Photography Blog

Cori Russell asked:




As one of the most important decisions you will make concerning the big day, planning your wedding photography should be considered with care. Follow these four steps to ensure your wedding pictures capture these priceless wedding day memories.

1) Select Your Photography Style

How do you envision your wedding photographs? Wedding Photographers generally fall into three stylistic categories: traditional, photojournalist, or a combination of both. Traditional photographers are practiced in obtaining great portraits and posed shots. For more candid shots that document the day’s emotions and all the behind-the-scenes action, you may lean towards the photojournalistic style of photography (a hot trend for today’s weddings). For brides who simply cannot decide, seek a wedding photographer who can offer the perfect mix.

2) Consider the Cost

This really is one area in which you should avoid cutting corners, as your photographs will be one of the few keepsakes you can actually take from your wedding. Expect to allocate at least $1000 to your wedding photography budget (the bottom line in metro areas will be higher). If budget is a concern, consider ordering the most basic package, but avoid hiring an inexperienced photographer to save money.

3) Hire your Wedding Photographer

Do your research, and compile a list of potentials and commence the “meet and greet.” When meeting with potential photographers, be sure to review his or her work and remember to consider the importance of personality. Your photographer will capture some of the best shots behind the scenes, so you must feel comfortable in working with this person and inviting them backstage. Trust your instinct: if you find anything disagreeable about working with this person, keep looking. And don’t forget to get everything in writing.

4) Plan the Wedding Pictures

Well before your wedding day, make sure you have considered the must-have photography shots and their execution. You should discuss these details with your photographer so that he or she will be familiar with the site location, the VIPs of the wedding (attendants, parents etc.), and the best and most un-obtrusive way to get these important shots.

Consider every aspect of your wedding day and how you would like it captured. From the pre-ceremony preparation, to your walk down the aisle, to your “I Dos,” to your first dance and finally to your departure, make sure to discuss the perfect shots for each special moment. Throughout the planning process, be in the lookout out for images that catch your eye, and consider bringing clips to your photographer. Browse this gallery of creative wedding pictures for inspiration.

Get even more wedding photography tips in this complete wedding photography guide.

Alex Don asked:


Great photos come with experience, but there are a few tips and tricks you can learn from the experience of others to help you improve your photographing experience. Listed below are eleven of them:

1. Use the tripod and self-timer of your digital camera. These two things will give you better chances to take sharper and clearer photos.

2. Keep the background tidy and clean. Before taking the photo, remove all things that you don’t want to include in it from the area. This will also help you focus on the subject without having your eyes distracted by the surroundings.

3. Place the camera as close as you can. Look into the screen of the camera and make sure that the things you want in the photo almost fill it. Using the macro function can really help. Look into the manufacturer’s manual to see how to use it and which distances are appropriate.

4. Make sure that the subject of the photo is in focus. A de-focused picture is unpleasant to look at and almost impossible to improve afterwards. If your photo is not focused, take a new one.

5. Stay away from dark shadows. Indirect sunlight and flash are much better for photographing than artificial or direct sunlight.

6. Take some time to think about what you want to photograph before setting up the camera equipment.

7. Improve the final result by rotating, cropping, resizing, sharpening and compressing if necessary. However, take your photo in such a way as to reduce the amount of necessary editing to a minimum. For example, removing unwanted objects from the picture is not something you should need to do.

8. Read the manufacturer’s manual to get to know all the features your camera has and be able to use them. Some of the most important things to learn about the camera before starting to use it are the self-timer, how to take pictures using the macro and manual focus settings, how to set the white balance and exposure levels, how to zoom in and out from the subject you want to photograph and how to adjust the resolution for your photos.

9. Don’t be shy to try experimenting. Try to put the techniques you read about into practice to see for yourself how they work. Change the angle of the photo, rotate the object you are focusing on, use different lighting, try out various background colors and exposure levels. You may be surprised of how much a certain technique can improve your photo.

