by Barry Craft

Before you start nature photography, you must have the correct lenses and cameras to take close up pictures. Most cameras do a fine job of taking landscape photography, however if you plan on photographing wildlife animals you may need a zoom lens since you will probably not be able to get as close as you would like without scaring the animal off.

Macro photography, on the other hand, is the photographing of small objects usually shot very close up. Things such as shells, insects, and small flowers are great subjects for macro photography. Some cameras have a built-in setting that allows them to take very good pictures close up. To get the best results though, you’ll need special lenses to take close-up shots. With the right tools, macro photography can be very beautiful and very rewarding.

Macro photography does require more patience. This is especially true when photographing small animals or insects. However, patience and persistence does pay off. Also if you are photographing outdoors the wind can play an important factor in the quality of your photos. This is because when you’re zoomed in close, even small movements can be very exaggerated and will cause your picture to be blurred.

A solution for this extra movement is purchasing various accessories for your camera. The equipment will help stabilize the flowers or plants especially in the moderate wind conditions. They usually clip onto the tripod and gently hold your subject in position.

To compose a great nature picture, you first must decide what you want to photograph. Do you find beauty in the sun shining through a leaf, or do close-ups of insects make you happy? If you have chosen plants, you only need to wait for the lighting to be right (whatever lighting you choose will give the photo personality and feeling).

If you choose to photograph animals, you must wait until one comes along at the right angle and stance. See our Wildlife Photography article for information on photographing animals.

To compose the best picture, put your camera on a tripod or hold it steady and still. A crooked picture will show a lack of experience while a straight picture will make the photo look more professional. Even if it is on a tripod, make sure the camera is level.

A great tripod will come with a built-in level to make this super easy. If it doesn’t, you can by one to snap on or use your guidelines to help find something straight in your photo to match up to. These tips will assist you in leveling your tripod and greatly improve the quality of your photographs. After this, you can begin taking pictures.

After you have practiced with your camera, try to take a nature picture that shows a feeling, such as joy or serenity. You might see the bright sun reflecting off of a window as joy, while the sun melting on top of the ocean may be viewed as serenity.

Try different lighting options or color filters to give your photo a different personality or capture an emotion of the scene. Practice with your camera enough and you will think to yourself, “Wow! I can’t believe that I took that picture!” Once you get even better, you can sell your photography, make large prints to hang on your wall or put your photos on a card, mug, pillow, etc. You will be rewarded with a smile and admiration from friends, family, and all viewers.

About the Author:

Barry Craft loves outdoor photography. For his latest tips to help you become a better photographer.Get FREE copy of his latest report entitled, “Top 10 Tips for Great Photo Composition” by visiting Nature Photography.

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by Barry Craft

With outdoor photography you can share the beauty of the wilderness with your friends and family. The first and most important rule when taking pictures of wild animals is to be patient! Good pictures require lots of it so make sure you move slowly and don’t scare the animals away. Keep far enough away to stay unnoticed, but close enough to get the good shots.

It’s important to remember that small animals will look small in a picture, unless you take the picture closer to ground level or the same level as the animal. This will make them appear bigger. You may need a zoom lens for this type of a photograph. This is probably something you will want to consider when purchasing a camera.

Even if you don’t get any good pictures on the first day, don’t get discouraged. There will be another opportunity to get that great shot. Remember that large wildlife can be photographed at a distance since they are big and can be seen easily.

Always be prepared since the right opportunity for that awesome shot can be there one second and gone the next. Be sure to capture the eyes of the animals that way it looks more like a portrait than a snapshot. This will make for a great photo.

Natural lighting is another important factor in outdoor photography. Depending on the time of year and time of day, your lighting will vary. The time of day, such as sunrise or sunset can give your photo a different personality and feeling because the angle of the sun will cast a different shadow.

You may have to use a fill flash to decrease the amount of shadows in the picture. The time of year also has some bearing on the lighting. The worst time of day to take pictures is mid-day, since the sun is directly overhead. The use of flash and help offset the harsh shadows the sun creates, especially in the middle of the day.

The best way to ensure image brilliance is to use a tripod. The tripod will bring out the best in the lenses that you buy. Make sure you buy a sturdy, rigid tripod, as this will create the best images.

Make sure to keep your lens clean since sand or dust can create specks on all of your photos. If there is sand on your lens, you may not want to try cleaning it yourself. See a professional because if you scratch your lens, you will have to buy a replacement or else have scratches in all of your pictures, which is no good.

After you download your images to your computer, you can use a photo editing program to tweak or enhance your already beautiful photograph.

About the Author:

Barry Craft loves photography. For his latest tips to help you become a better photographer.Get FREE copy of his latest report entitled, “Top 10 Tips for Great Photo Composition” by visiting Easy Photo Tips.

