Basic Photography

The book I read to research this post was Basics Of Photography by Irene Sheerow which is a very good book that I bought from kindle. This book is only around 30 pages so is quite short. This is a basic guide to photography and making money from your photos. There is also websites like twitter, flickr and instagram where you can display your work. It generally is best to specialize in one aspect of photography ie fashion. You can also display your work in a blog. There is a wide variety of types of cameras. Many use a camera phone for normal use like when out. When you are posing for photos women should keep hair away from their face and can sometimes play with it to get a nice effect. You can tilt the head slightly and have the subject slightly off the centre of the picture. Men can part there legs slightly and women can cross their ankles for full length shots. If you cross your arms it looks defensive. Men can put their weight on the front foot and women on the back foot. This gives men a more masculine appearance and women a more feminine one. This is a very interesting book I do recommend. I certainly enjoyed it and did learn a lot from it. A telephoto lens if used wrongly can decrease pixels in image and you should consider just coming in a bit closer if possible to get the subject.

Climate Change

The book I read to research this post was Climate Change A Very Short Introduction by Mark Maslin which is a very good book that I bought from kindle. Climate change consists of various cycles on the Earth one of which is the ice ages of the last 25 million years. In these ice sheets form in America, Asia and Europe and cover once temperate regions. There is also global warming where the Earth a cycle of warming up and cooling. these are dictated by convection flow between the various regions. It is estimated that currently 2-3 % of the worlds GDP would cover existing damage repair but this rises to over 20 % if tackled in the middle of the century. One thing is of course dependence of fossil fuels which cause global warming and the greenhouse effect with increasing the carbon dioxide increasing the tempertaure. There is also CFC’s that deplete ozone and increase the solar radiation getting through the atmosphere. There is also the depletion of the ice caps caused by warming that raises sealevels flooding land. With a rising population less and less resources is being spread more and more people. People in poor countries want the latest standards of living which can further make pollution worse. This book is around 200 pages so is a decent loength. It is interesting and I do recommend it.

Exposure and the Histagram

The book I read to research this post was Exposure and Understanding the Histagram by Andrew S Gibson which is a very good book that I bought from kindle. This book is around 60 pages so is fairly short. This book is part of a series of e-books on exposure and the various aspects associated with it and digital photography. The histagram shows your various light levels in a photo and this book looks at both adobe photoshop and photoshop lightroom. Many photographers only photo-editing is adjusting the light levels and you can achieve a lot with a pic in this way. In particular you should look at the curves slope which generally should tend to be gradual with out sharp breaks. You should bear in mind a photo is normally made up of red, green and blue and where these are all combined in equal measure makes white. You may have to adjust an individual color especially where it is an old photo that has decayed. Also you may have to adjust an individual color where it has either been under or over exposed. It also has some info on using raw mode which you generally use with DSLR cameras and provides more options especially with Photoshop. I did enjoy this book and do recommend it.

Digital Photography

The book I read to research this post was The Digital Photography Handbook by Doug Harman which is a very good book that I bought from a car boot sale. This book is aimed at hobbiests. There is some stuff on photo-editing as well as photography. The book is around 220 pages so is a decent length. You should buy the best camera you can afford. A mid-range DSLR camera is recommended. Get one that takes interchangeable lenses. You also need photo-editing software. The industry standard is adobe photoshop but many people use picasa which is a free program you can download. Many cameras have one permanent lens with different modes like different telephoto settings. These are mostly adequate but not as good as the real thing. I’d suggest for people doing photography and photo-editing as a serious hobby get adobe photoshop lightroom which is a photo-archiving program. Most people only have to adjust the light levels in their photos and this program does an adequate job of this. Finally if you are considering doing heavy duty photo-editing consider gimp v2.8 which is a free program you can download.

Electronics

The book I read to research this post was Electronics Made Simple by Henry Jacobowitz which is a very good book that I bought from a car boot sale. This book was published in 1982 so is quite old. It’s around 280 pages so is a decent length. It also contains lots of graphs of the characteristics of components on an oscilloscope which are mostly partly dependent on its rating. I thought these were quite useful. Of course since 1982 there have been huge developments including components shrunk on a minute scale. A diode is simply a component with an anode and cathode and the voltage is kept constant. There are triodes, tetrodes and pentodes with various numbers of anodes and cathodes and these can reduce the voltage. Trtrodes and pentodes can have shielding on the outside to form capacitors. A capacitor stores electricity for a brief period.You can have switches that often have gas in side and 2  apart contacts that can close or open depending on what you need. Magnetism is often used to close these. You can have mercury filled ones for a heavy duty rectifier. A rectifier changes AC current to DC current normally. In electronics there is also radio waves that travel at the speed of light and bounce off the ozone layer in the atmosphere and reflect a signal back to earth but a long way away. I did enjoy reading this book and do recommend it.

