If you love photography and have a blog, then it’s a no-brainer to put them together. I’m betting you can probably take some kick-ass photos too (especially if you follow the tips here. đ When you know how to take photos for your blog, you become more powerful than ever. Unfortunately, while beautiful photos can get you bunches of “likes” Continue Reading
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We love camping. The scenery is beautiful, the wildlife photogenic, the tent mishaps hilarious and the burnt marshmallows the best ones.
Don’t let Mother Nature with her water, dirt & total-lack-of-outlets stop you from photoing it all. Pack along these camping-friendly gadgets.
We field tested each one on a recent camping weekend in Big Sur. Check out this photo story of our trip, or scroll on down to see our favorite gear of the weekend.
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Ever wonder what Fido gets up to while youâre away?
Teach your pup to selfie, and all youâll have to do is follow Mr. Muffins on Instagram to keep tabs.
Yes, your dog can take selfies!
Our Pal Anna Jane of NYC’s School for The Dogs has been teaching dogs this skill (her pooch Amos is quite a pro). Sheâs kindly agreed to to let you in on just how itâs done.
Convincing your furball to update their Instagram on the regs, is up to you.
How To Teach Your Dog to Selfie
p.s. Help! Anna Janeâs School for the Dogsâ building burned down. So she is raising funds to give the doggies of New York a new place to go for training (and fun). Throw her a (metaphorical) bone, wouldya? Visit her fundraising site.
(…)
Read the rest of Teach Your Dog To Take A Selfie (384 words)
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The best lessons are the ones you learn the hard way. Here are 10 photography tips I learned after lots of frustration, discouragement, money lost, and forever lost opportunities. These tips are not very common, I never heard them hence you probably never heard of them either. I hope they help you avoid the mistakes I made, and help you improve your photography. Letâs get to it shall we?
How many times have you been a situation where you kinda wanted to take your camera bag, but ended up not doing so because of the thought of lugging the bag, or even the DSLR itself?
Itâs understandable. Do you want to take that DSLR everywhere you go? Who would want to dangle that thing while going to the grocery store? Nah. But one thing I’ve learned, is that images donât wait for you. Iâve been through too many “I wish I had my camera with me” scenarios to know so.
Caption: An abandoned cart on my way to get a sandwich
One of the best things I did as a photographer was to get myself a pocket camera (The Ricoh GRD III, now I have the Ricoh GRD IV) and take it everywhere with me. It freed me photographically, and it made me stop thinking in terms of âphoto shootsâ and start thinking in terms of âlife photographyâ.
Caption: At a hospital for a baby checkup
While the small compact ended up being my main camera, you donât have to do the same, but do get a pocket camera. You have no idea how many images pop up in otherwise mundane situations like grocery shopping, or taking a stroll at the park.
Caption: In the park
In a nutshell: photographs don’t wait for you, get a pocket camera to fill in the gaps where your DSLR is absent.
P.S: Your phone might do but I donât know about you but I canât stand using it, thereâs no buttons nor dials! Also check out the Canon S120,
When making an image, there’s bound to be a subject. But the subject is rarely alone, there’s the background to deal with. When looking through the viewfinder and you spot your subject, the first thing to do is not to press the shutter release button….it’s to pay attention to your background first.
There’s only two things a background can do for your subject: it can either bring attention to it, or detract from it. Say you are having a conversation with a friend, you wouldn’t want someone elseâs voice distracting from your own, would you? So why let your subject be distracted by the background?
This guy was on the bus and was just priceless, after some entertaining conversation (too much, he was drunk and the whole bus was watching), I told him I would make his portrait. Even before rising my pocket camera, while talking I was wondering how I could draw attention to him.
At first I wasnât going to include the guy on the left, but by changing the guy in the back leaned back and bought further attention to my subject. I happily made the shot.
In a nutshell: be attentive to your background, ask about every object, line, color: Does this distract or enhance what I am trying to focus on?
What is the first thing you notice when you see your child or significant other? A person, right? Well that’s fine and all if you are dealing with them as another person, but when it comes to photography, you are dealing with LIGHT, so you have to train yourself to see everything in terms of LIGHT.
Did you ever notice how the face lights up when someone is watching TV? Did you notice that you feel differently when a landscape is shot at twilight versus dawn? Do you notice how there’s ugly shadows in the eye area when there’s harsh light?
The examples are infinite, but the skill starts when you force yourself to pay attention to the light. In the image above of the building, I was going to the bank and it was pretty overcast out, and I looked up. While I didnât go to the bank to get this image, I knew what to expect (soft light, nice reflections of the clouds) and simply looked up and made the image.
