Photography Blog

Looking for an online photography course that can teach you every possible aspects of photography and train you to capture images like a professional photographer? Then you need to check the Proud Photography Interactive Online Course. This is the most cost effective form of photography course that you can find online or other sources. Besides that the course is quite flexible and has been designed to meet the needs of people with varied needs.

Visit Proud Photography for more information.

The Proud Photography Interactive Online Course has been divided into 13 lessons for better understanding of photography and also learn the useful techniques and tips. The thirteen lessons of photography include:

– Introduction to Photography and General Terms – Digital World – Exposure Control: Shutter Speed – Exposure Control: Aperture – Composition – Advanced Flash Photography Resource – Black and White Photography – Travel Photography Part I – Travel Photography Part II – People – Portraits – People and Environment – Various Tricks and Techniques – Common Pitfalls

After completion of each lesson a test is conducted in which you are judged of your learning skills and also help you modify your flaws and shortcomings. There is no particular time period to finish the Proud Photography Interactive Online Course. One can complete it according to one’s pace and learning skills. Moreover the class lecturers assign homework, assignments and also urge the students to participate in quiz competitions. Such interactive sessions help you clear your doubts and gather more knowledge.

All the information provided in the Proud Photography Interactive Online Course is in-depth and comprehensively explained and written that makes it easy to understand even the end users of cameras. Designed for beginners as well as experienced photographers, this course can be one great choice for entering the world of photography with passion. And because of flexibility of the course it suits to everyone’s needs. After you complete the course you get the certification from Proud Photography too.

Want to capture the perfect portrait every time? Keep reading to learn some tips professionals use that you can adopt – even without a fancy camera or a studio of your own. Learn what you need to know about simple but effective lighting, flash photography, and more. You should also consider following a photography course online that would guide you step by step until you could take truly memorable portraits time and time again.

Good lighting is key to any successful portrait. With on-camera flash, you encounter problems that detract from a quality picture. For example, flash brightly illuminates your subject in an unnatural, flat light. It can also cast harsh shadows behind your subject – especially if they are positioned near a wall, or some other object. This effect is not attractive. Additionally, flash frequently reflects light from the pupils in the eyes, causing the dreaded red eye effect – something you definitely want to avoid.

Portraits are actually much more interesting if there is some shadow on the portrait, but not harsh background shadows. It is good to work with directional lighting and then use a reflector or some fill lighting to lighten up features that might otherwise fall into deep shadows. You don’t want to eliminate the shadows altogether, though. That can make for a portrait that lacks dimension.

Where possible, try ambient light, such as that through a large window, or outdoor light instead. If using supplemental lighting, place a bright, diffused light directly behind where you are standing with the camera. This illuminates the subject’s face effectively. You can then add some softer light to one side of the subject to fill in some of the shadows on one side and emphasise the subtle shadows on the other. You could also “bounce” some light from a reflector onto the side of the face, instead of using direct light, so it is less intense.

This set-up creates a well-lit portrait – then you can start experimenting with adjusting the lights to see the effect you can achieve. If the light behind you is very bright, you may need to slightly reduce the exposure on your camera to compensate so the bright light does not overexpose the subject. A decent photography course online would explain in detail exactly how to create these desired lighting effects.

Another approach to try is to place the bright light to one side of the subject and then to place your fill light or a reflector on the opposite side. Your fill or reflected light should always be less intense than the main light. This will show the curves on the face and body more effectively. If you use extra lighting, take note of how it affects your digital image. You may need to adjust the white balance on your camera or set your camera for the kind of lights you are using to avoid yellow or blue colour casts on your photos. You can avoid this if you use natural outdoor light.

For a great outdoor portrait, an overcast but bright, cloudy day works well. The clouds diffuse the sun so the light isn’t too strong, yet there is plenty of light to work with. Alternatively, you can photograph in an evenly shaded area. This will also eliminate hot spots or over-exposed highlights on the face in your portrait. Make sure you don’t have any light filtering in between leaves and branches, though, as that can look odd when it shows up in your pictures. Avoid using the flash outdoors if you can help it, too.

