Frame Memory

Choose Best Photo Editing Software

2010-06-04T09:10:00.000-07:00

If you're serious about photography, and if you're looking for the best and most powerful photo editing program around, the de facto standard and market leader is Adobe Photoshop.

Unfortunately, with it's steep learning curve and equally steep price tag, Photoshop is overkill for the people who just want to play with their pictures. Photoshop has every possible feature that a digital photographer could want except a low price. What other programs are available?

Adobe recognized that their flagship product was a bit much for the beginner, so they scaled it back. With a few of the more complex features removed and a price tag under $100, Photoshop Elements still packs quite a punch, and might be considered the market leader in it's own price range. It has the same basic interface as the full powered Photoshop, and most of the same functionality.

Elements' leading competition is Corel's Paint Shop Pro XI, and some reviewers prefer Corel's product to Adobe's. Paint Shop Pro, in general, is easier to learn in many areas, and is just as powerful in most of it's tools.

Both Elements and Paint Shop Pro have red eye removal features and bundled photo organizer programs, and quite literally run neck and neck in terms of features and ease of use.

Another product on the market is the Microsoft Digital Imaging Suite. With the latest version, Microsoft has added wizards to help novice users work their way through the program. While the new features are an improvement, most reviewers still don't rank this product as highly as either Photoshop Elements or Paint Shop Pro. One feature that really stands out in Microsoft's package, though, is the slide-show program called Photo Story, which is much better than the equivalent in Elements. Photo Story is offered separately as a free download.

Top Landscape Photography Accessories

2010-06-04T08:48:00.000-07:00

There is a lot of photography accessories on the market today, some are very useful, but most of them are a waste of money. Here are five of the most important accessories for landscape photography.

Tripod

A tripod is important for one main reason, keeping your images sharp. You’ll want to select a small aperture to maximize depth-of-field, so you should be using a shutter speed of less than 1/60 second. It’s impossible to get a sharp image holding your camera in your hand at these slow speeds.

When choosing a tripod pick one made out of carbon fibers, these are light to carry but are sturdy in the ground. Choose a tripod that the legs will spread out far, this will help to optimize the strength of your support.

Filters

A small selection of filters is well worth packing when heading off for a trip. They don’t take up too much space and will definitely add a bit of spice to your images. A polarizing filter should be top of the list, while a few Neutral Density filters will certainly help with tough exposures. A 0.3, 0.6 and 0.9 will help with exposure without affecting colour.

Bring a few warm-up filters to help when the light is cool. The 81-series are the best choice, which will give your images an extra bit of life. There’s a large amount of filters on the market today; these are the most important filters for landscape photography.

Correct Film

Fuji Velvia is an obvious choice for me when it comes to shooting landscapes. This is a slide film that is high in saturation and is perfect for capturing the colour of all seasons. It comes in two speeds of ISO 50 and ISO 100.

It’s always handy to have a few rolls of Black and White film in the bag. You never know when you see a scene and know that it’s perfect for B/W. Whichever film you choose, bring plenty of rolls; don’t be caught in the middle of nowhere without film.

If you are shooting with a Digital SLR bring plenty of memory.

Cable Release

If your camera has a connection for a cable release you should buy one. It is a perfect accessory to minimize the risk of camera shake - especially if you are taking long exposures. It doesn’t take up too much room and is extremely light.

Light Meter

All modern day cameras have light meters built into them, but if you are serious about landscape photography it’s advisable to have a hand-held light meter. These are small and of light-weight, and when used correctly are extremely accurate.

These are the most important bits and pieces for your camera bag; other important accessories include spare batteries, a grey card and a few spare lenses.

Choosing Your Digital Camera Printer

2010-06-03T07:48:00.001-07:00

Choosing a digital camera printed can be so difficult and confusing, because there are so many types of digital camera printer. I just want to share a few main points you should consider when choosing a digital camera printer that will help make the printing process a little easier.

It isn’t necessary to have a high-resolution digital camera printer to make great pictures. The higher the printer resolution you use, the more pixels you'll need in your original image file to produce a decent size print with your digital camera printer. The actual file size (in pixels) of the image from your camera, divided by the printer resolution (in dots per inch), determines the final print size. So, if the image file size is 1,478 x 1,280 pixels, and you print the file at 163 dpi with your digital camera printer, the final print size will be 9 x 7.8 inches.

If your digital camera printer resolution is 300 dpi, then you will have a higher resolution with more dots per inch laid down on the paper but a smaller print size. It is therefore important to ensure that you have the image file size to support the resolution of your digital camera printer.

