photography
Photography Home studio
0Hi all, Especially people of Cardiff UK! 
I just moved to Cardiff because of my Postgrad Studies in Cardiff University. I am also a semi-professional photographer and am planning to set up a small home studio where i will be clicking pictures or making portfolio for young models (male & female). And when i said “Models”, it means it includes you too! Because i believe everyone looks pretty 
So, if you are in Cardiff or near, and are willing to get yourself a professional looking portrait done or maybe just a outdoor group photo with your mates, just get in touch with me and i will be more than happy to click it up for you!
Since I am just kick-starting now, i am open to keep a negotiable rate depending on what type of photo you want to get yourself. On an average, a single picture will take about 15min to shoot and 15 min of post processing, so you do the math Watch out this space for more on my home studio updates and offers, promotions, and discounts. Looking forward to see you soon! Cheers!
A Powerful Photo editor right within your browser
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Most of us are fond of editing photos and pictures that we captured over time, however, it is not always feasible to invest in the likes of Adobe Photoshop just for editing a few occasional photos. Here’s an equally powerful Online Photo editor that gets the job done efficiently and for free right within your browser!
L&L amateur photography Competition 2010
4
Celebrate the joy of Diwali with L&L as the amateur photographers’ community E-zine announces our First Photography Competition!
First issue of community photography magazine is out! Finally!!
1Hi all,
Here’s what you have been waiting for. A 15 page magazine, showcasing purely your pictures! btw, watch out for the next month magazine, did I tell you we have some special articles coming up? 
You can view and download from here
Photography Magazine – Call for submission
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Fresh amateur photography magazine to launch in september 2010. Amateurs and photo hobbyists can send in your best images to be featured in the e-magazine.
Lights&Lens, an online E-magazine, by community for the community, is all set to make a launch in september 2010. I would like to request you to send in your best images, where it’ll be featured in the magazine along with your name.
The free E-mag will be available for download online and be circulated among similar photo enthusiasts like us. We are sure to obtain a reach of more then 500 downloads for this issue, which I believe, will also be a great exposure to you guys too.
send in your entries to:
madhan8@gmail.com
along with your name, EXIF data intact, website if any.
Use subject line: [sep10-LL]
Since the magazine is starting out fresh and is in early stages, suggestions and critique’s welcomed
For more details plz drop me a scrap or leave a comment below.
UPDATE: You can alternatively submit images directly via our Flickr pool here
Cover img courtesy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/b-tal/
Under Creative commons
Photography Tutorials part 4 – Playing with Light
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Understanding the light around us is a very crucial step in photography. For if there was no light, there would be no photography. Controlling the amount or color of light while shooting, requires special attention as light plays a major role contributing to the overall appeal of the image.
First lets start with “Seeing” the light around us and them move on to different techniques of light photography. The key to understand light is to observe our natural source of lighting, the sun. For most of us who do not own studio equipments such as spot lights or studio lights, taking great pictures is usually done understanding the sunlight. One must understand that the color temperature and intensity of sunlight varies throughout the day. Learn to see how the natural abundant light bounces through each material, the reflectivity and the bloom or the harshness.
Try observing a place well known to you, it could be your own house corridor, or maybe that park by the lake you always visit. Observe how by each passing hour, the color or intensity of light falling in that particular area changes. The same place looks very different at the different times of the day.
Portrait photography at home without studio lights:
A portrait usually involves framing a person’s upper half and striving to capture the facial features, the emotion in a person’s face filling up the frame. The lighting needs to be soft and even, making sure that all of the facial features and spaces are well lit unless left darkened intentionally. Studios often use spot lights with diffuse filters that casts a warm soft light on the person. But when we are going to be shooting without an actual studio, we must make use of the available light. Shooting a portrait pic in early morning hours, (like the one here that i shot) and late afternoons ensures that the sunlight is bright enough to illuminate the subject completely but does not cast harsh shadows. Avoid shooting in hot mid day sunlight as there would be harsh shadows being cast on the subject. If any circumstance requires you to shoot during mid day or under harsh sunlight, you can use the camera’s inbuilt flash with a homemade flash diffuser to brighten up the shadowed area. yes, its completely fine to use flash in sunlight and nobody’s gonna mock you for that. Sometimes these harsh sunlight casts very strange and abstract shadows when it undergoes multiple bounce offs from objects. These could be great subjects to be captured too!
Light Painting: 
As you start to feel comfortable with learning to read light around you, why not use some cool techniques to create pictures of light themselves! Say hello to light painting. These techniques have been around for ages and I’m sure you must have come across hundreds of them already. It involves setting your camera to a slow shutter speed and “painting” or playing around with light infront of the camera sensor to create some really nice images like the ones here.
