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Even the most accomplished photographers who’ve moved into the digital age experienced an awkward first time, a dreaded beginner’s learning curve. You don’t have to face your digital future with fear and dread! Here are seven quick tips to make your new photographic venture quite painless:

1. Start Simply

Consider an inexpensive digital that will let you practice techniques using basic and automatic settings, including auto-flash and video display. You can easily move up to more complex models as you become more comfortable with the technology.

2. Step Into the Light!

One common characteristic of digital cameras is a small built-in flash that struggles in what you’d usually consider adequate lighting for decent pictures. Always automatically ask for the maximum amount of available light anytime you’re shooting inside.

3. Get Up-Front and Personal

Getting closer to your subject helps shed extra light on the subject, improves contrast and definition, and self-edits those sometimes bizarre background elements that can ruin a photo.

4. Study the Background

Poles rising from a politician’s head … telephone wires seeming to extend out of your loved one’s ears … a bicycle protruding from the bride’s backside … the potential disasters of background “noise” are endless. Always check before you click!

5. Digitals Hate the Night

Just believe it. You’ll want to use a tripod if you do a lot of night shots. Even with a “night” setting, which most basic digital cameras have, you’re apt to get blurred photos as the camera races against itself to manage the dim light.

6. Move Around

There’s no better time to experiment with perspective, light and color than when you’re starting out. Move around your subject to test your camera angles, your perspectives and to know both opportunities and limitations your digital presents.

7. Watch the Sun and Shadows

Even using an automatic flash adjuster, shooting into the sun on a blazing summer’s day or giving in to your subject’s natural move to shade his eyes or face, will likely give your digital photograph either so much light that all contrast is obscured, or else a zebra-like quality that detracts from the subject itself. Practice moving up close, keeping the sun behind you, or choose lightly shaded areas in which to shoot human subjects outdoors.

Kate Sheridan is a Michigan freelance writer, photographer and homesteader whose writings on the fun and foibles of country living may be found at http://www.gardenandhearth.com/RuralLiving.htm.

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Whenever you resize or edit a digital image, you should consider sharpening your image as a final step. If you sharpen first, and then edit your image further, you are likely to exaggerate the “artifacts” created as part of the sharepening process. Make sure you save your edited image with a different file name, or in a different folder than the original, in case better sharpening algorthims come along in the next few years - I burn my Original images to CD and also store them locally in an “Original Photos” folder. I place the edited versions in a “Photo Editing” folder.

Unsharp Mask
There are many techniques for sharpening a digital image, each with pros and cons. The following steps and ideas for using Unsharp Mask apply to Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Elements.

Radius: In general, if you have a low resolution image (fewer dpis) then you need a lower Radius - try setting it to 0.3; if you are working on a high resolution image, then you need a higher Radius. To avoid creating coloured halos around edges of things in your image, reduce your Radius. If you make the Radius too high, you may lose detail in light areas.

Threshold: For “busy” images, set this value to 0. As soon as you have large areas of a similar colour (e.g. blue sky), you should increase this setting to reduce introduction of noise in otherwise smooth areas.

Amount: This value will typically depend on the two settings discussed above. To reduce the constrast introduced by sharpening, try setting this value to its maximum (500%) and then find the smallest Radius at which sharpening is adequate (e.g. start at 0.1 and increase slowly). Be sure you view your image at 100% its actual size.

For more photography articles, please visit Jennifer Clarkson’s website at http://www.jclarksonphotography.com. To learn more about the books in her eSeries on Digital Photography, or to promote sales, please visit the following sites:

Choosing your camera and accessories

Getting the Most out of your Camera’s Basic Settings

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Well we used to all go out and shoot images on our film cameras, run the film to the corner store or kiosk to get it developed and then once the prints were hand we tended to stick them away without much more than a few minutes notice. Those days are no more as digital photography has grabbed hold of the consumer marketplace. Now we have tons of images in our cameras, on our hard disks and the options of what to do with them are growing and growing every year.

Digital photography has now found its way into more than half of the homes in America. However most people still order out to get their images printed. Maybe it is not the corner film kiosk of the old days but there is still a very strong market for image printing. Nowadays you can take your images to Costco, the nearby photo store where they might have a digital printing kiosk in the store, or you can upload them to the various internet sites devoted to printing your images such as Shutterfly, Ofoto, and Snapfish to name a few.

Since the year 2000 the number of images converted into conventional prints has been steadily sliding down and could go 5% further this year. However due to the interesting rise of alternative ways to print your images the industry predicts that revenues will rise overall this year. Now why would that be?

Well it turns out that there are some very lucrative ways for companies to make money in the digital age including printing reproductions from digital photographs onto posters, stamps, postcards, T-shirts, chairs, wallpaper, and bronze plaques. Even ceramic tile is being used as a medium for digital printing as designers are using images to decorate them for spas, restaurants, and fireplace mantels.

We have now entered the era of functional art versus just decorative art. Now you can touch it and get a more personal feeling from your digital photography. In addition you can put these digital images on wood, stone, plastic, and metal as well as conventional paper of every type. Either through software on your own computer or through vendors consumers can print their images on birthday cards, calendars, and storytelling photo books that actually get used instead of being tucked away in a drawer like most of our albums of old.

The camera makers have done a fine job of selling digital cameras to the population, but now that they are so infused to the marketplace it will take some creativity to for them to make money off of these sales going forward beyond just getting us to upgrade our digital cameras every year or two.

That will require some new methods for organizing digital photos, new methods of displaying images (perhaps along the lines of the wireless digital display frames that have shown some promise of late) and the ability to print our own custom books using our own digital photographs. That is something that would stay out on display in my home!

Did you know that in the past ten years digital cameras have managed to be sold into over half the homes in the US? The prediction is that number could go as high as seventy per cent by the yearn 2009. Old line film companies like Kodak have had to scramble to move into the digital camera game, with a fair amount of success as they applied old film lessons to their line of digital cameras such as consumer simplicity first, but even they are still leaning on the sales of inks used to print images on computers to hold the profit line.

They have over 75,000 in store kiosks installed throughout the country and are planning for new ones that can handle 900 prints per hour! Retail is strong for getting your digital prints as the big stores such as Wal-Mart and Costco battle it out for your business and in the on line market the field has been whittled down to the strongest. That means that the price per print that was once in the high twenties has now dropped to around 17 cents per print on line and 21 cents per print in store.

So where do you go for these art versions of your digital images? Be prepared to spend more for the experience but get a nice artistic version of your digital photography. Some of the spots to check out are Zazzle.com, Photopetgifts.com, and Matthewsbronze.com. For custom digital photo books you should check out Shutterfly. Imagine the look on your kids face when you give them storybook and it features images of them in the story!

Great Digital Cameras for your digital fix - great-digital-cameras.com

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