In a nutshell: start noticing light, its qualities, the shadows it makes, the shapes it forms.
Some photographs are either made by luck, or maybe you’re just a genius and you didn’t know it. I’ll vote for the second option because I like you. In all seriousness though, while your best photos might be made tomorrow, you could potentially have gold in your older work.
Caption: An image I found months later, I overlooked at first
Fact is, you might have something that you wouldn’t know the value of until you look at it with more mature eyes. I have shots from 10 years ago, (I never dreamed of becoming a photographer back then) that are stellar.
I wouldn’t have seen them if I didn’t revisit the work. The image above was shot 10 years ago. Granted, there were only a few nuggets of gold in the whole pile, but who says no to gold? Plus after time has passed you wonât be as emotionally connected to the images, making you able to judge the images more objectively. Sometimes I go through my old stuff and I canât believe what I missed! Or I am amazed at how I can recover images I believed were ruined.
In a nutshell: your photos are like wine, they get better with age, but you have to dig them up
You know your stuff. You know what aperture is, when to bump up your ISO, you know how to expose well. But when you look at your images, you just can’t put your finger on what exactly is missing. Let me suggest that it’s the heart element that’s missing. You are not emotionally engaged with your work.
Photography is not about capturing what’s out there in the world, it’s about capturing what’s inside your heart. Shoot what matters to you and put more of yourself in the images.
Here I was in a dark spot:
Donât judge me by this image, I was just in a really bad spot. Here I was more optimistic:
Here I was feeling the familial spirit:
In a nutshell: shoot how you feel, your images will be more powerful. Plus, humans are hardwired to relate emotionally.
Not everyone is into photography for the same reasons. Some want to get rich, others do it because they like it, others for fame or to document their kids growing up – you get the point. We all have different motives for doing photography.
Question your motives and your photography path will become clearer. Knowing your why is like having a loupe in front of a light source, it will help you focus and get where you want faster. I canât tell you your reasons because only you know that.
For me, photography is my way to dream awake. Donât worry, my mom knew she had a dreamer in her hands early on. Don’t call the looney bin on me, but everyday I SEE things, no, not dead people, but slithers in the fabric of time that reveal my imagination. Take this image:
When I saw this guy, I saw a hero ready to take on life itself. In reality, it was just a guy going to the beach. That’s my reason for photography: It helps me be in the world and in my imagination at the same time.
In a nutshell: it’s your turn, what’s your reason for photography? What is it about photography that attracts you so much?
Take it from a guy that lost $ 1000s in gear buying and selling, it’s not about what gear you have, it’s what you do with it. As a photographer, there are things that can keep you from doing your work, one of them is being too focused on your next purchase.
All the images in this article, (with the exception of 3-4) were made with a pocket, small sensor camera, with a 28mm fixed lens which I used with its upgrade for 4 years (the Ricoh’s mentioned above). Other cameras used were other compacts, my phone and one image with the NEX7 (the next pointâs portrait).
Believe it or not you are more creative with less than more. The puzzle-solving brain is much more creative when limited in some way or another. For example, if we could fly, we wouldn’t have invented airplanes.
In a nutshell: whatever gear you have, find new ways to use it. Plus having too much simply makes you miserable anyways (been there).
I think you should learn to expose correctly, learn when something is in focus, etc., and then let it go. I think too much time has been spent arguing on how a photo is slightly out of focus, or other small technicalities.
Some of the world’s most iconic photographs are slightly soft, some are outright blurry (Robert Capa – D.Day soldier), some even have white skies (Alberto Korda’s iconic image of Che Guevara – Guerriero heroico) amongst others.
Why didn’t you notice these imperfections? Well you didn’t seek them out, so you didn’t see them. The artistic qualities of a photograph are superior to its technical imperfections, so let go of them. Heck the Japanese have a concept, “Wabi-sabi” that basically means beauty in the imperfect.
So stop worrying about if you are 10000% in focus, if your white balance is the neutral greyest of neutral greys and start looking at what the photograph is about and how it makes you feel.
In a nutshell: let go of technical perfection, and focus on emotional impact.
Being a photographer is an attitude, and one of the fundamental shifts that must happen is making the difference between taking a picture and making a photograph. What are you doing when you rise your camera up to your eye?
If you learned how to use your camera through the dPS Newsletter, you have the power the express yourself. Now you have to understand that you donât take pictures, camera owners do that; you make them, photographers do that.
I was at a coffee shop, sitting down, writing on my device when I saw this dress flow in front of me. For one second I believed I was in heaven and looking at an angel. I used what was in front of me (a girlâs dress, how boring) and made a photograph, replicating the feeling I felt.