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by Barry Craft

The first thing you should understand before you buy a camera is megapixels. Why do megapixels matter? Megapixels matter because the number of megapixels determines the resolution and size of the image. The more megapixels, the larger a print of the image can be.

Most current model digital cameras usually start around 5 megapixels and go up from there. You will be able to get excellent quality 4×6 prints and even good quality 8×10 prints with that amount of resolution.

The next important thing when buying a camera is which type to get. An SLR (Single Lens Reflex) camera is expensive, but if you are looking for a high-resolution camera with excellent picture quality, SLR cameras are the way to go. This would be the digital equivalent of a 35 mm film camera.

if you have experience with 35mm cameras, you will recognize many of the same features and more. A very popular feature of the digital SLR camera is the ability to change lenses.

If you are not as particular with your photography and want a simpler camera to use, you may want to consider a point and shoot camera which generally will cost much less. In addition, point and shoot cameras are smaller and easier to use. Another advantage of this type of camera is they usually have many automated features and preset shooting programs which allow you to shoot beautiful photographs even if you don’t have much experience.

After you get a camera, you must choose a good memory card for your camera. The most popular types of memory cards for digital cameras are Multi Media Card (MMC), Memory Stick (MS), Smartmedia (SM), Secure Digital (SD), xD-Picture Card (xD), and CompactFlash (CF). Certain cameras require certain memory card types, so make sure you ask an expert which memory card is right for the camera you have.

One of the most important things to consider with memory cards is how many pictures you plan on taking it at one time before downloading them to your computer. Also if you plan to use the higher resolution settings on your camera, you will able to take fewer pictures so you may want to invest in a memory card that has a larger storage capacity.

You have to learn how to transfer the pictures from your camera when she take them since you can only sender and the pictures once they are on your computer. Your camera most likely came with the USB cable as an option. You can also purchase a USB card reader that plugs into your computer.

A memory card reader is a piece of hardware that plugs into your computer and then you remove the memory card from your camera and insert it into the card reader. Memory card readers are also usually faster to download your pictures than a USB cable. Using a memory card reader also allows you to save the batteries on your camera because the camera does not have to be on during the transfer.

It depends on what type of computer system you have but usually a message will pop up a telling you that your camera is connected. Depending on what type of software you have installed there would usually be some type of message where they would ask you if you wanted to transfer the pictures or edit them. If you’re using a Mac computer especially a newer Mac, iPhoto would pop open and a help tab would instruct you on how to download the pictures.

Once you have completed the download process and the pictures are on your computer, you can delete the pictures from your memory card which will free up additional space. That way you can take many more pictures. Is a very good idea to regularly make a backup copy of the pictures on the computer neither burn them to an external hard drive or perhaps any CD or DVD you invested a lot of time and effort in taking those beautiful pictures and you would not want to lose them.

About the Author:

Barry Craft loves photography. Get his latest tips to help you become a better photographer.Get FREE copy of his latest report entitled, “Top 10 Tips for Great Photo Composition” by visiting Beginner Photo Tips.

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There are always advancements being found in digital photography, which allow special moments to be captured with better accuracy than ever before. Now, with faster shutter speeds and better resolution, both expert and beginner photographers can take great pictures. Advanced editing options in today’s photo editing options make great pictures happen, even if you mess up with your camera.

Any good photographer will tell you that when taking a great photograph, timing is everything. Truly great shots only have a small window of opportunity to take the shot, whether it is a sunset or an important race’s winner. You must have quick reflexes and just know exactly when you should take the picture. Photography is considered an art form; since it is harder than it looks.

Most of us only come close to getting the ideal shot and never quite realizing it in the end. More often than not, our pictures have most of the elements, but they also have a tendency to fall short in a few key areas.

Even if you framed your subject correctly, maybe the lighting wasn’t exactly right. Maybe you didn’t remember to use red-eye reduction settings or flash. If you have any of these problems, this is where the photo editing software comes in.

When a picture is taken with a digital camera, it can be edited in only minutes to make it reach its full potential. Red-eye reduction, zoom features, crop features, and automatic color enchantment are just a few of the really neat features that a digital camera can have. Taking beautiful pictures becomes easier than ever when you have these tools within reach.

A photo editing program is really all it takes to make a great photo. If you mess up with something in the picture, it can easily be fixed with a photo editing program. Your camera is only your vessel from which great pictures come from. The photography editing program is the rest.

This is where the magic happens. By magic, I mean that you can use your picture software to change your images and do whatever you want to.

