Friday, October 7, 2011

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.


http://EzineArticles.com/6480620

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Sony Cybershot Digital Camera A Contender for the Best Digital Camera Under 200 Dollars

Pocket size Sony Cyber-shot DSC-HX5V is the best digital camera under 200 dollars. But don't be fooled by the light weight, pocket-sized digital camera as it offers fast shooting performance. Integrated backside-illuminated Exmor R CMOS sensor, BIONZ image processor and a Sony G lens with powerful (10x optical zoom, 25-250 mm range) wide-angel mega-zoom (30 mm) facilitate in taking stunning shots even in low-light conditions. The videos are recorded as brilliant AVCHD video with amazing clarity and enhanced detail.

The rounded grip molded into the right side helps in holding the camera and taking steady shots. The spectacular metal body comes in three stylish colors: black, silver and classic gold. The DSC-HX5V has a 10.2 megapixel resolution. It can also be used in vertical format to get a 3424 x 1920 ultra wide-angle images. The 3 inch big and bright LCD displays the crisp and clear images.

The camera can shoot up to 310 images during battery life. Other exciting features include the built-in GPS (Global Positioning System) receiver, a digital compass, Transfer-Jet support, cropping, face detection, blur warning, smile and blink detection, PRINT image Matching and the Sweep Panorama function. Direct printing feature enables you to print your favorite shot by simply connecting your digital camera with the printing machine, sparing you the hassle of connecting it to the PC first. The internal memory has the capacity of 45MB however, the memory can be extended with the help of SD/SDHC memory cards and Sony's proprietary Memory Stick Pro Duo cards.

Specifications:

• 10.2 megapixel resolution
• 4.1 x 1.1 x 2.3 inches in dimensions
• Weighs 0.375 lbs ( 170 g)
• ISO (80 - 3200)
• 2x Digital zoom
• Automatic focus adjustment
• TTL contrast detection
• BIONZ processor
• Frame movie mode 25mm equivalent wide-angle 10x high-zoom G Lens
• 11 shooting programs
• auto hdr Mode
• ( iSCN ) Intelligent Scene Recognition
• Powered by Sony NP-BG1
• 310 shots or 155 minutes
• Optical Image Stabilization
• Max. Shutter speed 1/1600 sec.
• Min. shutter speed 30 sec
• Continuous shooting speed 10 frames per second
• Face detection
• White balance mode
• Video captured AVCHD - 1920 x 1080
• Internal memory 45 MB
• Compatible with SD, SDHC, Memory Stick Duo, Memory Stick PRO Duo, Memory Stick Pro-HG Duo.
• Built-in flash
• 5 flash modes
• Self-timer (2 sec- 10 sec)
• Digital Image rotation
• USB 2.0 compatibility
• Direct Print
• PictBridge support

Although the camera does support RAW, it has the option to adjust aperture settings manually. A bunch of cons that this camera has to its name include lack of boost light sensitivity results in lower resolution, soft photos and Geo-tagging which requires software on a Window PC. In short, this digital camera is suitable for casual photographers who like cool-factor extras backed by impressive performance. Price ranges from $189.00. The digital camera delivers good quality shots and videos making it the best digital camera under 200 dollars.

William L Odom is a passionate photographer who enjoys both writing and photography. He writes articles on anything from a review of a digital camera under 100 dollars, to finding out the best digital camera under 200 dollars.

William also looks at digital cameras best buys outside this price range, and reports on those too.

William writes reviews for online photo press. He highlights the camera's features and gives his honest opinion of them, enabling the user to make a better qualified decision on their digital camera purchase.


http://EzineArticles.com/6497036

Sunday, October 2, 2011

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.


http://EzineArticles.com/6504270