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.

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.

Budget Astrophotography

The book I read to research this post was Budget Astrophotography by William Becker which is a very good book that I bought from kindle. This book has lots of useful information but is only 49 pages and I think is priced at around £6.00 which seems a bit steep to me. I think the author should have made the effort to write at least 100 pages. I have to admit though a lot of the books on astrophotography are too pricey. I have a review of another book called Astrophotography which you might find interesting at http://claireabella29.com. Anyway this book does focus on doing astrophotography on a budget so in that regard does a good job. The author does suggest a DSLR which will handle the long exposures often of at least 30 seconds and should give good results unlike a compact camera. He does suggest using a 2x barlow lens & also you can buy adaptors for connecting them to a telescope. If you buy a heavy duty telescope capable of seeing other galaxies and nebulae you are looking at around $2,000 so that is probably too expensive. You probably have to make do with the Milky Way and planets. Having said don’t buy a christmas junk scope as they call the cheapest ones. You can use a webcam which there are instructions for modifying to either attach to a telescope or use with astronomy software like Registax & Astroart. Typically your camera will be set to a shutter speed of 30 seconds, an ISO of 1,600, an f-stop as low as possible and a distance rating of at least 200 yards. The stars often become distorted with a wide angle lens although that might be good for special effects. I did enjoy reading this book and will do more posts on this subject.

Digital Photography Cloud Computing Applications

The book I read to research this post was Photography Applications For Cloud Computing by Matthew Bamberg which is an excellent book which I read at http://safaribooksonline.com

This book is a decent and has 26 fairly short and succinct chapters mostly on different cloud platforms. The original photography cloud sites was Photobucket around 2003. Since then this market has mushroomed and there is a wide variety of different types of photographic cloud computing services. Many people have heard of Carbonite who promote themselves heavily on television etc and they do a free month trial and run a back up service and if you consider the current huge capacities of hard drives a month isn’t all that much time in terms of backing up your hard drive contents. Dropbox & Photoshop Express offer 2 GB of free data back up. Photoshop Express is a cut down version of the Photoshop software and lately Adobe have been offering their software suites as a cloud product for around £30 per month. Google has a whole suite of products mostly offered free including Google Drive which I think offers 12 GB of free storage and also they have quite a reasonable photo editing product in the form of Picasa. Another photo editing cloud product is Pxlr which is one of the best cloud photo editing products on the market. Flickr is a popular online photographic storage medium and gives you the chance to show your work to a wider audience. Many people have Flickr accounts and they let you upload 300 MB of photos per month to your account for free. There is a platform called Adobe Revel formerly Carousel that primarily works with iphones and ipods but that allows you to upload and edit your photos. I really enjoyed reading this book and a lot of the sites mentioned can be found by searching for them in Google Search. Something I’m struck by is what good value many of these cloud computing services with the many freebies offered and I think if you do it right you can just use free storage across several free accounts. One not mentioned in this book but worth checking out is Microsoft’s Skydrive which offers 15 GB of storage and don’t forget especially if you are a business entity Amazon do a complete range of competitively priced cloud services called Amazon Web Services.

 

Digital Camera Technology

The book I read to research this post was Advances in Digital Camera Technology by Phil Donald which is an excellent ebook I downloaded for free from kindle. I am only going to look at a few of the most interesting features mentioned in the book but I would if anyone is interested in finding out more they sign up to kindle and download the book which at only approximately 30 pages can be read quite quick. A recent development in a lot of the more expensive cameras is the touch screen which is a bit like that on the mobile phones except obviously it’s camera features. Another thing is sometimes you can change the light levels in the photo on the camera which previously you had to invest in a program like photoshop to do. Digital Cameras often take video and alot do it in HD which is called AVCHD and means you can play it back on a big HD television. Another development is faster SD cards the fastest being category 10 although your camera must be compatible and higher capacities. SD cards are commonly used to store photos. Yet another development is facial recognition where you can have the camera recognise upto 6 faces and the photo is optimized for them faces. On the really expensive cameras you have an LCD touchscreen where you can select the faces. Another thing is smile detection where ie if you are at a wedding you can set the camera to take a photo each time someone smiles although if you choose the highest setting it will be going off when someone only smiles slightly. Often cameras start at around 12 MegaPixels which means you can have large good quality prints. Finally another development on DSLR’s where you can change the lens is the light meter inside it and the viewer can get dust on them affecting your photos and on some cameras if they detect dust they vibrate saving you having to wipe it.

Digital Photography

The book I read to research this post was Digital Photography for Dummies by Julie Adair King which is an excellent book which I bought from Kindle. Many digital cameras double as digital video cameras. In addition many multifunctional items like smartphones & even some mp3 players can be used as cameras. If you are serious about digital photography it’s best to buy a dSLR camera and some of these have interchangeable lenses although you can usually only buy lenses that are specifically for that camera. Some cameras with a fixed lens let you change the lens view at the flick of a switch. One problem in the past was that a digital camera had to charge itself each time it was used which might take a few seconds but especially the more professional cameras are improving in this respect. Some cameras have fancy features like automatic red eye removal & smile detection. Red eye comes from if you use the flash which reflects off the retina. Smile detection only works when the person faces the camera but means when you photograph someone smiling the camera automatically optimizes its settings for that persons face. Some expensive cameras in the $8,000+ category prints photos at the back of the camera each time a photo is taken. Many photographers like wedding photographers use photo editing software but only use it to adjust the light levels. Photoshop Lightroom for the pc & aperture for the mac are ideal for this purpose. When you consider lightroom sells for around $300 & the full photoshop program for around $700 you can see savings can be made. I use photoshop lightroom for most of my photography purposes and use photoshop elements for any editing.

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.