Everything that you need to take photographs, including cameras and software, can be found online if taking pictures is what you want to do. Digital cameras are very popular, so you can most likely find a camera that does what you want. Some important considerations when buying a camera are an easy docking option, so you can download your pictures and print or edit them, and one that takes good, clear pictures. Corel photo software and Kodak Picture are just a couple of the many photo editing programs available today.

Image from WikipediaSo, you need to buy a digital camera either for yourself or someone else. The problem is, you’ve never bought a digital before, and you don’t have the time to get up to speed on all the pros and cons of digital cameras. Well, that sort of speeds the process up already, as we’ve just eliminated all the professional grade cameras and move to the category of hobbyist or casual photographer cameras.

read the full article

by Dan Brown

Adobe’s Photoshop software is a very powerful image editing program that is by far the market leader for editing image files. I use Photoshop extensively when creating, and editing images for the web sites that I design. Almost all professional photographers and printers also use Photoshop to create all of the wonderful images that appear in magazines, billboards, and even on television. I am not the best artist in the world, but with Photoshop I have enough power to create brilliant images with tools that are built-in to the software. The coolest thing about Photoshop is that even as powerful as it is out of the box, there are many different plug-ins to make Photoshop even more powerful. The Photoshop plug-ins can be grouped into a few major categories which include 3D, color management, digital asset management, photographic, retouching, and special effects.

There are a few formats for digital photography, different formats have their own advantages. For instance the jpeg format is the default format used by almost every digital camera ever made. Named after its developer, the Joint Photographic Experts Group (and pronounced “jay-peg”) this format often lets you specify both image size and compression. At the moment you capture an image in this format a processing chip in your camera manipulates it based on the camera settings you used, and then compresses it to reduce its size. The changes made to the image cannot be undone later because it’s the final, altered image that is saved in the image file. Some of the original image data is lost for good. This is a handy format because it is the most basic and commonly used.

When the image is then opened and displayed by any application, the compression process is reversed more or less depending on which form of compression was used lossless or lossy. Lossless compression compresses an image so when it is uncompressed, as it is when you open it, its image quality matches the original source nothing is lost. Although lossless compression sounds ideal, it doesn’t provide much compression so files remain quite large. For this reason, lossless compression is only used by the highest quality image formats-namely TIFF and RAW.

RAW lets you decide on most camera settings after you’ve taken the picture, not before. For example, when you shoot a JPEG image under fluorescent lights, the camera adjusts the image to remove the yellow-green tint. Any changes you make later are on top of this initial change. If you shoot the image in RAW format, the camera just captures the images as is and you decide what white balance setting to use later. You can even create different versions of an image, each with its own white balance. RAW images can be processed again at a later date when new and improved applications become available. Your original image isn’t permanently altered by today’s generation of photo-editing applications even if they don’t support non-destructive editing. You can generate alternate versions of the same RAW image. For example, many photographers will adjust highlight and shadow areas and save these versions separately. Using a photo-editing program, they then combine the two images as layers and by selectively erasing parts of the top image layer let areas of the lower image layer show through so all areas have a perfect exposure.

As you take pictures, your camera automatically creates and names subfolders within the DCIM folder to hold them (like placing manila folders in a hanging folder). The first three characters in a folder’s name, called the directory number, are numbers between 100 and 999. The next five characters are known as free characters and can be any uppercase alphanumeric characters chosen by the camera manufacturer. When a new folder is created, as one is when the current folder is full, it is given a number one digit higher than the previous folder. Some cameras allow you to create and name your own folders, or select among folders the camera creates. This lets you route new images into a specific folder and also play back images from just one folder rather than the entire card.

The first four characters in an image file’s name, called free characters, can only be uppercase letters A-Z. The last four characters form a number between 0001 and 9999 and are called the file number. Canon uses the first four free characters IMG_ followed by the file number, Nikon uses DSC_, and Sony uses DSC0. Once transferred to your computer, or sometimes while transferring them, you can rename images with more descriptive names.

IPTC: Using an image management application, you can add information to an image such as keywords, a copyright notice, or a caption. The problem is that when you send the image to someone else, that information is usually not sent along because it’s stored on your computer in the database and is not part of the image file as Exif information is. (As you will see shortly, one solution to this problem is the xmp file.) To solve this problem, the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) defines a format for exchanging such information. Programs that support this standard let you add, edit, and view this information that’s embedded in a file just as Exif information is.

About the Author:

Discover lots more about editing digital photos and software like photoshop Get loads more info about editing digital photos than anyplace else.

