Photo and Pictures

Knowing your camera is essential to make good photos. You need to dig down at the functions of it so it is your second nature. When you start learning the rules of photograph late you realize that is important to know the rules so you know when to break them.

Just to follow the rules will make your photographs boring since you will become very predictable. It is the photos that stand out and break the rules that you will remember, but you have to know how to break them.

Make it a rule to stand out breaking a rule, but follow the rules. Look for new angles something that make the photo stand out. Free you mind learning the functions of the camera. Let the functions be the tool to fantastic pictures.

Thus making less light reach the sensor you can making it more sunset than it acually is using a small Aperture and less light will reach the sensor. Thus making it appear more sunset than it already is. Remember that you have control of the light.

Let the light be the slave rather being a slave to light. Study the masters of painting and learn how to add atmosphere to your photo. You will add light to the existing where you really need it and remove light if you need.

A reflector is often making the light appear more than it is actually is. Gold will make a dusky day appear sunny. Dark reflector will remove light you don’t want. Remember that one colour next to another is always effected. Learn how colour effect each other by studying the colourwheel

Let the sharpness of the photo of the landscape totally make you feel awe. You win on placing something reflective or bright in the foreground lead the viewer in. Let him/her discover your landscape and try to let emotions run free.

It is discovery of the landscape and feeling the same awe as you that make the picture. Don’t forget to channel the emotions of the place. It is essential that you are trying to channel the emotions of the place to make the landscape interesting.

In any forum a common question is asked. Which camera is the best? Just now there is still debating if a DSLR, compact or microfourthirds is the best for just this person. All depends what you want to do with your camera. I still learn and use the camera on my telephone to learn composition. We have the forum where you can learn more or find inspiration.

It is much easier to bring a compact camera than a DSLR, but if you want to learn more about photo and settings a micro4/3 is for you. As you notice i don´t discuss brand. If you go with the large brands any brand is good to go and will do much to you. The camera is just a tool to take pictures. Nothing more nothing less. Leave people starting discussing.

If you are into editing photos DSLR take much better picture and maybe you are even into Rawfiles. If you are more then interesting to learn about photo and photoediting. Raw-files is your second nature. You love to dive into editing and learn more. DSLR are for you.

If you simply want to take pictures and sort them maybe do them smaller or larger. Compact camera will do this for you and save the result as jpg. There are alot of them point and shoot that have good result. The experience i have tell me Olympus and Panasonic is much more into the jpg conversion and do a better job than Canon and Nikon, which do much better in the Raw-files area. There are some compacts that have a good way with settings but the are often limit by the lens and sensor.

I am both interested in photo my family and learning about photography then microfourthirds are perfect. The sensor that pick up light are slightly larger and you are able to take great pictures and photo the family. It will be a little slower than the DSLR so don´t expect the rate of shooting DSLR copes with. It will be a perfect street- and family camera. You are probably being able to take some movies too.

Today i took my micro4/3 for a spin and was out with its gorillapod shooting macro. I think it went rather well even though there was some problem.

You as a beginner photograph are making some common mistakes. I collected 5 of them for you to read. You are bound to make more but at least you can stay away from these. Know from the beginning that everyone starts and know nothing as a beginner.

It is easy to feel that photo is too complicated. You always actually do what is simple for you. Making photo is simple and easy and should be fun. You learn as you go along. Feeling inadequate is quite common and you are not alone, as this is something the best photograph have in common with you.

1. My photo´s are really terrible.
At some point you certainly will feel that your photos stink. This is common even as an expert. Knowing this might help since you are on a learning spray and photos are actually improving as you go along. Getting to know your camera and your equipment. Let every photo count making it more perfect and see to it that you learn something on the trip.

2. Everything I do is partial wrong
Nothing you do is feeling right and changing the settings is making it worse. Those “mistakes” is common as you are learning and experimenting. You need to learn how to use manual settings. Auto settings isn´t bad these days and becoming better and better. You need to learn how to walk before you know how to run. Learning using priority modes is a way to learn manual setting at your own pace. That is why i recommend using the cellphones camera to learn how to compose your picture right.

At time you are ready to tackle manual mode and conquer it. As learning curve have improved and remember that you have a short way to deletion button on your DSLR.

3. My composition stinks
Learn from others professionals and painters. Rembrandts paintings often have great lightning. Learn from others mistakes so commonly do critic make you think of what you find good and you develop your own style. Use the mobile to train lightning and composition. You can join a group with cell phone camera or do a set as i.