In a nutshell: start thinking like a painter, focus on making something, not taking.
Picture this with me for a moment: a beautiful van is driving down a road, a soothing voice enumerates all the features of the van, AC, GPS, windows, kids are smiling in the back. Ah, life is good, the van flows nicely in the streets. The van is making a turn when all of a sudden, a nasty crash happens. Shock!
“You didn’t see that coming” says the tagline. It wasn’t a commercial for a van, it was one for safety.
This commercial stuck in the minds of many because the ad spent its time building up a pattern (that of a typical van commercial) and then broke it. The human brain sees in terms of patterns and expects things to go in a certain way, when it doesn’t, it forces us to remember to be ready for next time.
You can also do that with photographs. You can create a pattern and then break it. Roland Barthes, a philosopher, named the pattern the Studium, and the pattern breaker the Punctum in his book Camera Lucida. So, if you want your images to stand out, seek the Punctum.
Meh. How many palm tree images have you seen in your lifetime? Well Iâve seen them a lot too, so in order to make this one stick out from the crowd, I decided to align the shadow of a tree that was behind me, to the tree in the middle in front of the camera. What started as an average palm tree image is now much more interesting because of that pattern breaker. Itâs unexpected. You expected a complete tree trunk and I replaced it with a shadow.
In a nutshell: anticipate the expected in your photograph, then break it.
So what other tips do you have for beginners? If you are just beginning yourself what do you struggle with the most? Share with us in the comments below.
The post 10 Photography Tips to Help You Take Your Photography up a Level by Olivier Duong appeared first on Digital Photography School.
When photographing landscapes, it can sometimes be difficult to produce a an image that is focused in its content, that leads the viewerâs eye exactly where you as the artist want it to go.  Sometimes, even though you may be presented with a beautiful vista, an image may not present itself and you have to work to find it. Here are five basic steps to help you take better landscape photos. I follow these any time Iâm looking to create a landscape image.
Sometimes itâs easy. You choose a building, or a rock formation, or a tree, and it all just comes together. Other times, it becomes more difficult.  Sometimes nothing in particular stands out. Look around the scene, find something that draws your eye. Look through your viewfinder, and see how things frame up through your cameraâs eye. Once you have found your subject, you have more decisions to make.
Haystack Rock is a fairly obvious subject. But there are a myriad options when it comes to photographing it. For this image, I decided to use a tidal pool and some rocks in the foreground, but also wanted to include plenty of sky since there was so much interest in the clouds. Â The rocks and water create some nice lines leading right to Haystack Rock. Â EOS 5D Mark III with EF 14mm f/2.8L II, at f/16, ISO 100.
There was no real foreground to speak of here. Just a lot of sand and some uninteresting brush. What I did see was the way the moon was rising between the arms of the saguaro (cacti), and the soft gradation from orange to blue as the sun set behind me. Taken with EOS 5D Mark III, EF 70-200 f/2.8L IS II, 1/20 @ f/22, ISO 1000.
This will partly be dictated by its location in relation to you, but also by what else is in your scene. Look for interest in relation to what youâve chosen as the subject. Is there an interesting object or pattern in the foreground, which could lead the viewerâs eye to the subject? Is there something in the foreground that frames your subject or otherwise adds interest without being distracting?  I will often use water or rocks in the foreground if I can. If itâs water, can you get a reflection of your subject in it?  Sometimes itâs leaves, sometimes trees or a fence.
If there is nothing in the foreground, try minimizing it by putting the subject as the foreground, and looking for background interest. Interesting clouds or sky, buildings, or trees, can all create a backdrop for the landscape. Sometimes, youâre lucky enough to get both an interesting background AND foreground. These are the times to play with your composition and vary the amounts of foreground and background to see what works best, or what doesnât work at all.   Generally speaking, if the sky is flat and lacks interest, I will place it in the top third of the frame, using the rule of thirds. If the foreground lacks interest, I place that in the bottom third.
Once you decide where your subject goes in the frame, whatâs in the foreground and what your background will be, itâs time to find a way to tie it all together. Are there leading lines that will lead your viewer from foreground to background? Leading lines are an easy way to tie your composition together.  Framing is another way, which I included in my discussion of choosing your foreground.  Without tying your composition together, it can often seem like you have two separate images in one. Creating a composition that pulls the viewer through it and leads them where you want them to look is the best way to create an effective landscape image.
EOS 5D Mark III with EF 16-35mm f/2.8L II. I was zoomed into 35mm on this one. Exposure was 1.6″ at f/20, ISO 100.
