Amateur's digital photography

The pride...

2008-10-17T10:43:00.001+02:00

Who's photo is this?? Mine!

Los Angeles International Airport
http://www.schmap.com/losangeles/shopping_publictransport/p=346998/i=346998_14.jpg

A little late but here's POTW #3....

2008-08-25T08:13:00.003+03:00

Here's a beautiful post called 'lightning in sunset', from [daily dose of imagery],

http://wvs.topleftpixel.com/08/08/18/

Here's what it looks like:

and:

enjoy.

Photo - Shoo's plaything

2008-08-16T18:49:00.002+03:00

This post is dedicated to one of my cats, this time its Shoo. This photo i've shot yesterday, displays her playful mood as she plays with one of her toys.

Enjoy.

Photo of the Week #2 (POTW)

2008-08-09T00:46:00.003+03:00

A great one by Joseph Zymanski and its called Ocean Beach, San Francisco.

Take a look:

Really excellent emotion and composition, here's the original post.

My blog is back online.

2008-08-09T00:45:00.000+03:00

For some reason my blog suffered a technical issue that prevented it from being displayed. It is now fixed.

Great photo: grey cars and red shirts

2008-08-06T14:43:00.004+03:00

URL: grey cars and red shirts

A simply excellent photo, this is almost like something from the Matrix.

For some reason, one of my photos...

2008-08-05T08:20:00.001+03:00

appeared here. What can I say? strange are the ways of the internet :-).

Photograph of the Day: Darker by Chris Nixon

2008-08-03T19:45:00.003+03:00

Take a look at this nice perspective urban B&W shot:

Source: here

Update: Thanks to Chris Nixon pointing out that its not his photo, its 96dpi's one, and the real source is here.

Tutorial 2: Sharpening your photo

2008-08-03T19:35:00.004+03:00

Sharpening is a serious issue, there are a lot of things to be said about it. However, for now, we'll stick with the practical sides of it.

To sharpen your photo do the following:

Open photo in photoshop.
Select filters -> Sharpen -> Unsharpen Mask.
Values: Well it depends on how much sharpening would you like to achieve (yes, there is such thing as over sharpening and it can ruin your photo too!).

Amount: The amount of the filter to apply, the higher the more sharpened the image will be.

Radius: The filter is applied in a radial manner, therefore the larger the radius the bigger effect of the sharpening.

Threshold: Is the amount of differences between colors that control when this filter is applied, the higher value the less pronounced the effect will be.
Click the preview button to see the photo with and without the filter until you decide you like the outcome.

And voila! There you have a sharpened photo.

A great urban shot

2008-08-02T23:43:00.003+03:00

I encountered this photo on the [daily dose of imagery] photography blog. Check it out:

Its called 'runner on white', here's the full post.

A beautiful dog portrait shot

2008-08-01T20:14:00.002+03:00

Simply one of the best!

Let the author (PoplarLee) what do you think of this gorgeous shot.

You can do so right here

Contrast recap

2008-07-31T22:53:00.009+03:00

After yesterday's first mini-tutorial, I kinda felt that I did not explain the logic of the Curves window only the technique.

So lets discuss the histogram and the Curves Window.

First, what is a histogram? In a photo, a histogram displays the amounts of various colors in a photo, each bar from represents a single color, and the height of the bar indicates the amount of that color in the photo.

Here's an example histogram:

(fig. 1)

One important note: The colors are sorted from black to white (left to right), therefore the bright colors (closer to white) are on the right side, and the darker colors (closer to black) are on the left side.

Usually a well exposed and contrasted photo will have a nice distribution of colors, something like this:

(fig. 2)

Therefore figure 1 lacks a bit of the brighter colors.

Now in order to 'fix' the histogram and by that I mean, adding a bit brighter colors, we can shift the entire histogram in the direction of brighter colors, you can do this like that:

Start position:

You drag the highlighted arrow to the left, this way you brighten the picture.

Final position:

This will surely brighten your photo and will add to the color and balance of the photo.

Obviously it works the other way around, in order to add darker colors you drag the black arrow on the left side to the right.

Hopefully, you now know how to use more skillfully the Curves window.

POTW #1 (Photo of the week)

2008-07-31T22:44:00.004+03:00

Photo of the week is a new corner in my blog. Every week I will select a photo that I found browsing flickr huge library of photos and display it.

This week's best photo is:

I really like the composition of the storm with the tranquility of the house and trees.

Really excellent work by photobonnie

You can leave your comments on this beautiful photo here.

Tutorial 1: Adding contrast to your photos

2008-07-31T20:30:00.000+03:00

As promised boys and girls, here's my first tutorial. This tutorial will be on the subject of adding contrast.

First lets ask our selves - what is contrast? Well if you ask wikipedia this is what you'll come up with:
"Contrast is the difference in visual properties that makes an object (or its representation in an image) distinguishable from other objects and the background".

My interpretation of this definition is that, well, you want to make your object stand out against the rest of the photo.

For our little tutorial lets use this image:

I shot this image on October 2006, I was pretty much a rookie in photography at the time. As you can see the image suffers from a serious contrast issue caused by the beautiful sunset.

In order to fix it, we'll use photoshop's Curves command.

So this is how we go about fixing the contrast:

Open the photograph in photoshop.
Go to the layers pallete and add a new Curves adjustment layer.
Now you can see a straight line crossing the histogram (we'll discuss the histogram in the next tutorial).
Now, since this photo needs to brighten the dark areas of the photo we will use the following settings:

Now, you may ask yourself how did I do that to the line?

Simply, you just click on a point on the graph that you want to add a point there, and the line will follow that line. As you can see i've added two points one that brightens the dark areas (higher than the original curve), and one to darken the very bright areas (below the original line).
To change the points position, simply click on it and drag it to your liking.
My enhanced contrast image looks like this:

Thinking about the definition of Contrast, you might consider: "What is the object and what's the background in this photo?". Well, I believe the shore was pretty much the object and the over brightness of the sun made it invisible.

Hope you've enjoyed my tutorial, let me know what you think about it.

Excellent tips on how to reduce camera shake

2008-07-30T16:51:00.003+03:00

I just came across an excellent article that gives a few techniques that really help reduce camera shake without using a tripod.

Check it out here. Thanks to digital photography school and photographer Natalie Norton of Oahu, Hawaii.

Old Trafford Stadium photo

2008-07-29T23:33:00.004+03:00

Old Trafford Stadium, originally uploaded by Nimrod Perez.

I took this photo at (obviously) Manchester UK. What I really like about this photo is the contrasting green colors of the grass in the shady area and in the sunny area.

Tomorrow I will post the first mini-tutorial. The subject will be adding contrast to your images in Photoshop!

Press photographer's year 2008

2008-07-29T22:55:00.004+03:00

Take a look here. That's the photographs of the year... Some really good ones.

This one is my favorite, this photo is by Andrew McConnell.

First post

2008-07-29T22:44:00.004+03:00

Hi all,

Here's the first post in my blog. If it wasn't clear, this blog will discuss my amateur photography techniques and discoveries.
Personally I use a Canon Digital EOS 400D, which is a very nice digital camera IMHO.

I started my interest in photography a few years ago (around 2004). However, only 2 years ago this hobby got more serious thanks to a friend of mine (Thanks Gaby!) that was into photography too at the time.