4. I can’t afford the editing program.
It is perfectly wrong reason since you can find cheap software on the net. Firstly Xnview or Irfanview is two programs that even show your files even if you have used Raw-files. These programs are useful for simple editing like take away redeyes and shrinking the size. Remember to read the terms first but both programs should be freeware and free to use. There is always Picasa and Picnic, which both are owned by google and they are also free to use. There is actually no excuse of not being able to afford photo.

5. I don’t know how to edit my photo’s
This is a very common mistake and also very easy to remedy. Firstly you try out different solution on software. Not using levels and sharpening is the first thing to correct. Remember as you crop a photo you also remove information. Try therefor always to crop in your camera sometimes that is not possible though. I also try to have a good starting point as a beginner.

The morninglight will turn your photo much softer so think of the time as a modifier to your light. It will make your photo much softer in tones and let the subject has a much warmer tone. The light is important and plays a important role to the subject that you are portraiting. So let it be a concern to take pictures at the right time.

It might be well worth the wait or going up early one morning just to take that picture. Then aperture and shutter speed play a much less role and the actual time you take your photo is much more important.

You are already storing your photos on Flickr or Ipernity and want to do some effect. The photoservice Tuxpi already can get the picture from an URL and you can choose en effect. You then can save it on your desktop. There are several effects to choose from and you are to lazy to upload it in your photo editor.

Here you can choose an effect and then choose another one and you will get a result that show effect upon effect. Like my result with the filmstrip. You also can add text and so you can do a cartoon out of your own pictures. The rest is up to your imagination.

Remember bot to do it to special photos that you don´t anyone else to reach. Actually that photo you should have on your hard drive where it´s safe. Any picture you put on the net is unsafe so be careful what you choose to view to others.

I have had an breakfast meeting the staff of the Photographic museum and Nordic staff of Panasonic. At first when arriving at Slussen it seemed hard to actually find the museum. But after walking sometime and asking about directions.

The vice VD Charlotte Wiking of the Fotografiska explained to me that swedish people often have a hard time finding them but that people from abroad think its lovely to have the exhibition so central. I now that they for sure is near one of the most famous tourism stroke with all their great views of the city.

Panasonic was presenting their cooperation with the museum and they said it was in the breathe of innovation. They want to innovate and as i was talking to the nordic ceo all i could think is that if only they had in interest the photograph they should be sure they could use the microfourthirds with adapter.

It is strange that Panasonic is not talking about the existing adapters to any old lens that do exist, but i guess they want to sell their own lenses. The strength of micro-4/3 is that there are adapters that make you able to use any lens even though it is Nikon or Canon.

First we visited the exhibition of Joel-Peter Witken and being a very artistic photograph he surely is one end of the scale. It was strange that he is using dead bodies to portrait situations. The absurdity of the photographs took over. The we walked around looking at Annie Leibovitz exhibition for some time talking about photography being the common nominator.

Both Annie and Witken wanted to sit next to Lennart Nilsson at the opening and that shows how big he is abroad. I think myself he is a great photographer who is really innovative with photos of the unseen universe showing pictures of unborn children and likewise.

Local enhancement is a simplier name on sharpening your picture with a large radius. I use 30-50 points as a size when sharpening. I usually use a radius that is quite small when i sharpen my picture but here you use a very large radius thus will effect the contrast in the picture. I have played around some although effecting the haze.

I wanted some halo-effects on the picture and thus i wanted it to control the picture with strong contrast. If you take your time and play around with unsharp mask you can have some strange effects. It is vital that you know of local contrast since it is a useful tool.

Remember you also can do USM only on the light layer in LAB mode to have a sharper image that will not effect the coulor of the photo. Doing unsharp mask will effect the image in different ways making it somewhat darker and this you should know of.

Read more: Luminious Landscape

I have been using Xnview, which is a viewer software on most platforms. As one of its features is that it takes also Raw. Xnview is free to use even though it is not open source. I have been shooting in Raw and put the setting to Monotone. Thus still having the information in colour but seeing the result in B/W. This is a common trick to fool the camera thinking you are shooting in B/W while still having the information in colour.

It is working with my camera that is an Olympus E-PL1 and taking in the Raw file so it is also bound to take your new camera. Be sure to check it out that your camera is avaible first.

You need a software program after you shot to convert it to BW. I have used Xnview to turn the Raw-file to jpg then i used monomixer in Gimp to turn the photo to BW. Shooting this way you still got the information of colour but you see the result in camera as BW. Do you have questions please comment.

This knowledge is a good tool while you are learning which photo is suitable for BW because you will see the result directly and you are able to make a color photo if you like.