Category Archives: Improve Your Skills

the Joy of Luck

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I am such a lousy endorser for online classes – I never finish one on time! Still, this free class is too awesome to pass off.

Fresh off the successful run of the month-long free class Joy of Love, Mc.Willette is offering another one!

Repost from Willette Designs:

this is a FREE one week online photo inspiration class where i email you a daily prompt to help you explore and document in photos all that you are lucky for in your life – we will explore the blessings that life has brought to us.

this class will consist of:

  • a daily email photo prompt that is emailed to the email you register
  • a flickr group to share the photos
  • photo tutorials/how tos
  • daily shot lists that correlate to the day’s topic/lesson

what do you need to participate:

  • any camera
  • a working email address
  • the desire to document your life

Class starts on March 14. Click on the class logo to register!

Nikon DSLR Beginner’s Guide

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I’m not sure when these pages were published, but it sure would have been nice to have found them when I was very very new to DSLR photography. What I’m referring to are the tutorials offered at Nikon Asia. You can go ahead and check them out yourself but be sure that you have a decent Internet connection, and the latest Adobe Flash plugin for your browser. Otherwise, the experience might not be so good.

The first tutorial is the Beginner’s Deck: DSLR Beginner’s Guide. The journey begins with understanding how cameras work, and a comparison of three types of digital cameras:

  • Cellphone Cameras
  • Compact Cameras (or point and shoot)
  • DSLR Cameras

The comparison includes sample photos of the same subject using the three common types of digital cameras. Of course, one might feel that the tutorial is partial to the DSLR, that is to be expected. It is, after all, intended for DSLR users.

They move on to camera holding techniques to give you an idea of a good posture that will help reduce camera shake while you still get to frame your photos properly. This is important for newbie photographers because when using compact cameras, we never really thought about how we hold them – we just point and shoot away!

The guide continues to talk about Focusing techniques, Zooming and Positioning, Exposure and Flash Use. These are all very helpful bits of information, in fact, those are the very topics I envisioned to delve into at this blog! The guide isn’t exhaustive but provides the basics that any newbie photographer could start learning from. Go check it out!

Post Processing

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It would be so wonderful to snap a photo than you can later on look at and feel ready to share straight out of the camera (SOOC). But that doesn’t happen all of the time. Sometimes, us newbie photographers end up not sharing our photos because we feel that it lacks oomph or whatever it is you’d like to call it.

The reality is, we shouldn’t really sweat it. Most – if not all – photographers do some form of post processing on their work. It’s part of the workflow really. It can be as simple as just adjusting the lighting, or cropping in to get a better frame. But it could also be quite complicated, everything to get the image to exactly the way the photographer initially saw it in his/her mind’s eye.

When I bought Maxine, my first DSLR (a Nikon D60), I thought that taking better photos would just come naturally. So when some of them were too dark, or noisy, or just plain not nice enough to share, I started feeling frustrated. You know that word don’t you? Frustrated.

discouraged: feeling exasperated, discouraged, or unsatisfied

I was unhappy with a lot of my photos. I felt that even with an understanding of how to get the right exposure, and after learning about Aperture, Shutter Speed, and ISO, I was just not getting the results I wanted.

It is true though, nothing else could make us better than continuing to shoot. Practice, practice, practice. Just shoot!

So now, do all my shots turn out the way I intended them? No. Not all. But I have learned that you get what you work for. Take time to shoot what you want and how you want it, then you’ll most likely get the result that you want.

If you’re still finding your own photographic voice, or you just really want to take your photos from good to really great, then drop the mindset that post-processing is cheating. You can’t take a bad photo and make it beautiful. All you can really do is enhance a good photo to make it even more so.

I can’t teach you a workflow because I haven’t really defined one for myself just yet. At this point, I’m taking tips from I class I attended over at Jessica Sprague, the Good to Great Workflow. I also use Photoshop actions I picked up from photography blogs I’d been reading. So instead of showing you how to post process your photos, let me just give you a list of resources that might help you along:

  1. Digital Post-Processing - An article from Photo.Net
  2. Fix-it Friday – Photo Editing Fun from I Heart Faces photography blog. Lots of tutorials on how to achieve different kinds of effects.
  3. The Pioneer Woman Photography – P-Dub and her friends are very generous with tips and tutorials, but what I’ve been really taking advantage of are the free actions that P-Dub shared through her blog. You’ve got to check them out. Using Pioneer Woman’s actions will shorten your workflow and take your photos to a different level. :) The best thing about them? They’re absolutely free!
  4. Take an online class at Jessica Sprague, the Good to Great Workflow! It’s a wonderful way to start off with the basics, and then you can build your own workflow based on what you’ve learned.
  5. Paint the Moon is also a wonderful resource for photography inspiration, and also for awesome actions to apply on your photos. Like them on Facebook and you just might find a way to get a free sample of their funtastic PS actions!

