When I started Photodoto, my mission was to try to make photography more accessible to everyone. I believe strongly that anyone can be a good photographer and that photography is not as mysterious or difficult as many people think. I hope that I’ve achieved that goal, at least for some of you.

Unfortunately, over the past year, I haven’t had the time to dedicate to Photodoto that I think it or you deserves. I’ve got a lot on my plate. I’ve been forced to prioritize and Photodoto just didn’t make the cut.

Photodoto will not just disappear. There will be no new blog posts. But the content will live on in some form. I intend to reorganize and republish the most popular articles. And all existing links to content here will continue to work.

There are many great photography blogs out there. Here are three in particular that I think have a similar aim as Photodoto and that I think you will enjoy:

• Epic Edits
• Beyond Megapixels
• Digital Photography School

See you around. :-)

-John
john@photodoto.com

This guest post was written by Sherry Osborne. Sherry is unable to leave home without at least one camera hanging off her shoulder. She posts photography tips geared to beginners several times a week at photoblog.net. Contact me if you are interested in guest writing for Photodoto. -John

I don’t know if this has ever happened to you but one of the worst feelings in the world (photography-wise at least!) is discovering that your memory card has become corrupted and you’ve now lost all the photos you recently took. It happened to me on my old point and shoot card but I was really lucky in that there were only about five or six photos on the card and they weren’t particularly important to me.

It can, however, be a disaster to lose your photos before you can remove them from the card. While you can’t prevent all problems, here are some memory card tips to avoid as many issues as possible.

1. Enjoy sales on memory cards but avoid cheap. When you’re shopping for a card buy the big name brands when a store is having a good sale. No matter how tempting it is, don’t pick up a card with a name brand you’ve never heard of and say, “Huh, only five bucks! I’ll get this one.” Sometimes price and brand really do matter and while even the popular brands can occasionally produce a defective card, you’re less likely to find yourself asking where all your photos went if you don’t buy a cheap card.

2. Do not leave your card in a card reader, even if you don’t think it’s doing anything. This is one of the tips that is hardest for me to follow. I have a tendency to take an average of 100+ photos on any given outing so I’ll often put the card in my reader, let it start, and then I’ll wander off to do other things. Then I realize, hours later, that the card is still sitting there. It seems like no big deal but as long as something is in the reader the computer will keep interacting with it. Don’t use it if it doesn’t actually need to be used.

3. Format your card each time you finish removing photos. Even if you delete the photos from the card, some data is still embedded in the card. When you load it back in your camera, take a moment to go into your menu and format the card each time.

4. Avoid extremes. Cards don’t like a lot of intense cold or high humidity. Keep it away from a lot of dust, and magnets. Be careful with it. They may look all sturdy and compact but they’re very sensitive.

5. Don’t use your card as a storage unit. This is such a common mistake and it’s so easily avoided. My parents travelled out East for my sister’s wedding back in September and my father took hundreds of photos while out there. I visited my parents at Christmas time and was utterly appalled that my father had never dumped his photos onto his computer. It was over three months after the fact and he had simply left the pictures on his card, continuing to take more on a fairly regular basis. He’s extremely lucky that his card didn’t become corrupted because he would have lost hundreds of pictures of his youngest daughter getting married, not to mention all the travel photos he took during his week-long visit. Just because your card can hold hundreds or even thousands of photos doesn’t mean that you should. Dump them and back them up often.

6. Consider more than one card. If you can buy two it’s a good idea to do so because then you have a back up. Change out your cards partway through the day. If you lose photos on one card, at least you’ll still have some on the other.

7. Don’t remove your card from the reader while it’s accessing the photos, don’t remove it from your camera while it’s turned on, and don’t insert it when the camera is on. All of these things can potentially corrupt your card, causing you to lose some or all of your images.

Do you have any memory card tips that work for you? Share them in the comments!