For this image of Kaaterskill Creek (above), I knew the small cascade was my main subject. There were some rocks to create interest in the foreground, and the water creates a nice leading line back to the cascade in the middle ground, and then to the foliage in the background.
Are you at your location at an optimal time? Some locations are better in the early morning, some in late afternoon. Some are good no matter what time you are there. The difference in the light at these times can mean the difference between a dramatic landscape image, or a snapshot of a pretty place. To find out where the sun will be in a given location at a given time, use an app such as The Photographerâs Ephemerus, or Sunseeker Pro, which will show you the sun’s exact location. This will enable you to plan when to be a location for optimal light.
Side lighting will create dramatic shadows and show off textures. Backlighting will help create silhouettes, which can be very effective for dramatic images with prominent features breaking the horizon. Front lighting will reveal detail everywhere. Often, I will photograph the same location at different times, as different light will create a variety of images from the same location.
EOS 5D Mark II, EF 17-40 f/4L. Exposure was 15 seconds, f/11, ISO 800.
Montauk Point (above) is a great location with lots of photo opportunities, but it’s a much better location at sunrise, than later in the afternoon or at sunset, due to the shadows created by high cliffs. At sunrise, it can be magical.
Finally, think about what your shutter speed will do to the image. If you’re shooting water, shutter speed has a lot to do with the waterâs appearance in your image. If there are trees, and itâs a breezy day, a faster shutter speed will be necessary to freeze the leaves and avoid motion blur. These are things to be aware of when composing your image. Learning to visualize these effects in your mind before pressing the shutter button will go a long way toward making you a better photographer.
EOS 5D Mark II with EF 24-105 f/4L IS. Exposure was 10 seconds at f/11, ISO 400.
The Minneapolis skyline was an obvious choice for subject here. But the sky was flat for a background, so I pushed the skyline to the top of the frame. Thankfully, I caught the Mississippi River on an uncharacteristically calm day and was able to get a nice reflection for foreground interest. I used a slow shutter speed  (or long exposure) to smooth the waters even more.
Do you have some great landscape tips you’d add to this list? Please share in the comments below.
The post 5 Steps to Help you Take Better Landscape Photos by Rick Berk appeared first on Digital Photography School.
[ By Steph in Art & Street Art & Graffiti. ]
Life is an adventure for tiny wooden figures navigating the urban world in this miniature art installation series by Joe Iurato. The New Jersey-based street artist creates small spray-painted wood cutouts that tell the story of his life, from skateboarding as a kid to becoming a father himself. The little people lounge on rusting metal gates, cling precariously to the edges of overpasses, lunge to reach crosswalk buttons and spray-paint their own works of art.
No bigger than fifteen inches in size, the figures are created using layers of hand-cut paper and spray paint to create texture and form in a modern adaptation of an old-fashioned printing process. The artist places them around the city and leaves them for others to notice or overlook, depending on how observant they may be when they pass.
“My art is nothing more than the exploration and documentation of personal experiences,” says Iurato. “The pieces form an abstract of my life. They are the questions I have, the conclusions drawn, the love, disgust, joy and sadness contained. Essentially, I paint what I know, or what it is I want to know, playfully or painfully.”
“However big or small, the works are often created in public spaces and left to interact with the environment and community. Like life itself, the nature of public art is one of transience. Each piece mirrors the unpredictability of existence and hopes to establish an intimate connection with the viewer in the here-and-now.”
Thomas Doyle creates intricate miniature sculptures under glass that capture disturbing and transformative moments in human life.
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Just last week, real Banksy art was offered for sale in Central Park to an uninterested crowd, with only a few passers by unwittingly picking up signed pieces …
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Those red pins marking the city center on Google Maps become 20-foot-tall, real-life urban installations in the ‘Maps’ series by Aram Bartholl.
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[ By Steph in Art & Street Art & Graffiti. ]
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[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Photography & Video. ]
Most light photographers focus on making a shape in the foreground in a matter of seconds, then setting it against a dark static backdrop – this artist often animates every inch of the frame.
Finnish artist Janne Parviainen of Helsinki takes these all-encompassing, long-exposure shots over many minutes (even hours at times), each line representing mere seconds along the way.
As surreal as they look, there is no post-production involved. Aside from props and plans, even their creator cannot really see what he is making them until they are completed.
Parviainen was an oil painter previously, but pivoted when an accidental long-duration photo of streetlights, clicked on a nighttime walk, triggered a fascination with lighting. Now using light as paint, he employs a new series palettes and brushes. Glowsticks, light strings, strobes and flashlights help him animate everything from human figures to abandoned cars.
