Learning Photography - The Basics on How to Take Good Photos

Many people dread picking up the family camera to grab that perfect moment. Much of this is said to come from their misunderstand of the equipment. It can also be because people misuse the best camera of all, their own eyes. To become a great photograph 'taker' you need to have an appreciation of what goes into making a great photograph. Being a professional photographer I often see this king of image produced by beginners.

Seeing a wonderful Peak District scene is something that we all enjoy but often we do not realise that the camera does not see the way that we do. Human beings look about; our eyes constantly rove a scene picking out interesting elements which either appeal to some hidden primaeval emotion or an interest we currently have. Put these elements together an you have a wonderful scene to photograph.

For example in the Derbyshire Peak District you will find some great landscapes (primeval emotion), we will also see wonderful properties (current themes and aspirational). Often people will reach for a camera to record this image because it presses a few pleasure centres for us. We might even think that the image will look terrific on our lounge wall. The bad news it that we didn't see the quarry and Peak District limestone processing factory in the middle distance. The result is that when we review the image back home there is an amount of disappointment.

The point being that before you pick up a camera you really need to survey a scene. Look for the things in the prospective image that will cause problems when you take your photograph. quarry's (unless that is the subject) might be one to look out for. Equally there are lamp posts which have an unnerving habit of sticking out of people heads. If you are taking a portrait this is even more important, as it is so easy to have a branch of a tree poking out from the side of some person's head.

Equipment is another consideration. These days cameras can produce clear sharp results in a range of locations and conditions. It really isn't that important to invest a small fortune to get the right results. Many high street store will a mass of cameras; when you are starting out get a modestly priced model. many professional photographers use high end equipment because they are designed for constant use and will produce images able to be enlarged to poster size. Most people really don't need this functionality and simple 'point and shoot' camera will do. Some basic tips would be to look at your scene, don't try to fit everything in; pixels are cheap so just take more photographs. Bring the camera up to your eye whilst looking at the scene, not at the camera. This will ensure you don't have to search around with the camera to find the shot you wanted in the first place. Relax your arms and most importantly of all, squeeze the shutter button don't stab at it, this will cause camera shake and your picture stand a chance of coming out blurred.

Enjoy your photography and remember to enjoy it. Photography is an art that requires practice and with the era of digital photography upon us the art has never been so ap to have a go at.

David John King a photographer working and living in the Derbyshire Peak District, United kingdom http://www.davidjohnking.co.uk/

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Ways to Share Your Holiday Photos With Friends and Family

The advent of digital cameras has been liberating for amateur photographers and those who love capturing moments to keep. We're now liberated from expensive film and basic manual cameras, meaning we can take thousands of photos at a time, with great results every time and no costs of buying and processing film. However when we get back from holiday with camera packed full of images, it becomes hard to free those images from their digital realm.

The first problem comes from the sheer volume of photos. This is where you have to take time to go through the photos and try to be generous with the delete button. If you're taken several photos of the same thing, try to pick the best one or two and delete the rest. Often images that looked fantastic to the eye can be very dull in a photo, so remove these ones as well.

When you're purged the superfluous images you can think about sharing them with the world.

The first steps are to share them digitally. You might have thought about emailing them across to your friends, but photographs are large files and not many can be emailed across at a time. The best way to share photos with friends online is to find a photo hosting service. There are many online photo hosting services, from Facebook.com where you can share photos with friends in your social group, to site like Flickr, Picasa, and PhotoBucket which allow you to upload your photos into online galleries. You can then email your friends the link to a gallery and they can access all the photos via the web.

The final step for your favourite holiday snaps - to help give them a real value and enjoy them at their best, is to bring those photos out of the digital, and into the physical world.

There are many options for this. A very common option is to get prints of your photos in the traditional size that you may have received prints when developing them from camera film. Online photo hosting services often allow you to order prints in this way, and there are also other sites which specialise in this service like SnapFish and PhotoBox. Traditional images prints are one thing but in this digital age there are other exciting options. You can create a photo book, where photographs are printed on the pages in a book, which you can customise by changing the cover, image positions and text. It's a very fun way to browse photos and can make a great gift or simply a great photo book to place on your shelf to store all your holiday memories.

If you have one image you particularly love, you can have it enlarged a printed as a poster, on a canvas or even on a t-shirt. The digital photography world has really made capturing memories easier and more fun than ever. Make sure you give it a go next time you go away.

Sean Thompson - A lover of travel and tech.

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Commercial Product Photography - Turning Passport Photos Into The Mona Lisa

Believe it or not, commercial product photography is actually a good deal more complex than simply propping a product up against a sheet, pointing a camera and pressing a button. In fact, product photography is both an art and a science, requiring ingenuity and imagination, scientific know how and cutting edge technology.

Of course, that's not to say that you can't just prop a product up against a sheet or stand it on your desk, point a camera at it and press the button. Obviously both approaches will result in you having a photograph of your product. But don't mistake a photograph of a product with product photography. They may sound the same, but they have about as much in common with each other as your most recent passport photo and the Mona Lisa. The difference between those two is likely to be that your passport photo is a reasonably accurate, albeit unflattering image of what you actually look like, with no help whatsoever. The Mona Lisa is an artistic interpretation full of imagination, creativity and interest. Which is likely to attract more attention when hung in a gallery? If both images were available as postcards, which would sell better?

If you're still thinking that your passport photo has a pretty good shot, then either you are the reincarnation of Ms Lisa herself, or your ego is so big you can't see past it to the delusions beyond! No doubt you can start to see the difference between merely taking a fairly honest but unflattering photograph of a product, and using commercial product photography experts to create an image which is likely to catch people's attention, and encourage them to buy the product, or at least to find out more.

There are many techniques used by advertising photography studios, and of course a good deal of state of the art equipment too. Naturally it helps if you have access to a huge studio, infinity cove and an abundance of lights and lighting rigs, as well as cutting edge digital cameras and powerful photo editing software. But this alone won't convert your product photograph into the Mona Lisa. After all, you can sit inside a Formula 1 racing car, with some of the world's leading racing car technology at your fingertips, but that won't necessarily mean you'll win, or even come close, or even finish at all!

Technology is one part of the equation, but it's not the most important part. That lies in the heads of commercial product photographers, who know not only how to use that technology to best effect, but also how to create an image which sells. Sometimes it can seem that a product really is just a product. But you have to make people stop, take a look at the item, instantly see themselves holding it, or using it, and wanting to find out more.

If you can get people to imagine using the product, or even just holding it, then you've achieved a huge step, because once we have that virtual kinaesthetic experience of holding or using the product, it not only becomes more real, but our ownership of it becomes more real in our minds, greatly increasing the likelihood of us being prepared to take the next step and make the ownership real.

If you're running a small or medium size business and you're looking at creating some product photographs, then don't imagine that publishing their passport photographs will get people running in your direction. Sometimes it pays to get the job done properly, and in the case of commercial product photography it's more of an investment than an expense, and much more of a certainty than a gamble.

If you'd like to find out more about how commercial product photography can help your business, talk to The Packshot People, who can offer very affordable advertising photography services for small and medium sized businesses.

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