Filed under: Tips and Tricks, Flickr, Websites
A little tool for all you flickr lovers a Profile Widget banner generator. Throw in which ever photos you wish to display - such as most recent, most interesting, random recent, and random interesting, select if you want a photo count included and bobs your badger as we say around here. The banner will automatically update itself every hour.
It shows a selection of ten of your photos and some statistics about your Flickr usage. And that’s about it to produce a rather nice looking banner that comes in one size - 500 x 100. What I couldn’t get it to do though was display a banner without the stats. Code is provided to place the banner on your website. [The image above is just a jpeg and doesn’t use the generated code.]
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Original post by Andrew Barrow
Filed under: Tips and Tricks, Websites
This came into my inbox today, and I couldn’t believe we hadn’t posted it. In fact, I initially brushed it off because I was certain we had. But we haven’t, so thanks to T for reminding me! If you haven’t seen it yet–it’s been up for a while–Darren Rowse’s Digital Photography School has a great article on shooting, er, photographing, pets. One of the things I really like about Darren is that he breaks it down into ten simple rules of thumb. The most important ones in my opinion are “catch them unawares,” “get in close,” and “start with your pet’s personality.” Great pet portraits start with those things. Figure out how to build a composistion out of them, and you’ll be on your way.
One other important thing to think about is lighting. Darren recommends against flash except for dark-furred critters because animals get such ghastly red- (or green-, or yellow-) eye. I’d like to modify that to this: try not to use direct flash as your primary light source. Getting your animal to arrange itself in natural light the way you want may be a futile effort. Be prepared to bounce or fill to get the light you want where you want it.
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Original post by Jay Savage
Filed under: How-to’s, Tips and Tricks
With the 4th of July (and Bastille Day, and a whole host of other regional excuses to set off large explosions in the Midsummer sky) in the offing, John Watson has a short tutorial on shooting fireworks. there are thousands of tutorials on this subject out there, but he boils it down to the essentials: use a reasonably slow ISO setting (100-200); don’t forget the tripod; exposure = length of trail; aperture = brightness of trail.
Working out the timing so that the starburst is centered wherever you’ve aimed the tripod is left as an exercise for the reader.
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Original post by Jay Savage
Filed under: Tips and Tricks, Inspiration
The last few days I have been in Italy - touring vineyards north of Venice, tasting fresh and creamy Prosecco, eating a selection of deliciously good food and being enraptured by the stunning countryside. The highlight of the trip was a helicopter ride over the vineyards put on by one of the top producers of the Prosecco region Bisol.
Plenty of exclusive photographic opportunities you would have thought; and you wouldn’t be wrong. Here are a few tips though. Firstly make sure you have a spare Compact Flash card so half way through the flight you don’t run out of space. Secondly check the white balance is set for the conditions and don’t assume the setting you have is overridden by the auto settings of the camera. Helicopters are noisy beasts and you have to have headphones clasped around your noggin to hear directions and commentary. This means of course that you can’t hear the click of the camera or the whirl of the auto focus.
You are excited of course and clicking away like some possessed mad man (well I might never have another go at this so make the most of it!) and forget all these simple and obvious tips.. and end up deleting half the shots you took as they are blurred or suffer from burn out. Half the pictures you managed to take before the ‘card full’ message flashes on the screen….
Luckily many I did take turned out fine.
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Original post by Andrew Barrow
