Posts Tagged ‘digital photos’
How to Take Better Photos of Wildflowers
8 Tips for Taking Great Digital Photos of Wildflowers
If you love snapping nature photos, especially of beautiful and unusual wildflowers, you’ll pick up a few tips from this post. Written by a Photo Naturalist, the post is from the Digital Photography School site — and I’d recommend it. And, of course, the photos are fabulous! And don’t forget, you can find great ways to print and share those wildflower photos you take when you upload them to lifephoto.com.
8 Tips for Photographing Wildflowers
In this post, Steve Berardi from PhotoNaturalist discusses eight tips for photographing wildflowers.To get the softly diffused light in this photo, I waited for an overcast sky. (Photo by Steve Berardi)With spring on the horizon in some parts of the world, you may be thinking about photographing some beautiful wildflowers soon. So, here are 8 tips to get you started:
1. Use a tripod
Using a tripod will help you get sharper photos by ensuring your camera doesn?t move. But, the tripod helps in another way too: it forces you to be more careful about your composition.
When you handhold your camera, there?s a tendency to just snap away, but when you add the tripod, you?ll spend more time thinking about your composition and ensuring your camera is in a very precise position.
2. Wait for an overcast or cloudy day
Rule of Thirds guides you toward capturing the best photo
It’s not my rule, but I’ve heard it a hundred times since I first picked up a camera. If you haven’t heard about using this rule to capture the “true essence” of the photo, you can find out more from digital photography pro, Darren Rowse. I was looking through his blog, Digital Photography School, and ran across this post which I’d like to share with you. Just might help you snap better pictures!
Perhaps the most well know principle of photographic composition is the ‘Rule of Thirds‘.
The “Rule of Thirds” one of the first things that budding digital photographers learn about in classes on photography and rightly so as it is the basis for well balanced and interesting shots.
I will say right up front however that rules are meant to be broken and ignoring this one doesn’t mean your images are necessarily unbalanced or uninteresting. However a wise person once told me that if you intend to break a rule you should always learn it first to make sure your breaking of it is all the more effective!
What is the Rule of Thirds?
The basic principle behind the rule of thirds is to imagine breaking an image down into thirds (both horizontally and vertically) so that you have 9 parts. As follows.
Enjoy–and learn from– the mystery, promise and past conveyed in Katherine Westerhout’s urban photos
As I was checking my inbound tweets, 
I saw one about how truly amazing this woman’s photos are. Checked it out and totally agree. That’s why I’m sharing Katherine Westerhout’s gallery and perspective with you.
Study her use of light, how she frames her subjects and what you think makes each photo so special. Then try to apply those ideas to your own photos. Good artists study the great masters and learn from them; as amateur photographers, we can study the work of people like Ms. Westerhout and learn from her.
See what you think about her philosphy and her photos. Then send me a Tweet or Facebook comment to share your thoughts. Let’s share this photo find with more people!
Artist’s Statement — Katherine Westerhout
Closely related to the language of dreams, photography reveals reflections that informmy life. Through them I seek a richer view of the literal world, in a place of the moment, seen in expanded dimensions. Within abandoned buildings, I meet a vision of the psyche. An echo punctuates human absence; carried on the light is a harbinger…These buildings are full of mystery and promise, and the longer one lingers, the more embraced one feels by a presence beyond the prosaic, in a sweeping realm, conjoined and familiar.
About the Work
These photographs are a selection from an ongoing series of urban landscapes that focus on interior spaces of abandoned buildings in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond; in 2003, the work included temple sites in South East Asia, and has now moved into other areas of this country, as I continue to photograph the abandoned cityscape of America.
Remember the Birthday Fun
Do you have tons of pictures you took at your child’s last birthday party?
Gather them up to put into a birthday photo book. Just upload them to lifephoto.com — you can set up your own birthday book photo folder there at no cost.