Smart Photography

The book I read to research this post was Smart Photography: Get Off Auto Diane Griffiths which is a very good book that I downloaded from kindle. This book is part of a Smart Photography series. This particular book looks at the basic manual settings for a camera and does a good job of it. Shutter speed is like a window shutter and you vary the speed it opens and closes. Too fast a speed darkens an images and too slow blurs it. A fast speed is needed for something moving or bright. Aperture is like the pupil in the eye varying the light getting but never blocking it entirely. Higher numbers darken an image. ISO is a left over from film speed days and for normal use use 100. A dark image might require 400 or 800 like a cathedral interior. A high number can create noise in the image. Photos are normally taken as JPEGS but can also use RAW which gives more options when working in photo-editing software. It can also be used with things like HDR or High Dynamic Range Photography where several photos at different settings are combined to create a more complete one. The camera doesn’t have the light range of the human eye but this can be overcome in HDR Photography.

Modern Chemistry

The book I read to research this post was A Modern Approach To Comprehensive Chemistry by GN Gilmore which is a very good book that I bought from a car boot sale. This book is intended for British A level students and is around 370 pages so is a decent length. You must get a minimum of 2 A levels and 3 O levels at good grades to stand a chance of getting to university. At A level and doing a university alot of self teaching and studying is expected. The time you spend with a teacher is limited and there is a steep learning curve. This book was published in 1982 so is quite dated. Carbon is able to bond to other identical atoms hence you can get very complex molecules especially living tissue. The majority of substances known to man are organic in nature. A molecule that is organic can also appear in 2 or more forms with identical numbers of atoms which we call polymers. Diamond the hardest substance known to man is essentially pure carbon with each atom linked by 4 covalent bonds. Graphite also a form of carbon by comparison is very soft due to different bonding. The size of an atom compared to carbon 12 is called its relative atom mass. There is more than 1 form of carbon such as carbon 14 and we call these isotopes. These unusual forms can often be radioactive. Due to being radioactive they decay changing maybe in several steps to eventually something more stable. We call this decay its half life. It is measured in the time it takes for half to decay and anything from a fraction of a second to millions of years. I did enjoy reading this book and do recommend it.

Apple Watch

The book I read to research this post was Apple Watch 101 The Complete Guide by Ryan Tracy which is a very good book that I downloaded for free from kindle. The apple watch comes in 2 sizes 38 mm and 42 mm and is priced from $ 349 up to a rather huge $ 18,000. To get the most out of it you need to use it in conjunction with an iPhone. You can make calls on it for example but it drains the battery rather. The battery life between charges is rated at 18 hours but this depends on how you use it. The operating system is called watch iOS. Initially it will have around 1,000 apps available with some of the more mainstream ones like Facebook and Instagram incuded on the watch. It has a rotating bezel to select stuff and a button to actually select and turn it on or off. You hold the button until it turns off to turn it off. It has various health features like monitoring calories used and heart beat many of which were available on the iPhone with various apps. It includes versions of iTunes and Siri. There isn’t an inbuilt GPS app but these are available to download. You can store uprto 8 credit cards in a secure payment system so you can pay for stuff without having to print your details each time. This book is around 20 pages so is quite short. It’s an enjoyable read and I do recommend it.

A Brief History Of Time

The book I read to research this post was A Brief History Of Time by Stephen Hawking which is a very good book that I bought from a car boot sale. This book is around 230 pages so is a decent length. A film recently was made about Stephen’s life and Eddie Redmayne won the Oscar for Best Actor for his portrayal. He is probably the greatest physicist of his generation and this book is his defining text. He explains a lot of complex concepts like the string theories and blackholes in language you can mostly understand. He did have a progressive debilitating illness for most of his life and many people regard him as almost as great as Einstein and Newton. I did very much enjoy this book and definitely recommend it. The subject Stephen specializes in is blackholes where if a star has more than a certain critical mass it eventually collapses and becomes one. A star like our sun will become a red giant then a white dwarf. The sun is less than that critical mass. Stars like Cygnus X-1 has got a nearby black hole and is 6 times bigger than our sun.

Photography Hacks

The book I read to research this post was Photography: Photography Lighting Hacks by Eric Adamo which is a very good book that I bought from kindle. This book primarily about landscape photography for the enthusiast. It is around 25 pages so is quite short. When you take a photograph you decide what the main thing in the photo is often called a subject and it needs to be a little off the centre. Many people divide the photo into thirds to get this effect. You need a mid-range DSLR camera preferably by Nikon or Canon and it needs to be rugged and have decent features. He suggests having a set of polarizing filters particularly good if the weather isn’t ideal. You need to experiment with these. The ND type are good to start with. You need a tripod because sometimes you will have to take long exposures. The best thing you can do to learn photography is practice and experiment with different settings. If a photo is less than perfect you can always delete it. You also should get Photoshop and Photoshop Lightroom softwares. At the moment Adobe do quite reasonably priced cloud packages with these. Photoshop Lightroom is a photo archiving software that lets you store your photos and do simpler tasks like adjust light levels. For many people this maybe all you need. Photoshop is the industry standard photoediting software that lets you do virtually anything you could possibly imagine to a photo. Bear in mind there is a steep learning curve to this software but if you do learn it, it is definitely worthwhile. I did enjoy this book and do recommend it.