Photography

Adapted from Capturing Better Photos and Video with your iPhone (Wiley)

J. Dennis Thomas

Light is a fundamental element of photography. Understanding the impact that light has on your subject and overall scene is pivotal to your ability to create excellent pictures.

Light has different qualities that play important roles in the presentation of your photo to viewers. The quality of light in an image impacts what a viewer sees and it guides how they perceive the visual you’re presenting. Likewise, the direction of light, as it illuminates a subject, also has a huge impact on how the subject looks. This also matters a great deal to the quality of your images.

With a sharp eye and a little planning, you’ll be able to find the right light in almost any situation, and this will help you make the best images possible with your iPhone camera.

For this night shot of Dirty Martin’s hamburger joint in Austin, Texas, I used an adapter that allowed me to attach the iPhone to a standard tripod.

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Excerpted from Real World Digital Photography, 3rd Edition (Peachpit Press)

By Katrin Eismann, Sean Duggan, Tim Grey

If you’re looking for new territory to explore with your camera, then consider leaving the familiar world of daylight behind and venturing into the darkness to explore the magical landscape of night photography. In the deep shadows and mixed lighting of the nocturnal world even ordinary locations can become mysterious and beautiful. Long exposures, motion blur, the soft glow of the moon and stars, or the colorful wash of ambient street lighting all offer many interesting possibilities for creating intriguing images. The best thing about night photography is that it requires little or no extra equipment, and many cameras, even compact models, have the necessary controls for capturing images in low light. Apart from some basic equipment, all you need is a willingness to explore and experiment, and stay out a bit later (or get up earlier) than usual.

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Excerpted from Taking Stock: Make Money in Microstock Creating Photos That Sell (Peachpit Press)
By Rob Sylvan

As photographers, we’re all drawn to different types of photography. Certain subjects, locations, techniques, and styles exert a pull on our creative minds more than others and fit better with who we are in the world. I love to be outdoors as much as I love how photography helps me capture and share that love with others. Embrace and nurture whatever it is that pulls the strongest for you. Own it! Leverage those passions as you attune your mind’s eye to shooting for stock. The key concept to keep in mind when you shoot for stock is that you are creating the raw materials for someone else to use for his or her purposes. That is the whole point of stock photography. This may be a paradigm shift from what you are used to doing with your photography, so the sooner you can start seeing in that light, the more satisfying this process will become. One of the best ways to understand this point of view is to put yourself in the shoes of the people you are trying to serve.

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Yesterday, Getty Images announced the launch of Archive Photos from their Hulton Archive. I thought it would be interesting to see how difficult it is to restore these old images.

Before.

After. Marilyn Monroe: Photo by Baron/Getty Images

I asked Getty send me a few before and after photos. Negatives are most often very badly damaged – cracked, chipped, or otherwise in very poor condition, and the restoration process is long and involved. Restoring a single damaged image can take weeks, but the end result – a rare image in nearly-perfect condition – is worth every minute of work.

Look at these amazing pictures shoot with an iPhone 3GS and edited with Photoshop afterwards. It proves that great picts depend on great lighting, not the camera.

After the success of the widely popular stock photography sites Stockxpert and stock.xchng, Hungary based Dream Group is entering the stock photo marketplace once again with Stockfresh a brand new microstock offering. The new website aims to offer the best royalty free images in the market at prices everyone can afford - via a hassle-free, clean and easy to use interface.

At launch the Stockfresh collection features over 100,000 images for sale from top stock photographers and studios such as Yuri Arcurs, Ron Chapple's Iofoto, Monkey Business Images, Dmitriy Shironosov and many more. They can be purchased through a wide range of pay per download and subscription plans available at highly competitive prices, and with Stockfresh's exceptionally high artist commissions customers can always be sure that their money goes to the right place. In addition to this, the website's easy to use, intuitive and uncluttered interface helps customers save time on their projects.

Prizmo is an application that allows you to extract the photos and text from your digital pictures. It's highly useful if you want to document an exhibition or make a quick copy of many pages from a book.

You can achieve the same results with a scanner, Photoshop and an OCR application if you have the skills, but Prizmo provides speed, simplicity and a better experience.

Ariel Shamir of the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science in Israel has developed a promising technology that enables image resizing that is much more intelligent than rescaling or cropping. See the amazing video for details. Hopefully this tool will find its way into Adobe CS4.

How to get rid of this unsightly effect...There are many technical reasons and some disagreement as to why purple fringing occurs in digital cameras. These factors include the lens, focus, leakage between pixels, and more...

What to do! You have taken a lovely photo, only to take it home and discover this purplish haze around the edges of the subject??

The most common cause of purple fringing is low light with high-contrast boundary areas in an image. So in the case of my example above, I took a photo of a reflective surface on a sunny day with the sun shining behind it.
Oh woe is me! Well.. never fear.. there is a way to fix this photo using Photoshop, I am going to show you the way that was easiest for me, of course there are a number of ways to do this... but I found this method to be the easiest to remember and most effective!