For those of you who were at image study last night, there were two broad themes – sharpen/contrast and focus on what the subject of your image is. I mentioned that I crop “out” from the center instead of cropping in, and here’s a brief video showing that technique. i use Lightroom 3, but I assume this can be done in other software as well – possibly without “bringing down the lights”, though. The image I use is a great example of things that we were discussing – the boy is the subject, and most of the background is of dubious value at best, but there’s an awful lot of that background.
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Folks have been asking for a way to visually identify each other. This is probably a good thing with all the new faces around. Having all of the new faces around is certainly a good thing!
So, as a start in this venture, we have added the ability to associate an avatar with your HDP blog account; to do this we are using the Gravatar service.
To set up an avatar, point your favorite web browser to: http://en.gravatar.com/, click on the button labeled “Get Your Own Gravatar Today” and follow the instructions from there. Make sure to create your account suing the same email address as you used to set up your HDP blog account.
That’s it… once you have created your Gravatar, everything else gets handled automatically.
I know that these pictures are small… maybe too small… but it is a start. Let us know if this will be “good enough” or if we should plan on looking for another solution in the future.
For the moment, the avatars seem to only show up associated with comments (not with posts too)… I’m not sure if this can be changed, but I’ll look into it.
Dave,
One of the suggestions proposed by a member was to add avatars to the website. I didn’t think it would be too easy to do but thought (with Frank’s assistance) that it could be done on the blog. I looked over my profile and cannot find anything that would suggest I can add a self-portrait.
Any ideas???
I have two babies that go to bed around 7, and need to be fed again around 10:30. I also have a wife who goes to bed around 8:30 so that she can be relatively rested after dealing with baby wakeups during the night. This means that from 8:30 until feeding time, I get to play with my camera. Last night, it was water-drop photography, and tonight was dropping-stuff-into-water photography. It’s actually pretty easy to do, so I’m going to do a quick writeup. The important thing here is that the flash(es) provide all the light. Like, ALL the light. And because the flashes fire so, so fast, the shutter speed doesn’ t matter – whatever you’re lighting with the flash will be absolutely frozen because the light is on for such a short time. Pics and writeup after the break
Hi everybody. I’ve recently started playing around with off-camera lighting, specifically Strobist-type setups. If you don’t know what Strobist is, check out http://www.strobist.blogspot.com/ for all the details – the site is run primarily by a guy named David Hobby, and he’s all about getting professional-looking light out of minimal equipment, for minimal cost. To get started, I finally pulled my flash out of TTL mode this weekend and started playing. I’m DEFINITELY not an expert in this field, and I”m sure some club members know far, far more than I do about this, but I figured I would document as much of my learning process as I can, and hope that it helps others. Click the “read more” link below if you’re interested, and feel free to post additional info/questions/comments below!.
It seems like a number of folks have been having trouble uploading photos and getting them added to their posts.
I believe that the trouble is the size of the images. Please re-size images to 500 pixels (or maybe 600 pixels) on the longest side. This is, in my view, large enough for viewing but small enough that images are easily transferred across the Internet.
Also the smaller the image the less likely it is that someone will “borrow” your image for use without your permission. certainly one can not make a very good print from a 500 pixel image.
Hopefully people will work though the learning curve and keep posting on the blog.
Please do not hesitate to email me is you have problems or questions.
— Frank
I’m sure that everybody in the club has a list of websites that they frequent, but since this is a blog, I thought I’d talk a little bit about photography blogs, and how I follow them. If there’s interest, I can write more about blog readers in the future, but here’s the quick overview:
RSS
RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” – the idea is that it’s a way for computers and programs to keep track of websites that change regularly – blogs, news sites, etc… This is done through an “RSS Feed”, which is a file that usually ends in .rss or .xml. You can see the RSS feed for this site by clicking on the “RSS” link in the right-hand menu.
Blog Readers
Blog readers (also known as “aggregators” or “feed readers”, among other things) are software packages that can either be web based, or a program on your computer. It’s increasingly common to see them as web applications. I use Google Reader, mostly because it integrates easily into all of the other Google services that increasingly run my life. If you already have a Google account, you can access Reader at http://www.google.com/reader. I’ve used www.bloglines.com in the past, but prefer some of the little tricks that Google Reader offers. Once you have an account with a reader application, you can start adding RSS feeds (the files I mentioned above).
My Feeds
I follow a few blogs, as well as some custom searches (which I’ll explain in a bit). You can subscribe to all of my feeds by adding this feed to your reader. Now, you might want to pick out some of the individual blogs, because if i add or remove any subscriptions, that will be reflected in that link. Some of the ones that I’ve found especially useful/interesting:
- Digital Photography School - http://feedproxy.google.com/DigitalPhotographySchool
- Strobist (note that people usually either LOVE or HATE this blog) – http://strobist.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
- Photoshop Insider by Scott Kelby – http://www.scottkelby.com/feed/
- The Big Picture – http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/index.xml
- Slickdeals Canon listings -
http://slickdeals.net/sdsearch.php?&search=canon&perpage=20&mode=forum&forumchoice%5B%5D=9&rss=1 - Craigslist Canon postings – http://boston.craigslist.org/search/?areaID=4&subAreaID=&query=canon&catAbbreviation=sss&format=rss
The last two on the list there are examples of custom searches. Many forums and message boards will have the option to save a search as an RSS feed. Once you’ve done a search, look for a reference to “RSS” on the results page. As new posts show up in the search results, they’ll automatically be delivered to your blog reader.
What else?
Does anybody else follow photography blogs? Any that you’d recommend? Post the RSS feeds in the comments!
Some excellent advice in here for the portrait photographer in all of us…