10. Set your expectations right. You shouldn’t expect to get the perfect photo from the first shot. This rarely happens. Two or three shots are not enough either, you generally need at least five before deciding you couldn’t have done it any better.

11. If you are using the camera’s built-in flash for craft and jewelry photography, you should also use the power cord which comes along with the camera to generate as much light as possible out of the flash unit for each photo. As you are using the camera, even if you don’t use flash, the batteries will discharge and the output from the flash unit will also decrease.

If you are using all of these tips you should see an instant improvement in your photographing. You may have them printed if you want and refer to them any time you are taking a new photo.

Ken Colby asked:




When you see the weatherman standing in front of a weather map many of you know that he is really standing in front of a green screen. The image is inspected by software that detects the green in the image and replaces it with the weather map. This is known as ChromaKey or Green Screen technology.

 

With the dramatic increase in digital cameras, green screen photography is one of the most rapidly growing effects for today’s photographer.  This technology can let you place a person in any setting you would like; even a San Diego family can pretend to be on a ski vacation.

 

Why use Green Screen Software?

You can have fun!

 

You will be hooked the first time your child smiles when they see a picture of themselves in a field of butterflies or on the moon. Green Screen Software frees your creativity in a way that no other photographic process does. You can place people or things anywhere in the world. Want to be a princess in a castle? No problem. Want your family at the beach or in the woods or at some event? It is easy. Your child’s first communion photo can have a stained glass angel behind it or your daughter’s wedding portrait can be in front of the bridge at Magnolia Gardens in South Carolina.

You can make money!

 

With the advent of high-quality digital cameras, it is easy for anyone to take great photos! Professional photographers today need to offer something more. Green Screen Wizard provides them a way to stand out from the rest of the pack. Headshots, Model Portfolios, Bridal Portraits, Family Portraits and even Pet Portraits are all enhanced with ChromaKey effects. Old time photos and fantasy photos are a natural for Green Screen techniques.

Photography puts more demands on Green Screen Software

With video the subject is moving and many small errors go unnoticed. The very high resolution of modern digital photography makes even the tiniest flaw noticeable. It sounds simple, “Just find the green and replace it” but the reality is that the green backgrounds are not perfect and your hair and other transparent objects distort the green. Remove too much green and you th will cut off hair. If you do not remove enough green you have green fringes showing in the image. The correct answer is to remove the correct amount of green and then change the

 

What do I need to do Green Screen Photography?

First you need a green screen and a subject.

 

Then you need to get that image into the computer and use Green Screen Software like Green Screen Wizard. Use the scale feature to make sure only the subject and green are showing. Then pick any background you like. If you do not like that background perhaps it would be more fun to be at the beach. Just select a new background.

 

Programs like Green Screen Wizard offer a lot of adjustments to color, scaling and Green Screen Removal settings. Unlike other programs,Green Screen Wizard offers a set of easy options to make the green screen process effortless.

There are other effects that you can do with Green Screen technology. Not only can you add a background to your image, you can add a foreground as well. This can be used to make people seam like they are inserted in the background. It also makes for realistic magazine covers.

Another fun thing you can do with Green Screen Photography is to create silhouettes.

 

 

To learn more about Green Screen Photography please visit

http://www.greenscreenwizard.com

 

Ken Colby

Author of Green Screen Wizard

 

 

 

 

Muna wa Wanjiru asked:




There is a saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. This is very true but to get this thousand word picture you need really high quality cameras or digital cameras. While many of us take for granted the presence of digital cameras and the many marvelous things that they can do we have forgotten the history of digital photography.

This history of digital photography is not that long but the events that took place have changed the way that we take our photographs.

In 1969 October 17th George Smith and Willard Boyle invented the charge coupled device or the CCD as we know it. This device was originally made for use in computers as a semi-conductor memory. These inventors of the CCD were also thinking about ways to incorporate their device into video phones.

With all of their plans and sketches finalized Smith and Boyle finally built the CCD into the world’s first CCD camera. This changed the history of digital photography altogether.