100% free stock photos
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If you are looking to work with stock photos in your projects but dont wanna buy them or download them illegally, here’s a round up of good stock photography site for you. All of them feature pretty good quality images and are 100% free and legal. The main contents come from amateur,professional and semi professional photographers who contribute to the site under creative commons. Well, that apart, check out these sites.
I will add more as i keep digging out good ones…
http://www.stockvault.net/ [my fav] [sample img above]
http://www.free-stockphotos.com/category/free-images/
http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/ [paid but low res free ones]
Photography Tutorials part 3 – Wide angle shots
0For the Beginner – How do i take Wide angle shots of landscapes?
Well, DSLR cameras have the advantage of using wide angle lenses, I mean really wide angle lenses (About 10mm) thats wider than human eye limit! But I have friends who have been asking me how do I take a wide angle shot with a point and shoot camera. The workaround is using a panorama mode.
A panorama is a technique where you click multiple images of a scene, say, it could be anywhere between 3 images to a 100 images or more! The catch is that they need to be clicked in sequence and requires good amount of post processing, which inturn requires you to have a PC with good amount of processing power. So then, lets start.
I have a sample of a wide angle shot taken using 5 pictures here. If you are using a point and shoot, there must be a preset setting called “Panorama mode” or “Stitch assist mode” which throws up a really neat preview of what you have clicked so far, enabling you to overlap images in succession,. If your cam doesn’t have that function, no problem, all you gotta do is keep clicking images as normally you would in either left to right or vice versa (for sake of simplicity) direction and keep a note of img numbers.
And there’s one really important factor you need to keep in mind while making a panorama shot. The exposure value of your scene might vary as you sweep across the landscape, so its advisable to lock your camera’s exposure either by Exposure Lock function or manually keying in the exposure regardless of what your camera reads. This way, you can have an evenly exposed seamless image.
Photography Tutorials Part 2: Basic training
0In part 2 of our basic training tutorial, we will look into
1.Taking the Picture
2.composition
3.Paying attention to details.
Hope you all have got your cameras ready. The first thing you should do is get to know the camera you own. Go through its manuals (a few consider the manual to be untouchable). Going through your camera’s manual is very important as it will let you explore the capabilities of the camera. In case you have lost your manual or damaged by wear and tear, fret not, as you can always find a pdf version of the camera’s manual from the manufacturer’s webpage.
Alright, now take that camera, set the image quality to the maximum limit your cam allows, i.e if its a 10mp camera, put it to 10mp and select fine picture quality. Put it in Full Auto mode(some cameras are in auto by default) and shoot a picture you like! Review the picture. Ask yourself these questions without worrying about the technical OSD(on screen displays) information.
(1). Does the picture look good? (2). what does the picture lack?
The picture should obviously look good to you atleast, its important that you dont delete this first picture as few years down the row, you can always look back to those old days and have a good laugh
Ah IMG_0001.jpg, nostalgic! ^_^
Now if doesnt look good, let me tell you what went wrong. The problem is either with the composition, i.e the way the particular frame was composed, or maybe an uninteresting subject, i.e the elements in your picture or it could be with really low or harsh or bright lighting.
Let me start by explaining how to get the composition correct. Strictly speaking, composition is the way you frame or compose your picture, in simpler terms, its your personal choice on how or which angle/perspective you like to shoot. A single scene could be composed in a hundred different ways by hundred different photographers! So let me stress that its you who decide what subjects to include in the picture, what not to, which angle suits the scene and so forth.
But there’s this one basic rule called the “rule of the thirds”. Its just a fancy name that suggests you NOT to place a single subject in the dead centre of the frame. See the example below.
fig 2.
In fig 1, the subject has been placed in the dead center with no special attention on the scale of the subject. The 9 column overlay grid you see on the image is your guide that abides rule of the thirds. This is accesible in your cameras under the menu settings, for instance, in canon cameras, you can enable it by pressing the transfer/print button. Pressing twice will disable it.
In fig2, we have recomposed the frame, by moving the subject a little off centre paying attention to the overall scene. The image as compared to fig 1, looks much better right?
This composition is your vantage point where you live by, but sometimes, on the other hand, breaking the rules of the thirds actually does some good! With the digital technology, dont be afraid to take as many shots as you wish and review them as unlike our film cameras, we need not worry about shelling out cash on film rolls. you can always erase the picture from your camera’s memory card when full or seems awkward.
