Digital Photo Secrets Book, How to Take Pictures Like the Pros
This past year our family was blessed with an addition in the form of an eight pound, three ounce baby boy so I knew that I would need to brush up on my photography skills.
I’ve always been the guy that is constantly ending up with one of his fingers blocking the shot.
Or blurring every picture because he doesn’t know how to set the shutter speed.
Or even most embarrassingly, leaving the lens cap on the camera.
Not exactly the best candidate to document those precious baby moments that you only get to see and document once.
When the holidays arrived, I knew that I had to get better at photography quick!
Doing some after new year’s shopping online, I came across an ad for an ebook offered at digital-photo-secrets.com.
I needed a quick solution, as everyone that has had a newborn already knows, running down to the book store isn’t always an easy thing to do.
After searching around a bit I finally hit on digital-photo-secrets.com, which has an e-book that promises to dramatically improve photography skills with the skills that professional photographers often use to get those great shots.
I cannot believe how much these tricks helped…
Read Full ArticlePicnik Lets You Edit Photos From A Browser
Sometimes you don’t need the Photoshop powerhouse for basic brightness or contrast editing.
I discovered this very useful tool for editing your pictures online from a browser. The web 2.0 site is called Picnik and like most web 2 stuff it’s in beta. What makes this application interesting is the tie in to your Flickr account. You can allow Picnik access to your Flickr account and do all your editing online.
The program is like a scooter to Photoshop’s Cadillac features wise but all the basics like contrast, brightness, histogram editing, crop, sharpen and red eye removal are there. There’s also about 14 filters and several special effects. It seems Picnik can add more as the product developes further.
Picnik certainly seems like an ideal setup with Flickr for travellers. Many photos end up being viewed online anyways so why bother with a desktop program for basic editng only to transfer the images again?
No doubt Adobe sees photo editing evolving to an online service. There are rumors of a partial online component in a future Photoshop version. That would get rid of pirated software and allow Adobe to continue charging money for application use. They would no longer need…
Read Full ArticleHard drive based camcorders from Sony and JVC-prosumer hard drive based digicams.
Hard Drive Camcorders for Christmas Consideration
Tired of all those mini DV tapes and Mini DVD’s? How about converting the video from tape or DVD to your computer for editing? Ever lost a tape or SD card of clips?
Say goodbye to all that BS and hello to hard drive based digicams.
Store all your footage onto the built in hard drive then when you are ready just transfer the resulting mpeg 2 files using Firewire or USB onto your computer for editing. Typical storage times are higher than on tape, lightweight, directly access your scenes, simple and quick in camera edit are some of the biggies in convenience. I anticipate this category is going to take off in the next few years.
Of course like every other gadget there are drawbacks. A big one, price, as hard drives are more costly than simply tossing a tape drive or mini dvd drive into a videocam. Plus, even though all these video cams can shoot stills, you would not want to use one of these as a replacement for anything less than a mediocre 3 megapixel point and shoot digital camera. The still image quality of even the best in the…
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