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.

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.

Lightroom 4

The book I read to research this post was Lightroom 4 by Jordan ferris which is a very good book which I bought from Kindle. This ebook is on a special offer of about £2 for this week only. Much of this book consists of the keyboard shortcuts for Windows & Mac. I own Lightroom 3 & very well may get Lightroom 4. Photoshop & Photoshop Elements are photo editing programs & are primarily intended for artists. Lightroom on the other hand is a photo archiving program with only basic photo editing features although it’s intended for the serious photographer. One thing I noticed with Lightroom 3 is that it will even import from an iPod & I think has a much wider range of digital cameras it will import from than the traditional Photoshop programs. If you enjoy this post I did a post on Lightroom 3 on my computing blog at

http://scratbag.me

It might be worth a look. In Lightroom 4 it’s still quite simple to import stuff. You merely check your settings & then click import. They recommend importing as a DNG file which is compatible with all Adobe programs. If you have stuff imported into another program it might be necessary to reimport it into Lightroom to use it in that program. A final point I bought Lightroom 3 off an Amazon Affiliate & got quite a good deal. It might be worth considering that if you want to get Lightroom 4 cheap.

Digital SLR Cameras & Photography

Some of what tend to be the cheaper SLR and the standard digital cameras have a light meter that only covers a small portion of what you are shooting. With these cameras what you see on the lcd screen isn’t necessarily how the photo is going to turn out. An option if you have a camera is to use an external light meter that measures the light reaching the subject.

I also want to talk a bit about RAW format it isn’t a single format, in fact there are several dozen and a manufacturer might have several for different models. Contrary to popular belief it isn’t unprocessed either. If you buy a program like photoshop or paint shop pro they contain RAW converters that convert most RAW formats. Some people use a third party RAW converter, some you have to buy and some are supplied free with the camera.

Digital Photography Lighting

I noticed I’ve got a comment so I’ll briefly answer that. If you get a book on the iphone get one on the iphone 4 because that is the latest one and also there is a post on the ipad and it does mention the ipad 2 which is the latest one. For anyone who lives in the UK I’ve noticed there’s a store chain called maplin and they are selling a Disgo 6000 7 inch Touchscreen Tablet which has android on it for £79.99 which I think is a good price.

Anyway the book I read for this post is Digital Photography Lighting for Dummies by Dirk Fletcher which I got from the local library. I have to admit it’s a good book particularly for anyone who is new to digital photography.

Most photographers think sunlight is the best form of lighting. What you should be hoping for when taking a photo is for the viewer to not notice the lighting. When someone is taking photos in the studio and they are a newcomer to photography they should get used to lighting which is always on rather than the type that flashes briefly because they have to get used to seeing the different effects. There are two types of meter there is spot meters which measure the amount of light at a certain point and reflective meters which are the type found in cameras and measure the amount of light as a whole. When photographing a subject it’s often a good idea to slightly blur the background.