He begins tracing what is there and then adds his own haunting portraits and inventive twists to the scenes he sets. The results are so saturated with light that it is sometimes hard to tell what is really behind them and what he created from scratch along the way – what is foreground, background or sheer imagination.
Like traditional graffiti and street art, light art comes in many forms. Unlike most graffiti, however, there is no one to complain about being tagged!
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A collection of unlikely (often discarded) objects coupled with a light source can create amazing city scenes, landscapes, portraits and more in the hands of …
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Combining light art photography and high fashion, these show-stopping runway gowns are manufactured without physical material and composed purely of light.
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Sequence photography is a great tool to use when you need to have a more interesting shot to use, but itâs not always easy to do â to take a flawless sequence shot youâll need to do as much work on the day as you will in Photoshop. What youâll need is: A tripod to steady the camera Photoshop (or Continue Reading
The post Sequence Photography Tutorial to Take Your Sports Photography to a Whole, Nother Level appeared first on Photodoto.
5 Tips to Take Better Images in a Zoo
Many photographers think that taking a great animal photo requires extreme patience, sitting and waiting for hours in the wild. Yes, this is how a great wildlife shot is captured. However, if you just want to get some practise, you can still capture great animal photos in a zoo. Taking pictures of animals in a zoo is easier than shooting in the wild. Yet, it is not too easy.
Many people think that taking a picture in a zoo is not challenging, but I donât agree. It is not as simple as you think to take a good picture in the zoo. Here are some tips that will help you to capture a better photo next time.
At the zoo, animals usually live in cages. If you are able to shoot inside the cage, beware you do not capture the cage as a background. On the other hand, for those animals you can observe through a thick glass wall, what you can do is to shoot as close to the glass as possible and open up the aperture as wide as you can so as to minimize flare and dirt on the glass.
For example, I shot this crocodile outside a glass wall. I used a 200mm lens at f/2.8 because I wanted to blur out all the dirt on the glass. When I was shooting, I removed the hood and stuck the lens to the glass so that no flare would affect my image. You can also use this same technique to blur out the cage if you can only shoot outside a cage.
Although you do not need to wait for your target animal to appear when you photograph in a zoo, you still need to understand their behaviour so as to capture a good image. Most animals feel hot and find shelter at noon. They tend not to move around and just sit still or sleep instead.
You may not able to get a good pose because they are not going to keep the same pose for hours. One of the solutions is to find out when the feeding times are. When the zoo keeper takes the food into the cage, or glass house, you are going to have the best chance to get the best angle.
Do not be afraid of noise. Noise is so much better than a blurry image. When you shoot with a 300mm lens hand held, you have to get at least 1/300 shutter speed in order to achieve a sharp image. Boost up your ISO. I normally use automatic ISO selection so I can focus on composition and catching the targetâs movement. You can set a minimum shutter speed and a maximum ISO with most camera models. You will need this because when the target is moving, it will move between both brighter and more shaded areas. You are not going to have enough time to change the ISO if you shoot with Aperture priority or Manual mode.
On the other hand, open up to the widest aperture unless you are shooting in good sunshine. A larger aperture can give you a faster shutter speed which can reduce the chances of handshake. It can also help to blur out the foreground and background.
Unlike shooting in the wild, shooting in a zoo is limited by many restrictions. You cannot step into the cage, or even get as close as you want. Therefore, you need to look for the best angle. You can shoot behind a rock with a telephoto lens.
This will provide you with a blurry rock as foreground and the photo will have more depth. You may also get a nice perspective by shooting from an extremely low angle.
A zoo is the best place for practicing animal shoots in my experience. You can take more time to think about your images.
You are extremely safe when shooting. Hence, you can get more practice with both your camera and lens. Get the feel for how fast your 300mm focuses. Practice and develop better hand held skills so you may use 1/40 sec for a 300mm lens. (I still cannot do this. Learn how to press the shutter just as an egret is beginning to hunt. When you have enough practice, you can try going âwildâ.
The post 5 Tips to Take Better Images in a Zoo by Kevin Choi appeared first on Digital Photography School.
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A smartphone with no battery power is like bread with no butter. Inedible. Also, you canât take pictures with it. Boo.
With the Power Boost Keychain in your pocket, you’ll always have the power you need to photograph all that you behold. Yay!
No plug? No prob. It’s a backup battery ready to give your iPhone or Android a 30% boost.
All the cables are built right in, so you’ve always got the right connector to give your phone a charge.
And since it lives on your keychain, it’s always ready to replenish your picture-taking power.
Learn More About the Power Boost Keychain
$ 40 at the Photojojo Shop
Now someone invent a butter keychain, plz.
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