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by Dan Feildman

Normally our eyes compensate for lighting conditions with different color temperatures. A digital camera needs to find a reference point which represents white. It will then calculate all the other colors based on this white point. For instance, if a halogen light illuminates a white wall, the wall will have a yellow cast, while in fact it should be white. So if the camera knows the wall is supposed to be white, it will then compensate all the other colors in the scene accordingly. Most digital cameras feature automatic white balance whereby the camera looks at the overall color of the image and calculates the best-fit white balance. However these systems are often fooled especially if the scene is dominated by one color, say green, or if there is no natural white present in the scene. Most digital cameras also allow you to choose a white balance manually, typically sunlight, cloudy, fluorescent, incandescent etc. Prosumer and SLR digital cameras allow you to define your own white balance reference. Before making the actual shot, you can focus at an area in the scene which should be white or neutral gray, or at a white or gray target card. The camera will then use this reference when making the actual shot.

Good photos result from the following elements: always having your camera with you; being in the frame of mind that you THINK about taking pictures when a good opportunity presents itself; experience in knowing what the camera can do and can’t do, such as how to adjust your camera to compensate for poor lighting conditions or anything else that doesn’t happen to be just right; have patience; taking lots and lots and lots of photos- the average professional photographer takes around 120 shots for every ONE that he/she actually uses and gets paid for; and finally, luck.

In order to be a photographer, you must be able to make decisions, not simply point a camera and press a button. Photography can be an important activity as it can help people, adults and children, understand what the media projects every day. Besides that, it is a good hobby, and photography can help people understand the world around them, especially through someone else’s eyes. It is a great way to bring together a community project as well. It is quite easy to touch the optics of a camera and leave fingerprints. The result is that your pictures do not turn out clear in certain areas. Or, the autofocus sensors (if your camera has them) can be fooled by the smudge you leave on them, and deliver blurred pictures. Regularly clean your optics with an appropriate cloth and solution (both obtained at any respectable camera store). Do not use tissue paper, your finger, spit or household cleaning solutions.

Color laser printers, once the stuff of dreams (or professional print shops); have rapidly become both more economical and more photo-friendly. The latest and greatest color laser printers cost under $300, produce high-quality color output, and features like PictBridge (that allows direct connection to many digital cameras) are starting to appear in this class. It’s looking like color laser printers may finally start to break into the huge home-office market, partly on their photo-printing strengths. Even without going to specialized photo paper, you can improve the quality of your printer’s output by careful paper choice. 24lb weight paper is best for most photo printing, though more expensive than normal 20lb paper, used for most printing. Lower weights will often bleed through too much ink; higher paper weights can cause reliability problems in typical home office printers.

While many consider themselves amateurs when it comes to taking artistic photographs, with a little study and an independent experimentation, most anyone with persistence could quickly become an expert in photographing works of art. What is the market for such a skill? With the Internet and e-mail the market for photographing works of art is growing by leaps and bounds. Those artists that have made it to the level of giving exhibits around the nation need excellent pictorial representations of their art work to market to various galleries. The greater exposure they enjoy the more art they will sell. One company sends sales people from one farm to another with an aerial photograph of their home in hand. There are few homeowners that will turn down a readily available heirloom photograph of their land unless they already have one. One other important market is to take photographs of buildings for insurance companies or architects who have just created an award-winning design of a life-time.

Focus on the eyes: This is an absolute. As in most portraiture, the eyes are the key to understanding the child. They reveal character, and most often have a lot of expression in them. If you don’t focus on the eyes you will always feel as if there is something missing from the photograph. There are of course artistic exceptions to this rule. For instance, the hand of the child at a particular moment might hold tremendous amounts of character and expression. Shoot as if you were three feet tall: When shooting from the child’s point of view of the world, you get the world as viewed by children. Also the child will feel safer and equal in the session. Let the children invite you into their space. Just find your inner child. Come on it’s fun! Shoot in couples or groups: Some of the best baby pictures I have ever taken are of children interacting with each other. There is something special and honest about the way they treat their peers. Be aware that some of your more active children may want to interact more violently then others. Props (especially soft ones) can be a great aid in both getting their attention and aiding in constructive interaction.

As news photographer becomes ever more popular it is important that you know the basics. Photographers in the field learn as much from their errors as their successes. It takes quite a bit of work but once you get it down pat then you can get professional shots. Here are a few expert tips on taking news photos: You need to zoom with your feet and not with your lenses. It is better to have a clear picture of what is happening by getting closer with the subject. Zooming the camera may create a blurred and low quality material. Do not use a camera light when it’s not necessarily needed. You may create a little angle on the light and not directly light the entire subject. You may flatten out all the images if you make the picture too bright for the background. Making great news photography needs a lot of skills and mastery in taking featured news shots. You should be creative and try different angles so that you will enjoy every situation you may encounter. Most importantly, it is through practice that you will make every shot a perfect catch.

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Learning Photography has become way better in the time it has been here. Having inquiries about photography? Look over a new report on newze action

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