Now to the final part, paying attention to details. This requires you to look, i mean, really look around and carefully observe the things up, below and around you! Most often, i hear my friends who are amateurs as well, complaining to me, “Hey! i’ve got nothing to shoot!”. Its a lame excuse as far as i can say. Look around, it isn’t like we live in a void! We live in a world where there is nature’s play everywhere, from bugs to animals, plants and tress, millions of people, architecture, art is everywhere! You just need to learn where and how to look. This no one can teach you but you. Learn to observe the day night cycle, the colors of light during the different time of the day. A very same scene looks bright in mid day, but dull and romantic in twilight. I hope you get an idea what I am talking about. Remember, just look around.
Experimentation by trial and error is the key to learn and improve in photography. If you have been reading this far, wow, thank you! Go ahead, post the images you shot here or hotlink them, I will go through them and give you hands on tips on how you can improve them. Afterall, sharing knowledge improvises each other! ^_^
Some important thing to remember is NOT to point your camera directly at the sun, as it will badly damage your eyes and the camera’s sensor chips. Its good to know that electric equipments and water do not get along well, so if your camera is not waterproof, drop the idea of trying some underwater photography!!
The next part of the tutorial will teach you about taking really wide angle shots. Stay tuned and keep visiting
photography tutorials part 1: Foreword
0Good day!
If this is your first visit to my new blog, my hearty welcome to you and hope you found what you are looking for. This is Part One of the series of Photography Tutorials that would follow over the next few days. I am not a professional photographer or an arts major, infact I am an engineering student from India. But with a passion for photography and the urge to show,share,with the world what I see, I have involved myself in photography.
You can check out my photography hobby at Flickr via the flickr widget at the right or at www.myphotohobby.co.cc
Let me assure you, I am here to share with you my photography tips and techniques and hoping to get some ideas from you in return, but hey, dont worry, its ok even if you have no idea about photography, we’ll all eventually learn.
So then, to the point, here’s what I will be discussing with you in tutorials part one.
The First and the most important question, (no its not about the camera) Do you like taking pictures? Yes, just this simple question, if your answer is yes, try answering this one – Do you pay attention to details? If your answer to this is also an yes, then my friend you can read the rest of the entry.
Lets get started already!
Here’s a list of stuff you will need to start your hobby:
1.A Camera:
A photographer is one who “paints” or sketches an image with light. Photos(light) and grapher(write). In order to do that, we would need a camera. The camera definitely need NOT be a expensive high end prosumers or DSLRs that cost you an arm and leg. Remember, the audience for this tutorial is hobbyist/amateur photography here, people like you and me, so lets just stick with affordable and decent ones. Hope that cheered you up a bit
Now the big question, which camera should I buy??
This is a tricky question that plagues all amateur coming into photography. I would say, as a starting point, even your mobile phone camera is good enough, but if you want to print them out, and are really serious about pursuing this hobby, i suggest you look into 6megapixels cameras or more. Most importantly, invest carefully and make sure you steer clear of this “wooohoo a newer model! lemme buy it” upgrade bug! Dpreview has a comprehensive list of cameras and price list with reviews, maybe you wanna check them out. And here’s a really nice secret that will make you feel loads better. 90% of the images in my flickr page like these, these and these were taken with a Canon IXUS compact point and shoot camera! No DSLRs here :p
But i would like to point out, that as our tutorials advance, we would be looking into manual mode of adjusting various parameters to create pictures,so make sure that the camera you own or will be buying will have a full manual mode i.e the camera lets you manually adjust the exposure, iso, shutter speed etc. Some canon point and shoots lets you install thirdparty firmware to enable manual mode, but then again, this is for the advanced users, maybe I’ll write about how you can achieve this in the forthcoming tuts.
2.A photo processing software:
Wait! i know you read that as Photoshop CS 5!! I do know that photoshop is a great great software to post process images but let me tell you, for starters, its an overkill and has a steep learning curve. If you are an advanced user, then I suggest you go ahead with photoshop, but for the rest of the starters, all we will be doing in post processing is a bit of level adjustments, curves, highlights, contrast adjustments etc (dont worry, we’ll get back to this later). For this sort of work, softwares like paint.net, gimp, picasa are more than enough! And the best part is, all are free!
Alright then, we have all the equipments we need to start our photography hobby. I can hear you say, “wait! thats it??“ Dear friend, yes thats it! As tutorials proceed, I will introduce you to additional accessories.
The next tutorial will cover Basic Picture taking with focus on composition and paying attention to details. This is where our journey will begin!
If you like the way I write please bookmark me or follow me and keep coming back for more tutorials and videos. A comment or two would be a great encouragement and also let me understand what you readers want the most ^_^