I’m sure there a lot more resources out there, and you’ll find them if you try hard enough. PP can be quite addicting once you see the difference in your SOOC images versus the PP’ed ones. But kudos to you if your images don’t require much PP :)

Here’s the SOOC version of the image above:

Silhouette Photos

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It was in May of 2009 when I took this wonderful silhouette by a happy accident:

It was early in the morning, the day after we arrived in Baler, Aurora province in the North of Luzon. It was about half a day’s drive, maybe even more. My Mom and her colleagues were having their annual meeting and summer getaway with the families. That year, it was myself, the boyfriend, and my niece Hannah (in the picture) who accompanied my mother. I don’t remember why Dad wasn’t able to make it. I don’t remember what settings I used, nor was I going for this effect when I fired the shot, but I was happy enough to see the end result. At the time, I didn’t know much about photography. Not that I know a lot now.

Silhouette photographs leave me in awe, even when the foreground is nothing more than a shadow. They’re simply captivating.

There will be no tutorial here on how to shoot silhouettes. But I am linking to a few articles I have found in some of my trusted blogs that made sense out of all the jargon others would spout about the subject of Silhouette Photography. I have seen it stated before, to achieve the desired effect, one has to meter against the sky and not the subjects. But it only really ticked, after reading the following explanations:

The article on I Heart Faces was written by the photographer who shot the beautiful photo just above this line. Go check them out and be inspired. If you have photos of silhouettes, be sure to link me up so I can go pay you a visit. :)

I am still unable to find a suitable solution for the custom posts on this new theme. From the support forum for the theme, experts have mentioned changing the Permalinks setting to default. I did that and the custom post did work. However, it changed permalinks to ALL previous posts. I’m afraid I have linked here from my other blogs in the past and don’t have the patience or the time to find where I have linked and changed all of the URLs. So I’ll leave that issue for now, unresolved. :(


Lomo and Toy Camera Photography

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Two years ago, I had wanted to dabble into Lomography. Talking to my photographer hobbyist friends though, I was convinced that 1) lo-fi was the way to go, but 2) I’d be better off with a film SLR than a toy camera. And so our first foray to Hidalgo was not for a cheap plastic camera, but to find a good bargain on an old film SLR. Then there goes the rest of the story of my adventure into the fun world of photography.

Then a week or so ago, I found myself gravitating towards Lomography again. I was fascinated by the dreamy photos that Lomographers usually produced. But more than that, I was attracted to the process: point and shoot. Capture the moment. Don’t worry about how to take the shot, or what settings you’re supposed to use. No editing required or needed. There is a carefree sense to it since you won’t know how the shot went until after the film’s been processed. It would either make you be more careful with each shot, or if you were more like me, just be excited about how it would turn out. After all, lomo to me is about the here and now. The resulting photos will just be a wonderful way to commemorate those moments.

I found myself browsing through Lomography sites and flickr pools, until I focused on online toy camera shops and zeroed in on the perfect toy to start me off in another wonderful adventure. Before my birthday month ended, I dragged the boyfriend to Oh! Shoot for a belated happy birthday gift to myself: my Pink Dress Superheadz Super Fat Lens, Ultra Wide and Slim.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. What is Lomography?

I guess you can say that Lomography is a movement within photography and art circles that promotes the culture of snapshots. From the Lomography hub, it is said that Lomo started when two students discovered an old Russian camera which they had then used for this new style of experimental and artistic photography. Lomography as a brand came about, reproducing many lo-fi cameras of old for worldwide distribution, and coming up with new models too. Though digital cameras were already sprouting at the time, lomo lovers remained true to their love of film.

The ten golden rules of Lomography (before you react violently, “what? how could there be rules? Read first.)

  1. Take your camera everywhere you go
  2. Use it any time – day and night
  3. Lomography is not an interference in your life, but part of it
  4. Try the shot from the hip
  5. Approach the objects of your lomographic desire as close as possible
  6. Don’t think (william firebrace)
  7. Be fast
  8. You don’t have to know beforehand what you captured on film
  9. Afterwards either
  10. Don’t worry about any rules

While adopting the ten golden rules, lomographers the world over live by rule #10. And that’s what I love most about it.

As I read up on Lomo for this post, I came across this post from the Lomo Flickr pool discussion board. The post author, Gimel Vav, raises an interesting distinction between Lomography which is a brand, and toy camera photography as a whole. I think that’s what my friend Edsel tried to explain to me before. How certain renegade photographers preferred to use cheap plastic (hence the term toy) cameras to show that you didn’t need expensive, high-tech gear to produce quality images. There have been photographers doing that even before the term Lomography was coined.