TTV stands for “Through the Viewfinder” and to create one of these photos you need two cameras. Basically you set up your digital camera to shoot through the viewfinder of another camera. It sounds simple but requires quite a bit of patience to get it set up correctly. The best advice is to give it a try and practice until you get the hang of it. Also, try placing something dark coloured around the gap between the two lenses to keep out extra light.

Oh, and check out the Through the Viewfinder group on Flickr for some more TTV inspiration.

Photo credit:

Congratulations! You’re ready to take the next step with your digital photography, and start earning some money with it! There are two avenues you can pursue — you can sell the photographs that you take, or you can provide your photography skills as a service to other people. Either way you go, earning money with your photography is challenging and rewarding in this highly competitive field.

In this article we’re going to talk about promoting your photography skills.

Create a portfolio — The first important step in selling your photographs is to establish a portfolio. Create a collection of the work that you are the most proud of, or that is the most applicable to the type of photography you will be performing (portraits, product photography, interiors, etc.). Click here for an an article I have written on how to develop a portfolio.

Establish rates — Next you need to figure out how much you’re going to charge people. This can be tricky — charge too little and your work is undervalued; charge too much and you’ll be passed over for a photographer who is less expensive. Conduct some research into what kind of rates the industry currently supports. Review the rates of your local competition or photographers in your type of genre, and weigh their rates against how much you need to make per hour, per project, per photo, etc.

Get business cards — When people see you with a camera, they tend to be interested in your work. Most of my “advertisement’ has come from people who have attended the events and venues that I am photographing. They ask me who I am and what I do, and I am able to produce a business card that has all of my contact information and website URL. Word of mouth is a powerful tool in the photography industry, so make sure you’re prepared at a moment’s notice to get your name out there!

Volunteer your services for free — Experience and practice and vital to garnering customers for your photography business. You don’t want to go in cold to your first “gig’, so gather some experience by volunteering for some photography projects for free. This will allow you to gain the experience you need, bulk up your portfolio, and establish potential future paying customers. Ask friends and family members to pose for portraits. Attend events and venues similar to those whose business you’d like to receive. Offer free examples of your work on CD’s or in print to showcase your talents.

Buy some basic gear — In order to be sure that you’ll be ready for whatever requirements come your way during your photo shoots, be sure that you have some basic gear to get you by. A good prime lens, a fast telephoto lens, a quality wide angle lens, and a quality macro lens are a good starting collection. Also consider a softbox for portable lighting, neutral colored drapes or drop-cloths for backgrounds, a tripod, a remote shutter release, and a remote off-camera flash.

Get the word out — The final concern is how to get the word out about your photographs. You can’t sell anything if people don’t know about your work, right? Consider printing and framing some of your photos — put them in your own home for your friends and family to see, or give them as gifts to friends and family members, so that they will be seen by their own visitors. Approach local establishments (businesses, restaurants, libraries, etc.), and ask them if they will allow you to hang your work on their walls. Often, if it’s of no cost to them, a business owner will be happy to showcase quality work and decorate their store or office. Be sure you leave some method of contact – a business card tucked inside the frame, for instance – and make it clear that the photos on the walls are for sale, and that there’s plenty more where they came from!

Photo credits (all): Snerkology Media, http://snerkologymedia.com/

Photo by:

What?
White balance is responsible for keeping your photos the correct temperature. A low colour temperature creates more red, a higher colour temperature more blue. Digital cameras create the correct colour temperature by picking the part of the photo that it thinks should be white and filtering the light to make that area white.

Why?
If you want natural looking photos you need the correct white balance. In other words having the correct white balance prevents your photos from looking too cold (blue) or too warm (red). Although your camera will have an Automatic White Balance (AWB) setting digital cameras are not as good at detecting which part of the photo should be white as you are.

You can get a more accurate white balance by choosing a manual setting for the white balance or creating a custom white balance of your own.