The camera that was built by them was a solid state video camera. During 1975 the CCD camera with its image sharp pictures was shown on television for the first time. The image that was shown was clear enough to be seen by the viewers of television.

In the history of digital photography the first prototype of the digital camera was created by Sony in1981. This digital camera was called Mavica which meant Magnetic Video Camera. The Sony Mavica was essentially a video camera that was used to capture video freeze-frames.

In 1986 Kodak scientists invented the first megapixel senor. This senor was capable of recording 1.4 million pixels. These were capable of producing a 5 x 7 inch digital photo quality print. In 1987 Kodak released 7 products that had the ability to manipulate digital images.

In 1991 Kodak in partnership with Nikon, released the Nikon F-3 camera. This camera was equipped with a 1.3 megapixel sensor by Kodak. This shows how the history of digital photography merged scientific know-how to produce a digital camera.

At about this same time Logitech produced and released their Dycam model with black and white images. Apple produced a digital camera that could transfer images to the computer from the camera.

This is the short version of the history of digital photography. Today 30 years after the first digital camera was produced and released digital photography has changed our lives. The next time that you buy a digital camera you might want to see what other information you can find out about the history of digital photography.

Ava Land asked:




Photographer Alfred Cheney Johnston was discovered by Flo Ziegfeld of the famed Ziegfeld Follies. Flo was a master of publicity and when he saw what “Cheney” was capable of creating with a large studio camera and glass plate negatives, Ziegfeld hired the young photographer on the spot. Cheney was shrewd beyond his years thanks to being mentored by family friend and famous illustrator Charles Dana Gibson who became famous for the Gibson Girl drawings. Gibson advised Cheney to make sure every photograph of his had the name, Alfred Cheney Johnston, clearly stamped on it. Thanks to that bit of advice Cheney would become world reknown for his amazingly beautiful photographs of the gorgeous stars of the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway.

Cheney, though married since his art school days promoted himself in the Manhatten night club scene as a bachelor man about town. There is some evidence to suggest that this was an agreed upon arrangement between he and his wife Doris possibly to enhance his artistic career. They lived seperately. By day Cheney would photograph some of the most beautiful and alluring women in Manhatten. And in the evenings he attended a myriad of parties or stood backstage watching the amazing Follies production while cheering the Follies Girls on during their musical or dance numbers.

Alfred Cheney Johnston shot thousands of photographs in his life time. He was in great demand both by Flo Ziegfeld, the denizons of high society in New York City and the Hollywood Studios until the stock market crashed. It wiped out Flo Ziegfeld who’d always spent money like it was water. The Follies were forced to close down. Cheney’s steady and most lucrative job abruptly ended.

Cheney and his wife eventually bought a farm on the edge of Oxford in rural CT. The barn was converted into a photography studio. There he dabbled in giving photography lessons. On a couple occasions Johnston attempted opening studios in the surrounding towns but nothing much came of them. Alfred Cheney Johnston’s star slowly faded over the years.

Sensing a need late in life to have his work live on after him, Johnston contacted the Museum of Modern Art where Edward Stiechen was the curator of the Photography Department to offer the museum a collection of his famous images. Stiechen turned him down.

Ultimately it may have been Stiechen and Stieglitz who delivered the greatest blow to Alfred Cheney Johnston’s photographic legacy. Did they deem him too commercial? If so, how unfair, for Stiechen did commercial photography throughout his career.

It appears that Alfred Cheney Johnston simply lacked the business sense to steer his photography career successfully. At the point that Johnston lost Flo Ziegfeld as his greatest and wealthiest client, his career began to slowly and systematically unravel. Johnston who was trained in the classic fine art traditions of Europe may have been overwhelmingly ruled his artist’s soul which possessed little interest in the business side of his career as a photographer.

Thanks to the internet however Alfred Cheney Johnston’s photography is being re-discovered by photographers and collectors worldwide. The beauty of his work and the depth of his creativity can no longer be denied.