The price of a digital camera printer is lowering while the quality is increasing. If you choose the right digital camera printer you can have your own photo lab, greeting card designing and sign making department with just your digital camera, some software and a printer.

The aim of having a digital camera printer is to produce photographic prints that look as close to real photographic prints as possible. This type of digital camera printer was once very expensive to buy and run, but technological advancements and competitive pricing have made them much more accessible to the average buyer. Ink-jet printers are now available that can produce excellent prints and a near photo-quality printer is much easier to find for people with a small budget. You will probably want to have a digital camera printer with a scanning feature built-in. If you want to produce same-size scans of photos you don’t need scan resolutions higher than 300 samples per inch for the scanner.

Your digital camera printer should also have the same interface that you already have on your computer. So if you have USB, then get a digital camera printer with USB, a Firewire printer if you have firewire or a SCSI printer if you have SCSI. There should be no need to buy a digital camera printer that requires a different interface to the one you already have on your computer or it will cost you more to upgrade if necessary.

Tips For Self Mastering Digital Photography

2010-06-03T07:17:00.001-07:00

Digital photography can be difficult for some people. The most difficult thing that usually happen is “red eye” syndrome. I have five tips to improve your skills to mastering digital photography, even if you are using cell phone. Follow these tips and keep practicing.

Compose Carefully

Composition is one of the most basic digital photography you should consider. Pay attention to what is in the frame of the viewfinder. Fill the frame with nothing but blue sky, for instance, behind a single subject throws off the proportions of the photo and decreases interest.

Turning the camera sideways to see if a vertical photo might have more impact than a horizontal shot of the same subject.

You can also try positioning your subject off to the side, rather than in the center of the photograph.

Take Great Close up Photos

Your digital camera has a “macro mode” – think of it as a super magnifying glass. An extreme close up of something like flower petals can bring out textures that you never knew existed, and will add excitement to your photos. Play with this feature, you will find dozens of ways to use it to enhance your pictures.

Buy a Tripod

Digital cameras are prone to blurry photographs if your hands shake even a little bit. Several companies manufacture light, portable, inexpensive versions. Digital photography tips like this can save you hours of frustration and preserve otherwise perfect shots.

Get Active

Take your shot from the top of a teeter-totter, off the side of the boat, or standing on your head. Thinking outside the box can really pay off in unexpected ways. You will truly get once in a lifetime shots by adding a bit of creativity to your thinking.

Take a Photography Class

Are you still hungry for digital photography tips? There’s nothing like practice to improve your photography – except practice plus experience gained by learning from a pro. You can find photography classes online, at your local recreation centers, and community colleges.

Becoming an expert at digital photography takes time, you won’t become a professional photographer in your first week. Just keep trying new methods each time you use your camera, and before long, your friends and family will be admiring your newfound skills.

Cloning Digital Photograph

2010-05-01T07:29:00.000-07:00

In digital photography, the cloning tool is used to copy one part of the image into another area, or even into another picture entirely. If your beautiful picture of clouds at sunset is ruined by the ugly electrical wires running across them, it can be fixed. The wires can be painted right out of the picture by using the cloning tool to copy small bits of the clouds around the wires over top of them.

This technique can be time-consuming, especially if there is a large area that needs work. It is also very easy to do it badly, with results that clearly look like they were cloned. Remember to click on different areas of the picture to be the source of the cloning tool, because if you don't, you can easily get a tell-tale pattern in the texture of the image.

Cloning is also useful in other ways. Imagine two pictures of the same family portrait. In the first, Grandpa is yawning. The photographer saw that, and shot a second one, but he didn't notice Junior sticking his tongue at his sister in the second shot. Rather than throw away both pictures, the photo editor can take the smiling Junior from the first image, and clone it over the ugly one in the second photo.

Cloning is one of the most common tools used in photo faking, just as the family portrait example shows. One recent example is Lebanese photographer Adnan Hajj, who was fired by Reuters. He was caught using a cloning technique on his pictures, making battle damage in the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict look much worse than it really was.

My Digital Camera is Broken

2010-04-08T06:30:00.001-07:00

Updating and sharing personal photography is not an easy things anymore. Since my digital camera is broken because of my own mistakes for leaving the battery inside while not using it for a long time. But it is okay, I will try to share pictures that catch through my eyes using my phone camera until I can buy a new one.

Thank you for all of you that already visiting this frame memory photoblog. Spirit..

Black And White Photo Classic Look

2010-03-29T08:39:00.000-07:00

How stacked is your photo album? Are you keeping it updated as the years go by? Remember, you won't ever get them back. It's probably time to start preserving those special times. When I flip open an old photo album and glance through the variety of black and white photos from my parents’ childhood, I am simply amazed.

