Remember what I said a few days ago about fitness? “Just show up”? Today is such a day with this blog for me. I’m tired, I have a headache and I would rather not write. But I’ve shown up, with the idea that a small, helpful blog post is better than nothing. So, here goes. I’m gonna talk about taking better pictures.
When you’re a beginner learning a new skill, it’s okay to try to recreate the Masters’ works as practice (in private). With that in mind, when I was learning to use external flashes with the Fuji X100S I gave myself the task of recreating David Hobby‘s iconic profile picture. I asked David for his permission to blog about it and he graciously granted it. There are serious ethical issues involved with publishing this sort of practice work. To jump directly to that discussion, go here.
I attended the Glendale Heights SummerFest fireworks display last night. As the fireworks started I tried to take a video of them on my iPhone. I must have placed my finger in front of the lens because the focus locked on a short distance (as opposed to the infinity needed in such situations). The resulting bokeh was unexpected but very beautiful.
In a previous blog post we learned what a histogram is. In today’s post we’ll see how to use histograms to help take properly-exposed photographs. If you haven’t read the previous post, or are not familiar with histograms, I would recommend you read that post before continuing with this one.
I’m not a professional photographer. I’m merely an student of the art and science of photography. Sometimes I think of submitting my pictures to contests or for use by others - not for the money, but for the personal satisfaction. Now after reading this post by Bob Krist, I’ll make sure to pay attention to photographers’ rights when I submit my pictures anywhere. I will also refuse to buy any product from Frommer’s Travel Guides, and urge you to do the same.
I recently discovered David duChemin’s blog. I’d like to share a couple of his posts with you. In ‘Just?’ he offers advice to people who consider themselves ‘just an amateur photographer.’ In his follow-up piece ‘Confessions of a So-Called PRO’ he serves up an ‘anti-pep-talk’ that demonstrates that professional photographers aren’t necessarily that different from amateurs like you and me.
In a previous article we looked at how lenses work. We learned about the focal length. Today we’ll focus on camera lenses and what the term f-stop means.
The term f-stop is a ratio. It has no dimensions. You don’t measure an f-stop in meters, inches, kilograms or even degrees Fahrenheit. An f-stop is the ratio of two distances. It’s the ratio of the focal length of a lens to its diameter. In figure 1, the f-stop is f/d _where _f is the focal length and _d _is the diameter.
I’m interested in tinkering with High Dynamic Range photography, but before I get Photomatix, the software that’s recommended most often, I thought I’d try out a technique that’s a very crude approximation of HDR. It involves taking one image that’s underexposed, and one that’s overexposed, and merging them in Photoshop. The technique is described in this article at luminous-landscape.com. Essentially, you put the underexposed image in a layer above the overexposed one. Create a layer mask on the darker layer, and copy the brighter image to the layer mask. Apply a Gaussian blur to the layer mask, and you have your blended image.