Archive for April, 2006

Creating a photography portfolio

You are into taking photos, obviously - so what do you do with them? Many of you probably make online galleries, or you create prints to hang on your walls - or perhaps you even sell prints to others. Eventually, as photography progresses from a mild interest via passionate hobby and into the realms of what could be seen as a professional career, you are going to have to create a portfolio of your images, to show to prospective clients. Heck, even if you have no clients, you will still want to make a portfolio. Imagine how great it'll be to show the grandkids!

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Stabilising a cheap tripod

Tripods are cheap as chips nowadays, but the cheaper ones have a few flaws. Most importantly, they are too light, and too unstable. So what do you do when you are working on macro stuff, and your tripod won't stop vibrating, or the high winds are trying to disturb your photographic peace?

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Soldering

Hi! Just a quick one - I just stumbled across DIY live's How to Solder guide (including the links at the bottom of that entry - pure gold-dust!.

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Getting the most out of a compact digital

Daniel posted a blog entry with a lot of valuable tips about shooting with the limitations of using a digital compact camera - most of it is common sense, but if you've never thought about any of it, it's definitely worth a quick read. Some of the points he brings up is using a low ISO to reduce noise, using custom white balance, using program mode, getting in close, and take a lot of pictures, to increase the chances of getting the shot.

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Is Your Darkroom Safe?

I stumbled across an article by Michael Fulks, which serves as a reminder that photography can be dangerous:

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Compact camera flash deflector

It's an old trick, but it's a goodie: If you find yourself in a pinch and need to bounce the flash off a compact camera, grab a piece of white card (my credit card has come in more times than I care to admit - good job they wouldn't give me a Mastercard Gold, because that would have eskewed the white balance :), and hold it at a 45° angle in front of the flash. That way, the flash will bounce via the ceiling, and you get far softer lighting than with a direct flash.

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Umbrella helmet lighting

People get extremely creative when it gets to getting the lighting right. My old mate Ed just tipped me off about one which is particularly weird. But as far as making people laugh, it works. The bonus? it means you can get some excellent lighting for impromptu portrait photography!

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Create your own distance meter!

One of our readers sent in an article from the mid-1930s, written by mr Edward J. Ramaley. It offers some old-skool tips on how to judge distances - a skill that was rather important in the days of rangefinders, before SLRs and autofocus.

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GPS-tagging your photos with EXIF

You know how your JPEG files have information stored about shutter times, focal lengths, your camera etc? Well, all of that info is stored in something called Exif tags (Exchangeable image file format). If you are geeky enough to ever have looked at the EXIF data specifications (more easily digestible on Wikipedia), you will have noticed that there are fields for co-ordinates inside the JPG file, much like GPS systems store world-positioning details.

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Removing the IR filter from an SLR camera

This one falls in the "if you are planning to do this, you have to hate your SLR" category. If you enjoyed our earlier tip about IR photography, you will probably have noticed that many cameras - especially DSLR cameras - have IR filters built into the body. Obviously, that means that you can't use it for IR photography. Unless you remove the filter, that is...

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