For some reason it's hard to remember our parents were children once too. We only know them as the adults they have become. I want my children to be able to do the same thing with me one day. So far my wife and I have accumulated around a dozen photo albums. We have two or three of them made up of black and white photos.

Some people actually prefer black and white photos since they tend to hide imperfections a little better. However, now days the digital cameras are so widespread and simple. So many photos are taken and downloaded to our laptops. This is much less expensive if you don't print them out.

Do you take a lot of pictures? Well, if the answer is no, then you should start. Pictures are the keys to great memories. I noticed that I did not start taking oodles of photos until I had my first child. Suddenly, I wanted to preserve every single pose. Some of my favorites are black and white photos.

These old-school pictures have a certain presence all their own. It's almost like they show a deeper emotion. There's something to be said about the lack of color. It allows us to see beyond the mere cosmetic factor. This is why my wife and I love to shoot plenty of black and white photos of our children and family.

In this modern world of color, it's rather hard to come by classic black and white photos anymore. If you've not dabbled in this area of photography, I suggest that you at least give it a shot.

Get some great black and white photos of your family and loved ones. If you would like a preview of some extraordinary black and white photos, you can always surf the web and find a spectrum to choose from.

The quality is not lost in black and white photos, it's merely the color. After dealing with both sides of the coin, I don't think I will ever prefer color pictures over black and white photos.

Setting The Camera White Balance

2010-02-18T07:28:00.000-08:00

How to setting your camera white balance? You will have to find this one in your manual. In a nutshell if the human eye looks at a sheet of white paper in the morning it looks white because our eye adjusts to whit automatically but the camera will see the paper as having a blue cast.

If the same bit of paper was held up in front of our eye at lunchtime and again at sunset our eye still compensates and sees the paper as white but not so with the camera. So you can set your camera at “auto white balance” which takes an average only and is most of the time incorrect.

You can change to the little icons for “sun” “shade” “incandescent” “flour” or “night” all of these are ok but nowhere as good as setting the exact white balance for the light you are in. Go to set white balance if your camera has it – say yes, then aim your camera at a piece of white paper filling the whole frame (you may have to turn of the auto focus) press the shutter release (like taking a photo) and it will be “set” just for where you are now – if you move to another area you would have to change is again.

It is important to note that when you set your white balance all the colours in your photo will be correct and without colour cast even if your subject is standing right next to a yellow wall.

JPEG Image Compression

2010-01-07T07:09:00.000-08:00

Have you been heard a lot of confusing stuff about JPEGs image file? Some people said they are perfect for online photography, and other people said that converting images to JPEG will throw away most of the quality of the picture. I don't want to ruin my pictures, so should I be using JPEG?

There is a grain of truth in both sides of this question. The bad news is, JPEG compression does throw out information in your picture. The good news is, most of the time, you're not going to be able to tell the difference.

JPEG compression works under the assumption that if two areas are almost exactly the same color, the average viewer is going to see them as the same color. If the entire area can be saved as one color, that's a lot less data to be stored in the file, and the compressed version becomes a lot smaller. Smaller images are important for both emailing and loading web sites.

As an example, JPEG compression might take a black shadow thrown against a very dark grey background, and remove the shadow, so that the entire area is roughly the same color. This is over-simplifying, of course. The end result is that fewer individual colors translate to a much smaller file.

The danger with JPEG is when a picture is compressed multiple times. One of the worst things you can do to a picture is to save it as JPEG three or four times in a row, because each save will compound the quality lost. Just like a fax that gets forwarded or a photocopy of a photocopy, the quality of the picture will suffer. After a couple of rounds through the JPEG program, it will be obvious where it decided to save space. For this reason, when you're editing your photos, always start with a lossless format (like PNG or TIFF), and don't convert your image to JPEG until the editing is done.

Photo Faking History

2009-12-15T06:55:00.000-08:00

Almost as soon as the first photographs came out of cameras, people were using them to manipulate images.

Take, for example, the very famous portrait of Abraham Lincoln, standing with one hand on his desk. Analysis in the 20th century showed that his mole was on the wrong side of his face, and further research turned up a picture of North Carolina Congressman John Calhoun in exactly the same pose. Someone in the 1860s had taken Lincoln's face and pasted it onto Calhoun's body, and the resulting fake photo was spread all across the Union.

Through the Civil War, photo staging was much more common than photo editing. It was very difficult to get an "action" shot because of the long exposure times, so war photographers would pose their shots.