How?
Most DSLRs will let you choose a white balance from within the menu. The choices are likely to include daylight, shade, cloudy/twilight, tungsten, fluorescent light, and flash. Using these setting is a good start and can improve your photos greatly, especially those taken in the more extremes light (such as fluorescent light or twilight).

To get the most accurate white balance you can set a custom white balance. You can buy a grey card from most photography stores to help you do this, or you can find a white object in your shot and use that instead. Fill the viewfinder with the grey card, or the white object, and shoot using manual focus. The exact method of setting this as the white balance varies from camera to camera, you may have to press the white balance button before you take the shot or after. Check the manual of your camera to find out how yours works.

Extra Tip
For most situations AWB or one of the manual settings will do just fine but it’s worth learning how to set the custom white balance, especially if you do a lot of shooting indoors.

Photo by:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/brunogirin/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Switch Cities

Erin Lassahn

Simply bid on a photo you like, if you have the highest bid you get the photo and your money goes to help Haiti.

Photo by IFRC

What?
ISO is traditionally a measure of film speed; basically how sensitive a roll of film is to light. Obviously if you’re using a DSLR you’re not using film but your camera still has ISO settings. Instead of film it’s a reference to how sensitive the camera’s image sensor is to light. ISO settings can vary greatly but most cameras have at least 100, 200, 400, 800, and 1600. The lower the number the less sensitive the sensor is to light.

Why?
Although lower ISOs are usually desirable (leave your camera on Auto settings and it’ll choose 100 or 200 most of the time) to give you clear, sharp photos there are times when a higher ISO can be useful.

Choosing a higher ISO allows you to use a higher shutter speed or smaller aperture. This is especially useful for shooting in low light, particularly shooting action in low light (for example indoor sports events or concerts). It also comes in handy in places like museums and art galleries where use of flash and/or tripods may be prohibited, or in any low light situation when you don’t have a tripod available!

Higher ISOs cause a grainy effect, which, while we often want the clearest photos possible, can sometimes be desirable to create a certain look in an image.

How?
You can choose your ISO setting in the menu of most DSLRs, check your manual if you can’t find the ISO option in yours.

Extra tip
Try taking the same shot at several different ISO settings so you can get a feel for what each different setting produces.

The program is run by Columbia University and, although you can’t buy the Bigshot camera parts, you can visit their website to learn how the different parts of a point and shoot camera work.

Welcome to class, first up; auto exposure bracketing.

What?
Auto exposure bracketing allows you to automatically take a series (usually three but sometimes up to seven) of photos, each at different exposures. Basically the camera takes one image at what it perceives to be the correct exposure, one underexposed, and one overexposed.

Why?
What your camera views as the correct exposure may not necessarily be the exposure that suits a particular image best. You may find that you like your photos slightly overexposed, or that for a particular shot the underexposed version appeals to you more.

Auto bracketing allows you to take the different exposure shots in one quick succession, meaning it’s almost as fast as just taking the correct exposure shot. Especially for beginner photographers this is a great way to get shots in different exposures, and learn which ones you like best in which situations.

Overexposure is not always a bad thing, it can make for some interesting effects.

How?
Most DSLRs will let you choose the brackets you want (usually anywhere from a third-stop (not much variation in exposure) to two stops (lots of variation)), and the number of images you want to take.  How you set auto exposure bracketing varies from camera to camera so you’ll need to check your camera’s manual (look for AEB), it’s often found as a menu setting but some cameras have a specific button for bracketing.

Extra tip
Auto exposure bracketing works differently, depending on if you have the camera in Aperture Priory Mode or Shutter Priority Mode. Basically the camera will change the setting that is not in priority to control the exposure (e.g. if you’re in shutter mode the aperture will be changed).  Therefore if you want to maintain a certain shutter speed or aperture make sure you put the camera in the priority mode for the setting you want to keep set.

That’s it in a nutshell, get out and play! If you like you can add the results to the Photodoto Flickr group here.