The Westville Camera Club

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m always inspired by watching stories or documentaries about other photographers. When I see how hard they work it reminds me how much effort needs to be invested in this craft in order to be any good at it. Fstop are running a series of short documentaries on their Staff Pro team that are worth a watch. Part 1 and Part 2 have already aired and there are a couple of episodes coming up. So keep looking out for those. Having a look around their website I also see that they have quite a good “Community” section with tons of cool stuff to look at.

So do you know what the secret to photography success is? I couldn’t summarise it any better than Chase Jarvis did in the above two minute interview clip. Do you agree with his comment?

By the way, check out the Silber Studios Youtube Channel for loads and loads of video interviews and resources. 

The Sony α Portal

All the major camera manufacturers have started to put a little more effort in looking after their customers by putting together some great resource websites. This time its Sony’s turn with the “Sony α Portal” as its called. The do cover quite a good range of topics, but it is mainly geared towards beginners. So if you getting started with photography I definitely recommend it.

Want to play around with your camera settings and learn exactly what each setting does? Now you can, and you don’t even have to use your camera. Canon have put together this simulation website where they give you a virtual camera and you are able to play around with the settings, take photos and learn how each setting affects the way the photo comes out. Once you done, you can take the challenge and see how quickly you able to complete it. This one is aimed at begginers but try the challenge out anyway. Its quite fun.

More Free Books

David duChemin, a world humanitarian photographer has put together his second Craft & Vision ebook. The book covers “More Great ways to make stronger photographs”. Topics include: Making sharper images, learning to shoot in manual mode, balancing flash with ambient light, developing style and consistency, learning to see the light plus much more. Best of all- It’s FREE. Not only that you can get the previous version for free at the same time. Get it all right here.

In this article by DPS, they cover the When and How to convert photographs to black and white. In other words, how do you know which photos will be good candidates to convert to black and white? Not all photos look better or good at all when they are converted. And how do you use Photoshop to convert images to black and white? I’m sure most people can give you 3 different methods quite easily but some methods can cause a loss of image quality. Do you know which one is the best method?

This is really cool if you have some spare cash lying around… Joe McNally is an incredible photographer who has been shooting for National Geographic since 1987. (He photographed a story for the latest National Geographic on the shelves). His specialty is portraits and the use of off-camera flashes. He’s a true lighting master! He will be in South Africa giving workshops in Cape Town and Jhb which will be hosted by ORMS. Check it out here if you interested…

I’ve mentioned a lot of PDF guides by MakeUseOf. They write some very good guides although not always about photography. This one however is about photography… HDR photography. The guide covers everything from what HDR photography is, why you want to do it, what equipment is needed, how to do it as well as free software options that you can use to process the images. At the end there are also more links and resources to further help you with this technique. I know its not everyone’s cup of tea but if you want to give it a try, this is as good a place as any to get going… Be sure to check out some more of their great guides.

 

Two Inspiring Macro Porjects

Here’s two inspiring projects to try out with Macro photography. They similar in style but the second one looks a little bit more difficult…

The first one is from FStoppers and involves shooting colourful water droplets through a piece of glass, and making a pattern show in the droplets from an object behind the glass. Can make some nice abstract images.

The second one is a very similar concept but it requires shooting falling water droplets wich can be very tricky. But I’m sure you’ll agree the results are very cool. This one is by DIY Photography…

 

I was asked again about a Photoshop keyboard shortcut cheatsheet… I’ve blogged about this one before, but its one I’ve had on my desk for the past two years… Here is the download link again… Have you found a better one? Please leave a comment with a link to it.

Here’s another helpful cheatsheet… We all know that rules are made to be broken, but they also made to be followed. This helpful infographic produced by Digital Camera World, can be printed out and kept for your next portrait editing session. It suggests where the best places to crop a portrait are (green) and also those places that should be a no no (red).

Sometimes people tell you to use the ISO on your camera the same way that you would use the Aperture or Shutter Speed as if ISO was some magic bullet. While its true that today’s digital cameras cope with high ISO settings amazingly, with nature and science there is always a trade off. Do you know what the trade off for your camera is and how far you can push the ISO while still getting acceptable images? In this article by Light Stalking, they explore what these trade off’s are and give you some suggestions on when to “pump the ISO”. Check it out and maybe try perform the tests yourself…

This week’s roundup is a bit of a higher grade one. However the web is an important part of our lives and its good to get a deeper understanding about how our images look when we display them on the web. There’s two aspect I want to point you to. The first one about Color space and the second one about file types…

If you have a look at your camera’s settings, you will see that there are options for the “color space” to use… In this article by FStoppers, they look at what a color space is and which you should be using if you want to display images correctly on the web. Very interesting read and something to take note of.

Optimizing Images for the Web

The second aspect (for today) about displaying images on the web is that of which file type to save your files as. The idea is to keep the size to a minimum and the quality to a maximum. In this article by MediaNovak, they discuss what the best file types are for web images (usually jpg for photographs) and how to best balance the quality and file size.

Do you have any tips and tricks for optimizing your images for web display? If you do, please share by leaving a comment.