One great way to add dimension to your portraits and flatter almost every face and body type is to turn the subject’s body away from the light about 90 degrees. In other words, have the subject face the light and then turn their body one-quarter turn. This gives shape to the body as the light wraps around it. Now turn the subject’s face so it is facing the light. This illuminates the face, which is the focal point of your image. It gives your subject somewhat of a glow, and should result in some catch lights in their eyes, which can really bring a portrait to life!

Using lighting effects successfully can be a little daunting at first, but practice makes perfect – experimentation is key. By following a reliable photography course online you could easily master these, and more, lighting techniques, learning when and how to apply each for optimum results.

Whether you are planning to build an online product catalog or a printed version including rich digital photos will enhance it and will increase potential sales. When building a catalog photos are a powerful tool that you must use. Here are a few tips for taking digital photos that will bring justice to your products and will help increasing sales.Product catalogs that do not include photos are boring. For example imagine that you are looking to buy a new digital photo printer. You just found a new online catalog or got a catalog via regular mail. The catalog has plenty of digital photo printers and also a lot of information about them such specifications, capabilities descriptions and more but it does not have any photos of the printer. You are most likely going to dump that catalog and search for the printer in another place.This behavior is common to most consumers especially in this era of immediate gratification and impatience. Consumers do not want to spend time reading and figuring out what the product can do. They want to see a photo and get a short snippet of what the main features of the product are and what the price is.Just taking photos and adding them to your catalog is not enough. Good photos can add a lot to a product image but at the same time bad photos can really damage that image. Here are some tips and concepts that can help taking good photos that in turn help selling products online:Variation: Take more than one photo. Show the product from many angles: zoomed in and zoomed out and in different positions for example if the product is a clamshell-phone you should show it both in the opened and closed positions.Quality: The photo quality must be as high as possible. Don’t confuse quality with file size or resolution we refer here to photographic quality: Follow the rules of good photography, use a tripod when long exposure is needed make sure the photo is not overexposed or underexposed and that it is not blurry. Background: It is very important to shoot with the appropriate background. Usually you would stage a background that is in contrast with the product and that has no details or distracting objects that can catch the viewer’s attention. Make sure that the background is matte color and that it does not reflect light. For example when taking a photo of a black digital photo printer use a white or light gray background.Show details: Emphasize the product details. Every product has unique features or important details that you would like to draw the viewer’s attention to. The best way to do that is to take close-up photos of those details. You are not limited to physical details for example when selling an digital photo printer that has long battery life take a close-up photo of the digital photo printer’s LCD screen displaying how much battery is left. Such a photo conveys credibility and is much more powerful than the product battery life specifications text.Support the product description: Take photos that support the textual description of the product. For example if the text claims that the digital photo printer comes in three colors: black, silver and red show three photos of the printer in those colors. Convey physical attributes: If your product has unique physical attributes that you would like to emphasize take photos that convey them. For example if the product size is important use a known size object in order to help the viewer visualize the size take a photo of the digital photo printer next to a quarter coin to show how small the printer is. It is much easier for viewers to visualize and understand measurements if they are put in reference with objects they know very well. This is much more powerful than specifying inches and ounces in a textual specification.Keep file sizes small: This is relevant for online catalog only. Keep the photo file size small. When viewing a photo on a computer screen low resolution photos are more than enough. In most cases a VGA (640X480) picture is all that is needed and such a photo file size can be 50Kbytes or less. It is important to keep this in mind and not be tempted to put high resolution big photos files. Such big files load slowly on the viewer’s computer and in most cases the viewer will get frustrated from the slow response and would just skip to the next site.

