Bulb mode for extended shutter times
When using film cameras, photographers rely on the camera's B setting, in combination with a cable release a shutter button on the end of a cord . The B setting short for bulb keeps the shutter open for as long as you hold down the release. Many a photographer has stood out in the cold, thumbs pressing down on icy cable releases, softly counting One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three Your digital camera probably doesn't have a B setting although a few do have Bulb modes . But...
Getting Photos Online with Shutterfly
Shutterfly is an online photo service that lets you store, share, and print your digital snapshots. Shutterfly gives you three ways to upload pictures. You can transfer photos one-by-one using your Web browser. With the help of a browser plug-in, known as the Picture Upload Assistant, you can upload several photos at once. Shutterfly also provides a standalone utility program called Shutterfly Express, which you can use to perform minor edits and then upload photos with a few clicks. Note At...
Enhancing Exposure and Color with a Single Click
If you're not quite ready to make exposure and color corrections on your own, EasyShare's Enhance button may just do the trick. First, select your photo in the My Collection window, click the Edit button, and then click Enhance Figure 9-4 . EasyShare examines your photo and then adjusts the overall exposure and brightness of the image and makes color adjustments. The result may not be perfect, but more often than not EasyShare does a pretty good job. Tip When you want to inspect and compare a...
Strategies to Protect Your Photos
Photos from your digital camera may not fade, crumble, or turn yellow like your grandfather's old prints, but they're vulnerable in a different kind of way. Digital photo files are nothing more than a series of 0s and 1s stored in a particular order. They only last as long as whatever media they're stored on, and CDs, DVDs, and hard drives are just chunks of plastic and metal that are vulnerable to water, fire, accidental erasure, and breakage. Scared yet Good. Here's rule number one for...
Taking the picture Adq
Once you've set up your inanimate subject and have the lighting just right, here's how to set up your camera for the shot Adjust your camera's white balance for the type of light you're using Section 3.2.2.3 . Uncorrected incandescent lights produce an overly warm reddish cast flash tends to produce images a bit on the cool bluish side. A tripod helps keep the camera in precise position. If your camera has a manual-focus mode, use it to lock the focus on the object's area that's most important...
Composition Explained
Composition is the arrangement of your picture the interplay between foreground and background, the way the subject fills the frame, the way the parts of the picture relate to each other, and so on. Before pressing the shutter, veteran photographers compose pictures by asking themselves a few questions Will the shot be clearer, better, or more interesting if you move closer What about walking around to the other side of the action, or zooming in slightly, or letting tall grass fill the...
Forcing the flash to fire
The solution to the situation in Figure 3-9 is to force the flash ona very common trick. If you're close enough to the subject, then the flash provides fill light to balance the subject's exposure with that of the surrounding background, as you can see in the bottom photo. If you're using your on-camera flash, stand within about eight feet of the subject so you can get enough flash for a proper exposure. The fill-in flash can dramatically improve outdoor portraits. It eliminates the silhouette...
Star Trails
If you really want to impress your friends with your budding photographic skills, try capturing star trails. Surely you've seen these dramatic shots one star, located in the center of the frame, remains a point of light, but all the other stars in the universe seem to carve concentric circle segments around it, as though the galaxy were spinning dizzily. That one fixed star, in case you were wondering, is the North Star. It remains steady as all the other stars seem to travel in a circular path...
Image Stabilizer Vibration Reduction
The hot new feature for 20062007 is built-in image stabilization. This feature, available in a flood of new camera models, improves your photos' clarity by ironing out your little hand jiggles. It's an enormous help in three situations when you're zoomed in all the way which magnifies jitters , in low light meaning that the shutter stays open a long time, increasing the likelihood of blurring , and when your camera doesn't have an eyepiece viewfinder forcing you to hold the camera at arm's...