Later, through the early twentieth century, photo postcards showing monstrous fish, grasshoppers, and crops were very famous, and nearly all of them were made by merging two shots into the same frame. As the Dust Bowl ruined crops, the postcards of apples the size of watermelons and corn cobs as big as fireplace logs showed a very dark humor, almost a sick joke.

Josef Stalin made photo editing famous, as those who fell out of favor simply "ceased to exist." There are numerous examples of pictures where people standing beside him have simply been painted out and forgotten.

Even magazines and newspapers today are not immune. One magazine over-darkened OJ Simpson's mug shot for it's cover, making him appear much darker and more menacing than he was in real life. And a number of photojournalists were caught using Photoshop tools on their photos to either merge two scenes into one or increase the smoke and battle damage far beyond what was really there.

Photo faking goes beyond simply posing a scene, because it's a blatant attempt to lie to the viewer.

Unhealthy Breakfast

2009-11-28T02:58:00.000-08:00

Breakfast is needed by everybody for giving energy to their body for work. Don’t wasting your time for having an unhealthy breakfast like this picture below. Use your time for searching fast but healthy breakfast recipes. I believe there are still a lot of choice of food for your breakfast for starting your hard day.

Wood Mushroom

2009-11-02T02:38:00.000-08:00

Just a picture of a wood mushroom growing on a death wood in a forest. Framed while take a rest inside Sungai Tolak forest.

Sunset in Tanah Lot

2009-11-01T02:32:00.000-08:00

I believe, almost all of you already know and visiting Tanah Lot. Bali is one of famous tourist destination. Tanah Lot is located in the southern part of Tabanan District in Bali Island, on the west side of Kuta Beach. In a clear weather, I can guaranty you will get a never forget able moment of sunset. So don’t wait any longer, choose Bali as your next summer vacation destination.

Sea Grass

2009-10-30T23:15:00.000-07:00

I captured this picture while visiting Tanah Lot Temple in Bali Island. I just love watching this sea grass and the water on it. Just a perfect small ecosystem I think. Hehe.. Just kidding.

Sungai Tolak

2009-10-30T01:50:00.000-07:00

Sungai Tolak is a name of a river located in Ketapang District, West Borneo, Indonesia. I visit this river with my friends for seeing Bekantan, which have a good population along side the river. Very nice journey using a small traditional boat, except the sun is shining so hot.

Half Moon

2009-10-29T22:05:00.001-07:00

I try to capture a half moon moment, but my camera resolution is to low. So this is the result.

White Orchid

2009-10-28T23:55:00.001-07:00

Blooming flowers especially orchid is will always catching your eyes. I got this flower and framed near my boarding house. Since I move out I never visit that place again, but lucky me still can enjoy this orchid picture. So white and clean.

Privacy and Policy

2009-10-03T20:15:00.000-07:00

Your privacy is very important to us. Accordingly, we have developed this Policy in order for you to understand how we collect, use, communicate and disclose and make use of personal information. The following outlines our privacy policy.

Before or at the time of collecting personal information, we will identify the purposes for which information is being collected.
We will collect and use of personal information solely with the objective of fulfilling those purposes specified by us and for other compatible purposes, unless we obtain the consent of the individual concerned or as required by law.
We will only retain personal information as long as necessary for the fulfillment of those purposes.
We will collect personal information by lawful and fair means and, where appropriate, with the knowledge or consent of the individual concerned.
Personal data should be relevant to the purposes for which it is to be used, and, to the extent necessary for those purposes, should be accurate, complete, and up-to-date.
We will protect personal information by reasonable security safeguards against loss or theft, as well as unauthorized access, disclosure, copying, use or modification.
We will make readily available to customers information about our policies and practices relating to the management of personal information.
We use third-party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit our website. Our advertising partners include, but are not limited to, Google. These companies may use information (not including your name, address, email address, or telephone number) about your visits to this and other websites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you. If you would like more information about these practices, used by Google, or to opt out of having cookies set on your system, please visit Google’s Ad and Content Network Privacy Policy page.

We are committed to conducting our business in accordance with these principles in order to ensure that the confidentiality of personal information is protected and maintained.

My Links of Interest

2009-10-02T04:17:00.000-07:00

If you had a some kind of photoblog and want to link exchange with me. Just place my blog link to your blog / web page (with anchor link "Frame Memory" and link address http://framememory.blogspot.com) and than post a comment in this post page. Your link will be placed in this page. Thanks for visiting.

My Links of Interest :

About

2009-10-01T04:29:00.000-07:00

Taking Pictures Help Me Refreshing My Mind

Taking Pictures Make Me Healthy

My Pictures Representing My Views

Just Another Amateur Photoblog

Cheers