the creative commons feature which gives you flexible control over your images and who is allowed to use them. I am looking forward to trying out Flickr to see what it is like.
Flickr’s two main goals are:
1. To help people make their photos available to the people who matter to them.
2. Enable new ways to organize photos.
So in a week I have gone from knowing nothing and not being interested in Flickr, to starting my own account and looking to join a Flickr group to do with Project 365, to meet other photographers doing the same thing. A pretty sharp turn around!
Mandy
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Project 365
February 20, 2008
Could you take a photo a day for a whole year?
I have recently read on Photojojo about this Project 365 - take a photo a day for a year. It was originally started by Taylor McKnight back in 2004 and he has recently done it for a second time. Photojojo are encouraging everyone to have a go and see how it changes you as a person and as a photographer.
It sounds really interesting, the thought of taking a photo a day for a year is a big commitment, and a bit of a challenge to think of something to take every day. But I imagine it would be very interesting, and at the end of the year I would have a huge album of photographs to look back at.
And taking a photo a day for a year can only improve my photography skills surely, or else completely put me off photography for life! Either way it will be fun finding out.
I am definitely going to do it and I am looking forward to the challenge. I haven’t decided yet whether to post the photos here or to use Flickr and share them there (I don’t know anything about Flickr - yet), but I will be waiting until the beginning of next month to start the project just to keep things nice and tidy, and give myself time to prepare!
Why don’t you too take up the challenge and start your own project…
Mandy
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Image of the Week #9
February 18, 2008
This week in image of the week:
I seem to get onto to a topic and then get stuck on it! I have another gate this week, but a very different one from last week.
This is an old Church gate, actually one of the gates to get into Birkenhead Priory one of the oldest buildings on the Wirral.
I just liked the way that the iron gate is rusting with the stone pillar propping it up at the end. It adds depth to the gate and makes it more interesting, aging it.
The more photographs I take the more I can see my own style or preference for different types of photography emerging. With a definite lean towards industrial and architectural subjects, that I think are fascinating and have wonderful patterns and texture to them.
Mandy
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My Digital Camera ISO Experiment
February 15, 2008
Following on from Wednesdays post about digital camera ISO I thought it would be good to stop talking about it and give it a go.
So I did, but seeing as I didn’t have any low light shooting opportunities coming up I decided to use my mouse as a substitute.
The photograph on the top is taken using the 100 ISO setting on my camera and the photograph on the bottom is taken using the 200 ISO setting on my camera. And these are the only two options I have for ISO besides the auto setting where the camera will automatically decide which is the best between the two.
Results…
I took the shots using a mini desktop tripod and no flash. Which really gave the camera a good workout because it was really low light!
There isn’t a huge difference between the two photographs but there is some, and taking into account that I don’t have much ISO range on my camera anyway, I think it is quite a good result. What I wanted to achieve was to see the difference (if any) between the ISO settings on my camera. They show that using a camera’s ISO settings in low light with no flash is a realistic option and one I will experiment with further.
It will be great for when flash photography isn’t allowed, like concert or school performances. And I can see that there will be slightly different effects with each settings depending on what I want to do with the photograph. Looks like fun!
Mandy
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What is Digital Camera ISO?
February 13, 2008
Back in the old days when I had a film camera, ISO was to do with the film and it’s speed. I generally used ISO 100, 200 and 400, for bright conditions, cloudy conditions and all round conditions respectively.
It’s a little different with digital camera ISO
What is digital camera ISO?
Digital ISO gives an indication of the sensitivity of the camera’s image sensor (what would be a comparison to film).
And can be adjusted depending on how much light is entering the camera. Which sounds a little like EV compensation to me, but it isn’t!
The lower the camera’s ISO the better the image quality of the photographs.
The higher the ISO setting the more chance there is of the image having digital noise (depending on your image sensor).
So what is noise?
Briefly it occurs when the ISO has been set high and therefore the image sensor is very sensitive to the amount of light coming into the camera, but also sensitive to anything else as well. And that results in noise or ‘dots’ appearing in the image.
The size of the image sensor in your camera is directly related to it’s ISO speed range and how large it can be. It can go as low as 50 or up into the 1,000’s, each camera will have it’s own range. Point and shoots only have small sensors so a high ISO will cause noise. Where as DSLR camera’s have large sensors so noise is not so much of a problem and higher ISO’s can be achieved.
Why would I use it?
If you are in a low light situation where you want to take a picture but can’t get the right exposure because you can’t use a flash, then using a higher ISO to get the right exposure for the picture is the best option, and will let you take the picture.
This can increase the risk of noise in the image. But I would take the photograph anyway because you can use post production software to remove most of the noise afterwards.
Digital cameras will have an auto ISO setting as well, and the camera will automatically select a higher ISO when light conditions are low, but you may want to adjust this.
My Camera
My camera has an auto ISO setting and a choice of 100 and 200 ISO settings. So the auto setting will decide between the two in low light if I don’t choose one myself.
Mandy
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Image of the Week #8
February 11, 2008
This week in image of the week:
This is one of the first photographs I took on my digital camera, using a mini tripod resting on a low wall and using 2x digital zoom.
What attracted me was the old wooden gate that seemed to be disappearing into the green foliage around it. I like gates and windows, anything that is a frame or being framed. They have that inviting quality whether they look like they are an entrance or an exit, they draw you in.
And I had to take full opportunity of the brilliant sunny day!
Mandy
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Camera Colour Features v’s Photoshop
February 6, 2008
My camera has an option to change the colour settings of the camera to full colour, black & white or sepia. So I went out to give them a try as I have’nt used them before. These three photographs are the result. It was a dull day and it was raining so I picked a subject that was full of colour to give greater contrast.
I used to sometimes shoot in black and white film on my old camera so it’s nice to be able to just flick between the two (colour and black and white) whenever I feel like it.
Although the detail is good I don’t think I would shoot a lot in sepia unless for a specific need.
But if shooting in black and white or sepia solely and not using colour for that subject then there is no turning back.
Once you get home you can’t add the colour again so it’s something to think about.
But you can always shoot in colour (as well) and then change it later in Photoshop, or is that cheating!
Photoshop
These next three photographs have been produced in Photoshop Elements
The full colour photograph is in RGB colour.
The black and white one has had the colour removed in the colour adjustment palette.
And the sepia one has been created in the colour adjustment palette by adding blue and red.
If you were comparing all six photographs together I don’t think you could guess which was which if you didn’t know beforehand. The first three look a little sharper but that could be the subject, to properly compare I should have used the same photo but I thought that would look a little monotonous.
So I think it’s down to a question of taste - camera or Photoshop (whichever version you prefer). I think I would choose photoshop because it gives a bit more flexibility, but that’s easy to say as I have used it a lot.
But one thing I will say is the Photoshop Elements
Mandy
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