At $6.95 for a 20-page softcover 6″ x 4″ photo book, it’s easy to make one for each child’s birthday. And these books will be a memory that will last forever. Here are some of the options:
- 7 books sizes
- Hardcover or softcover
- 4 paper stock choices
- Lots of birthday backgrounds to use (or not)
- 2-4 photos will easily fit on a page
- Many photo arrangement choices
- Full flexibility for photo placement, captions and text
Fast, Easy and Inexpensive Photo Books for Every Birthday
Get started now and surprise your child. Better yet, send one to Grandma and Grandpa, too.
PHOTO SHARING NOTE: Don’t forget — you can share your birthday photo book and your digital photo album by e-mail, on Facebook, Twitter or a blog.
Tweet this post or share it on Facebook.
Professional Photo Book of Samples — Easy to Make and Share.
In the last post, I introduced you to the concept of using a quality online photo sharing source for creating your own professional art 
portfolio. This is a very high quality bound book that you can share with art patrons and potential clients through several vehicles: 1) The printed book itself. 2) E-mail. 3) Social media posts like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others.
Lifephoto prints your sample book in its professional photo lab — you get archival quality paper, satin cover linings, parchment pages and pro quality printing. Plus — and only on Lifephoto — can you get a link to share your complete art portfolio via e-mail or social media. Read more about this in my last post.
Get Started on Your Portfolio
Here is a step-by-step guide to formatting your photo portfolio, a link to the sculptor’s portfolio previewer and tips for using the book and previewer to market your art work more effectively. continue reading
Valentines’ Day — Wedding Day — Birthday — Anniversary
- Wedding Day. How cool to give your fiance a day planner that begins on your wedding day!
- Valentine’s Day. How about giving your sweetheart a custom day planner that begins on Valentine’s Day — with photos of fun times together throughout!
- Birthday. How appropriate to give someone a photo day planner that begins on the date they were born. Show them how important that day was to both of you!
- Anniversary. Even though you’ve been married awhile, give your spouse a photo day planner of your lives together — that begins on the date your were married. How romantic!
A custom day planner is easy and quick to make on lifephoto.com. Add notes on special dates, reminders, personal messages of love. Be creative. Have fun. Photo day planners are available in two sizes with 13 to 54 images — you decide. That special person will love it!
Memory Books Offer Positive Results
Alzheimer’s Disease takes away a great deal of a person’s memory 
including those accomplishments and life experiences that made the person who he or she is. A person’s sense of worth is depleted when their memory fails them. You may have read my earlier post about how to put together a memory book for an Alzheimer’s patient. Here is a new study just released for a thesis by Margaret Jeanne Trela at Ohio State University that indicates a photo memory book for an Alzheimer’s patient can help preserve that patient’s sense of self.
You’ll find in the study:
- How to structure sentences and phrases in the memory book.
- How the memory book helped the patient: “The memory book helped the participant in this study to communicate more effectively. Therefore, it helped her, and others, to see that she is still the person that she always was, in spite of the disease.” continue reading
Get your digital camera ready for holiday photos
These tips are just too good to pass up. Darren Rowse has offered up these great suggestions to help you get ready for holiday picture-taking. I’m passing them along to you and recommend reading all 16 of his tips! Then you’ll be ready to make some fun photo gifts or maybe even a 2009 Christmas photo memory book with all the great pictures you took!
Here’s a photo book made by a friend of mine after last year’s holiday season! You can do the same — easily! Then e-mail the same kind of photo sharing previewer to your family and friends — or put it out on Facebook or Twitter! So easy when you upload your photos to lifephoto.com.
16 Digital Photography Tips for Christmas
by Darren Rowse (from Digitalphotographyschool.com)
Christmas-PhotographyPhoto by mom drew nick
It’s just a few days until Christmas so I thought a quick tutorial on the topic of Christmas Photography might be appropriate. Hopefully this will give you some good Christmas photo ideas.
Here are 16 Christmas Photography tips and ideas to try that come to mind for digital camera owners wanting to capture the big day: continue reading