Trailing Car Lights
You've seen this shot on postcards and in magazines neon bands of light streaking across the frame, with a nicely lit bridge or building in the background. The trick to these shots is to keep the shutter open long enough for the cars to pass all the way from one side of the frame to the other Figure 3-14 . Figure 3-14. Don't wait until complete darkness for this type of shot, or your sky will go pitch black. Twilight is the best time to Figure 3-14. Don't wait until complete darkness for this...
Apply the Rule of Thirds
Most people assume that the center of the frame should contain the most important element of your shot. In fact, 98 percent of all amateur photos feature the subject of the shot in dead center. For the most visually interesting shots, however, dead center is actually the least compelling location for the subject. Rather, artists and psychologists have found that the rule of thirds Figure 2-1 ensures better visual balance. Figure 2-1. Top When shooting a head and shoulder portrait, frame the...
Creating Panoramas
How many times have you showed a travel picture to a friend and remarked, It looked a lot bigger in real life That's because it was bigger, and your camera couldn't capture it all. Capturing a vast landscape with a digital camera is like looking at the Grand Canyon through a paper-towel tube. Digital camera makers have created an ingenious solution to widen this narrow view of life panorama mode Figure 1-8 . With it, you can stitch together a series of individual images to create a single,...
Creating a flattering effect with rim lighting
Once you've experimented with fill-in flash Section 3.2.1.3 , try a variation that pros use to create striking portraits rim lighting. Position the subject with her back to the sun preferably when it's high in the sky and not shining directly into your camera lens . Now set your camera to fire the flash the lightning bolt, not the automatic setting . If the sun is shining into the lens, block it using your hand or a lens shade. The first thing you'll notice is that the sun creates a rim light...
About These Arrows
Throughout this book, and throughout the Missing Manual series, you'll find sentences like this one Click Start gt All Programs Accessories Windows Explorer. That's shorthand for a much longer instruction that directs you to click the Start button to open the Start menu. Then choose All Programs. From there, click Accessories, and then click the Windows Explorer icon. Similarly, this kind of arrow shorthand helps to simplify the business of choosing commands in menus, as shown in Figure I-1....
Creating Flattering Headshots
In professional portrait photographs, everyone looks great. Surely photographers use some kind of tricksancient, carefully guarded trade secretsto make Uncle Ernie look so distinguished and handsome. On the contrary, there are no fancy secrets to great headshots. You can make any subject or any uncle look his best by applying the simple principles in this section whenever you shoot someone from the shoulders up. You can take good portraits even if you have the cheapest camera on the planet. But...
Burst Mode for RapidFire Shooting
When you press the shutter button on a typical digital camera, the image begins a long tour through the camera's guts. First, the lens projects the image onto an electronic sensora CCD Charge-Coupled Device or CMOS Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor . Second, the sensor dumps the image temporarily into the camera's built-in memory a memory buffer . Finally, the camera's circuitry feeds the image from its memory buffer onto the memory card. You may be wondering about that second step. Why...
Optical Viewfinder
Every year, digital camera screens get bigger. That's a welcome trend, because framing your photos and, later, showing them off to other people is a heck of a lot more satisfying when they're bigger than a postage stamp. These days, though, some screens fill the whole back of the cameraand leave no room for an optical viewfinder the little glass hole you can peek through . Plenty of people are perfectly happy composing their shots on the screen, but remember that holding a camera up to your...
PointandShoot or Single Lens Reflex
What type of photographer are you Do you always have a camera in your pocket or purse so you can pull it out for quick shots at work or at the ball park Or are you a photographer who loves toting around lots of gear and enjoys having the best tools for the job Do tripods and macro-lenses sound like fun to you Pro aspirations anyone Answers to these questions point you toward the digital camera of your dreams. Your camera should become a natural extension of your vision. If you and your camera...
Image Resolution and Memory Capacity
The first number you see in a digital camera description is its megapixel rating. A pixel short for picture element is one tiny colored dot, one of the thousands or millions that compose a single digital photograph. One megapixel equals one million pixels. You can't escape learning this term, since pixels are everything in computer graphics. The number of megapixels your camera has determines the quality of your pictures' resolution the amount of detail that appears . A 5-megapixel camera, for...