Most people tend not to think about the details of their online photo sharing experience. As long as their photos get from their computers to their online photo album, they could care less about the processes that got it there. The way that digital cameras designed, this really isn’t a problem, as most cameras and photo editing software support this approach. However, there’s a lot more that goes into online photo sharing than is obvious on the surface.
Those who are interested in the fundamentals of digital photography may be curious about different file formats. Many have heard or seen the terms for picture file extensions, such as .jpg (or JPEG), .gif, .tif, and .png. What do all these different three letter extensions mean?
JPEGs
The term JPEG actually stands for “Joint Photographic Experts Group” – the group that initially created the standard back in 1992. Since then, the JPEG has become the most commonly found picture file type on the Internet. This is primarily because JPEGs offer a tremendous amount of flexibility in terms of its compression and picture quality. That is, its possible to significantly reduce the storage size of a JPEG file by also reducing the quality. Back when the Internet was first starting out, downloading mutli-megabyte picture files just wasn’t practical. JPEGs could maintain a reasonable image quality while making the file size of the image much smaller.
JPEGs have remained an Internet standard thanks to this quality. People are able to make images much easier to transfer between computers without losing a significant amount of picture quality. The drawback to JPEGs is that it is a “lossy” format – this means that each time a picture is edited and resaved in the JPEG format, it loses a degree of quality.
TIFFs
TIFF stands for Tagged Image File Format. TIFF files are versatile and high quality, supporting up to 48-bit color depth (compared to 8-bit for GIFs and 24-bit for JPEGs). The downsides of this format are two-fold. For one, TIFF files have a wide variance and an image viewer that can view one type of TIFF file can’t necessarily view anther. Secondly, TIFF files are not widely supported by web browsers, making them impractical for online photo sharing.
GIFs and PNGs
GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format. Like the JPEG, GIF files are also commonly found all around the Internet. GIF files are comparatively limited in their color palette – having only 256 colors to work with. This make GIFs a good choice for relatively simple pictures without a lot of color differences, such as cartoons and simple logos. While it a lossless format that doesn’t degrade in quality, it’s pretty rare that you’ll see a photograph in a GIF format in the modern age, since most cameras are able to take pictures with significantly more color depth.
PNGs, or Portable Network Graphics files, are the successor to GIFs. Unlike GIFs, they support truecolor, a 16-million color palette. PNGs are lossless, making them great for editing photos. Most web browsers support PNGs, but they can still be quite large. In many cases, the best choice is to edit a file in PNG format, then convert to JPEG for distribution.

Once you have discovered the many uses of creating photo stories such as sharing your adventures with family and friends, creating an online journal or creating a story to highlight your qualifications in order to boost your college application or resume you will want to use free photo editing software to create your stories. Finding free photo editing software online to create your stories is easy because there are many sites and programs to choose from. You will want to choose the best free photo editing software for the type of stories you want to create, however. You can even create a free online photo album.
You should look for free photo editing software that allows your stories as much flexibility as possible. You should be able to resize your photos, create backgrounds from a variety of designs and colors and place the text where you would like it to go. You also want the software to allow you to edit your photos to reduce redeye and eliminate flaws in the photo. The ability to crop your photos is also helpful so that the image is focused on the subject and displayed to its fullest potential. In fact, your free photo editing software that you use for creating your photo stories should be able to do anything you can do with regular photo editing software PLUS the capability to add your text in a creative fashion.
Even the best professional photographers regularly use photo editing software, so budding photo storytellers should not feel that their photos are second-rate just because they need some editing with free photo editing software to create stories that are compelling. Editing is just a way of taking a good photo and making it great so free photo editing takes your stories to the next level. You want your viewers to focus on the subject of the photo and be drawn into your story so removing imperfections and cropping unnecessary scenery can help them zero in on the important elements of your photo story.
Finding the best photo editing program online for your stories will ensure that your creativity will not have limits. You want your photo story to translate from your mind onto the computer screen just the way you see it and the right editing program will help you do just that. In fact, all the editing tools and options that are available may just make the photo story you develop better than you could’ve imagined.
Creating photo stories is a great hobby that has so many possible uses such as: creating a family history, recording a vacation, journaling your thoughts and feelings or just keeping in touch with friend and family. Free photo editing for your stories makes this fun hobby even better in these difficult economic times. With a couple of clicks of your mouse you can be on your way to creating memories that will last a lifetime with free photo editing and the stories of your adventures with your family and friends. What could be better than that?