Photography Articles
Resize Your Images Online
In this day and age a lot more people are using digital cameras to take photos. It is certainly a lot more convenient and cheaper than the traditional film camera.
Whenever you go to buy a digital camera, the sales assistant will probably tell you that you need a camera with a lot of megapixels to take the best photos – 6 megapixels and above are now common place for consumer level cameras. Whilst it is true to some extent, we are going to explore how you use the image files from your Digital Camera.
If you are taking your images primarily for printing or to get developed at your local photo lab, then you need to ensure that your camera is configured to take the pictures at its maximum resolution and quality. At maximum quality the file size will increase. Typically a 4 megapixel image will be around 1.4 Meg in size. But let’s face it, the cost of flash cards has decreased in recent times and the lack of space on your memory card shouldn’t be a consideration for not taking the highest quality images your camera is capable of.
It Pays to Shop Around
When I bought my first Digital SLR about 2 years ago Compact Flash cards were, expensive, small and slow. These days it is common place to have 4 - 8 Gig cards.
But be aware, not all cards are created equally. Don't make the mistake of buying on price alone. Make sure you go with a reputable brand. My personal choice at the moment is the Sandisk Extreme III card. It represents both good value for money and performance at 133x speed (the 266x extreme IV is also becoming very cost effective). The Sandisk extreme series of cards are designed for extreme environmental conditions with the professional photographer in mind.
Lightroom EXIF Data and Gallery 2
When it comes to streamlining your workflow there are lots of little things that you can do to help your overall process. The EXIF data contained in your image files if used wisely can certainly be a great little time saver.
Gallery 2, like a lot of other image galleries can read your EXIF/IPTC data and put it to good use. This will make the process of uploading multiple images much quicker and easier by automatically applying: Titles, Descriptions and Keywords to your images without the need for any intervention afterwards. This is done from the Library module within Adobe Lightroom.
Monitor Calibration
Most people browsing the internet are either blissfully unaware that what they are seeing is not what it should be, or just accept the fact that the colours are not right. I guess is doesn't really matter which category you fall into as for most people this isn't really important anyway.
Where is does become important is when you get some photos printed either commercially, or at home and the result is not what you are expecting. This is particularly evident when trying to get skin tones right.
You can either muck around with the numerous different methods posted on the internet and try to calibrate your monitor visually. From my experience this won't prove to be very successful or you can start to look at a hardware device to do the calibration for you.
Controlling Depth Of Field With Aperture
Depth Of Field or DOF is the part of an image which is in focus. There are a number of different factors that influence the DOF of an image including, focal length, distance from subject and aperture. In this article we will explore aperture.
Aperture is an indication of the size of the opening in the lens on your camera and measured in f-stops or f-numbers. Essentially, aperture is the ratio of the diameter of the opening compared to the focal length of the lens:
- The smaller the f-number the larger the aperture. Resulting in a shallower DOF.
- The larger the f-number the smaller the aperture. Resulting in a larger DOF.
Changing the aperture will also have another affect on your images. By using a larger aperture unless you compensate by slowing down your shutter speed the resultant images will be underexposed or appear very dark. By comparison a small aperture will result in overexposure unless you increase the shutter speed.