But whatever you choose to believe, for me Lomo is just that – lo-fi photography. You deal with moments, there will always be light and composition considerations, but what’s important is that you take the shot.

So on the very hour I bought my Pink Dress, I got a Fuji Velvia 100 film (pricey), slapped it on and started shooting. I knew it was meant for bright light, being an ISO 100 film, but I didn’t care. I just snapped away. As a result, I didn’t get the full Velvia experience. None of the vibrant colors I have hoped to get. I’m not sure though if it was my error, or maybe the film was not processed correctly. Nonetheless, I am happy with the results. Truly, I am. I am even more motivated to keep on shooting with my toy camera.

Here were my first images (sorry I haven’t installed any image viewer plugins on this blog yet):

Read up: Photography Magazines

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[Photo courtesy of the DPP Website]

Another way to learn about this craft is to read up. There are many photography magazines out there that provide tips and tricks of the trade. Often, they feature professional photographers who willingly share some secrets to their captivating photos.

The cost of the magazines is something to consider though. They do not come cheap. In our local bookstores, I’ve seen digital photography magazines from the US and the UK that are way beyond what I would be willing to pay for a magazine. They do often come with CDs of software that you can use for post-processing so I guess in a way that balances the cost.

Here in the Philippines, the Digital Photographer Philippines or DPP is probably the leading magazine for photography enthusiasts. The boyfriend and I recently bought four issues. We were lucky that there were ‘back issues’ being sold at this magazine stand. They were offered at full prize though. You see, there really are no back issues for the mag. I guess they don’t print too many of those so there’s a big demand for them. Years after the first few issues of the ‘zine have been sold out, people (like me) are still looking for copies. We once bought an issue, but the great flood damaged it greatly. :(

A copy costs 295 pesos, or USD6.50 by current exchange rates. Not cheap. Is it worth it? I think so. One thing to take note though is that more often than not, you need to have some knowledge of the craft already for you to fully appreciate the tips that you provide. I must admit, I need to reread their articles and really give it some effort before I can take it all in. I guess then, it’s not exactly for the newbie photographer. I suggest reading online magazines (run a search on “photography magazine” and you’ll see results for online versions of those in print) first and reading blogs on photography to grasp the basics. This way you don’t spend a dime.

In time, these magazines will turn out to be good investments. I know mine already are. :)

Improve your Skills: I Heart Faces

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As newbie photographers, we should be looking out for opportunities to take more photos. We need to brave new avenues to learn more about the craft and improve our own skills. The Internet has definitely done wonders for the arts. I say this because I have seen so many online communities that foster art, and educate more and more people, photography included.

Photography enthusiasts can find a good number of communities all over the ‘Net that helps newbies and pros alike to connect with each other. These groups serve up inspiration and a good dose of tips, to keep the passion burning. More importantly, they provide newbies like us with the information and encouragement we need to keep on capturing moments through our cameras.

Apart from engaging in Project 365, you may want to join in the weekly challenge at I Heart Faces.

If you’re like me who spend countless hours blog hopping, you’ve probably seen this logo before. I’ve always enjoyed looking at beautiful photography, but I’m not one to really participate consistently. Being exposed to so many beautiful works of art can be intimidating, and sometimes I may feel inferior, but that totally misses the point of these challenges.

What is I Heart Faces?

…a photography site focused on the art of capturing faces and their various emotions. Each week, people from across the world have the opportunity to enter their favorite face photos into a themed photo challenge. A “Guest Photographer Judge” will choose ten of their favorite photos that will then be displayed on our home page. 

That’s how the founders of the I Heart Faces Photography site describe their community. Having faces on each photo entry is a theme in itself, but adding another on top of that theme makes this challenge even more interesting. Photographers of all levels are welcome to participate. To be honest, I’m not even looking at the challenge as a competition. Simply being able to submit an entry is triumph on its own. :) The awesome thing about joining challenges like is that you gain a targeted audience. Other participants, though not required, will visit your photos and leave comments on your entry. It will totally help you receive much needed feedback on your work. Of course, you can increase the likelihood of this happening by visiting their entries too and giving meaningful comments yourself.

There are also participants who write about the process of taking their photos. There’s a lot to be learned there. Definitely.

Apart from the weekly challenges, site owners and contributors publish tips, tutorials, and other photography related news. To know more about IHF, checkout their FAQ page.

This week, I missed the deadline (opens on Mondays, closes on Tuesdays) for entries. The theme is Yellow, and there are 619 entries. Wow. Check them out!

If I wasn’t late, I would have joined with either one of these: