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2008-12-11T13:26:00.001+08:00

How to Be a Curious Photographer

Source Digital Photography School

Photo by -bwr-

A few months ago I wrote a post on how curiosity is a characteristic of great photographers.

I was rereading this post earlier this week and began to ask myself a few questions:

How do some people end up more curious than others?

Is Curiosity a personality trait or can it be learned?

How can I be more curious?

As I pondered these questions I thought of the images that I see each day on Flickr’s interestingness pages (the shots in this post come from there). Some of the shots are just so unusual that I would never have thought to take them. Obviously there are some ‘curious’ photographers behind them - but how do they do it?

I’ve never studied this but I suspect that while curiosity could well be something a personality type thing and that some of us will be more naturally curious than others - it is also that we can all probably learn how to be - to some extent.

How can you add Curiosity to your Photographic toolbox?

10 Ways to be a more Curious Photographer:

Photo by elTwitcho

1. Don’t be held Captive ‘the Rules’

There are a lot of ‘rules’ going around when it comes to photography. Read the books (read this blog) and you’ll find them. Some of them have formal names like ‘rule of thirds’ and ‘the golden ratio’ while others are often just called ‘the right way to…’.

Rules are a great thing to know (and use) - however the curious photographer often takes great shots because they not only know the rules but because they set out to break them.

Take the Rule of thirds - sometimes the most powerful shots are those with a centered subject staring down the barrel of the lens.

2. Ask Questions

Curious photographers are always asking questions. Questions of other photographers, questions about their own work, questions about their cameras, questions of their subjects etc

As a result they often learn things about their art (and themselves) that the rest of us don’t and their work improves because of it.

Find someone with the same camera as you and ask them how they use it. Find a photographer from a different genre to you and ask them about their techniques. Look back over your last month’s photos and ask yourself what you did well (and not so well).

3. Ask ‘What if…’

One of the key questions you should get in the habit of asking is ‘what if’? Curious people don’t just ask questions - they also come up with solutions.

Many of the solutions will end up being thrown away but if you ask ‘what if’ enough times you’re bound to make progress eventually.

What if I held the camera on this angle…. What if I got my subject to stand like this…. What if I lay on the ground to take this shot…. What if I lengthened my shutter speed…..

Photo by gakrid

4. ‘Turn Questions into Quests’

An old teacher once used this phrase with me and it’s stuck in my mind ever since - ‘turn your Questions into Quests’.

Asking ‘what if…’ (and other questions) is not enough. Keep a record of the questions that you ask yourself and keep coming back to them from time to time to attempt to find a solution to the problems behind the questions. Taking your questions to the next level like this may not always be fruitful but at times it’ll lead you on journeys of discovery to unexpected places.

Set yourself quests and challenges for your photography. I occasionally set myself a list of photos that I want to capture in an afternoon or will have a week where I explore a theme (the assignments in our forum are great for this).

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5. Learn from Others

While sometimes the best way to learn is by trying, making mistakes and then trying again - sometimes it’s more effective to find someone else who has already tried, made mistakes and tried again to help you avoid the pitfalls of photography.

Find another photographer to buddy up with when you go out on shoots. Swap ideas, give each other tips and share the lessons that you learn. This is actually whey I started this blog and more recently our forums - I want to learn more about digital photography and I know together we’ll discover so much more.

6. Put disconnected ideas together

Edward De Bono has a lot of different exercises that help people develop lateral thinking skills. In a number of his books he talks about how one way to think outside the box is when you put random ideas together to find new solutions to problems. Get in the frame of mind where you regularly do this and you’ll be surprised at how your mind comes up with wonderfully creative things.

The shot above of the guy under the umbrella with capsules dropping down on him is a prime example of this. Who would have ever thought to put drugs raining down on someone under a bright umbrella?

Photo by Anoxlou

7. Play

Perhaps the most curious of people are children who do a lot of what we’re writing about here (especially asking questions).

Another thing that children do is ‘play’. With no other agenda than having fun and seeing what happens next children will play with the things around them and experiment and push the boundaries of their environment. In doing so they learn about life, themselves and their world. I find that it’s often when I take this ‘playful’ approach to life that I’m at my most creative and make all kinds of discoveries.

Some of my best photos have come out of periods of ‘play’ when I just fooled around with my camera with no agenda at all. Play with new angles, with different shooting distances, with shooting from different perspectives etc

8. Go with the Flow

One of the biggest blockages to creativeness and curiosity are statements like:

We’ve never done it this way before

This is Stupid

It will never work

It is often directly after such statements that ideas stop being explored, projects end and people return to the humdrum of life.

Learn to ignore such statements and follow your intuition and hunches and you might just find yourself doing something that ‘has never been done before’ that people wish HAD been done before. I’m sure many of the images in the Flickr interestingness page are the result of this evolution of ideas by people who didn’t know when to stop.

Photo by J.Star

9. Get Proactive

One of the main things that I notice about curious people are that they rarely sit still and are always pushing forward and taking the initiative. Curious photographers don’t expect great photographic opportunities to come to them - but instead they actively search for them. They have a mindset where it almost becomes natural to ask, seek and find the things that the rest of us hope that will one day fall in our laps.

Grab your camera, get out of the house, find some interesting subjects and start shooting. That great shot won’t just come knocking on your door!

10. Slow Down

We live in a fast paced world where we race from one thing to another, rarely sitting still.

Unfortunately it is easy to bring this way of life into our photography. We impatiently wait for ‘the shot’ and when it doesn’t quickly come we snap away and move on. However in most cases photography isn’t a fast paced medium. I learned this talking to a Pro Landscape photographer once who told me that some days he’d sit in a spot for a full day and only take a handful of shots. He had learned to slow down, to see the smaller subtleties of life, to be patient and the results were that his work was truly magnificent.

Set aside a few hours this week to go and sit quietly in a pace in your town or city and watch the world go by. Don’t set yourself an agenda - just watch and when you see something worth photographing take the shot.

2008-12-11T13:25:00.001+08:00

Moving Toward Manual Settings: Understanding Basic Daylight Exposure and Equivalent Exposure

Source Digital Photography School

In this post, Hawaii photographer Natalie Norton wraps up the 4th post in her series on manual camera settings - this one exploring Basic Daylight Exposure and Equivalent Exposure.

Don’t miss other installments.

Part I: Understanding Aperture

Part II: Understanding Shutter Speed

Part III: Understanding ISO

Wow! Is anyone else as excited as I am about the stuff we’ve been learning about manual settings?

I know that for a lot of us it’s old news and rudimentary to say the least, but to quite a few DPSers out there, this has been just what the doctor ordered.

Thank you for all the email love letters!

I’m SO glad the info has been helpful and that it’s starting to click! Congratulations!!

Today we’re going to wrap it all up in fancy cellophane and call it a day! We’re so close. Again, if you haven’t read first 3 articles in the series I suggest checking them out before you read the rest of today’s post.

The first thing you need to understand today is BASIC DAYLIGHT EXPOSURE (BDE). This is also referred to as the SUNNY 16 rule. Basically this is how it looks if you’re one of the remaining wackos who understand equations ;):

BDE = 1/ISO @f16

If equations aren’t your cup-o-joe, then think of it like this: To achieve proper exposure on a bright sunny day, your ISO and your shutter speed are going to be the same when you’re aperture is set at f16. This will ALWAYS be the same as long as it’s a bright sunny day. Now from here, and I’m not gonna lie to you, we get to run our brains over repeatedly with a Mack truck. BUT, I promise you it will all click if you give it a second and you’ll be a superstar photographer forevermore.

Basically what the phrase “equivalent exposures” is referring to is achieving the same exposure while manipulating the depth of field in different ways.

Let me illustrate:

Let’s say you’re out at the beach on a bright sunny day. So you think to yourself, “Hey, Natalie taught me all about Basic Daylight Exposure! I’m gonna try it out!”

So you set your ISO to 100 (see here if you’re like “a whoobie what’s that now!?”) and thus you’re going to have a shutter speed of 1/100th. . . because what’s the equation for BDE?? Basic Daylight Exposure = 1/ISO at f16. So you’ve got your shutter speed and your ISO matched up and you shoot your aperture on up to f16 and SNAP! You’ve got a great, perfectly exposed beach scene. You can see mom and dad clearly in the foreground. You can also see the kids playing in the water behind them, also in clear focus. You can see the boogie boarders in the background in clear focus as well. Your image is perfectly exposed, not too bright, not too dark, JUST RIGHT!

So you’re thinking you’re hot stuff until you think, “You know, there’s a lot going on in this photo. There’s really no focal point. It’s TOO BUSY!” You decide you’d like to focus only on mom and dad and throw everything else in the image out of focus. . . you’re going for a shallow depth of field. SOOOOO what’s a girl to do? . . . or a boy as the case may be. Well, clearly you need to open up your aperture, right? Open that baby up to give you a more shallow depth of field. Now we understand from the post Understanding Aperture that in order to OPEN our aperture to let in more light and cause a shallow depth of field, we’re actually going to be setting the camera on a LOWER aperture number. So we open that baby on up to f4 and SNAP! . . . uh oh, what the heck happened?? We have an image that is just pure white! All light. Completely blown out. NOW WHAT? This is where Equivalent Exposures come into play. . . this is also the point where you really need to have read the other articles in the series. Part I, Part II, Part III. GO! For the rest of you, let’s break this down:

You had a correct exposure of the beach scene when your camera was set to ISO 100 at 1/100th of a second f16.

When you dropped the fstop down to f4, you let in WAY too much light and ended up with an image that was completely blown out.

The obvious answer would be to increase the shutter speed, right? To let in less light? You got it! BUT, by how much? How do we know how fast our shutter speed should be? Equivalent Exposures. That’s how.

Since you started at f16 and went down to f4, how many stops did you change your aperture by? Look at the chart below, that you SHOULD have memorized if you did your homework from Part I. . . and see how many FULL STOPS you had to move to get from f16 to f4. Go on and count ‘em.

In the chart above you see the TRUE apertures. Those highlighted in blue are the common apertures for most lenses.

That’s right, 4 stops. You went down 4 FULL F STOPS to get from f16 to f4. . . now here’s the secret of life. . . you simply have to match that number of stops with your shutter speed to achieve the same exposure with a different depth of field! In other words, since you opened your aperture by 4 stops, you simply need to speed up your shutter speed by 5 stops in order to ensure that the same amount of light hits your sensor as it did at f16. . . THUS ACHIEVING THE SAME EXPOSURE WITH A DIFFERENT DEPTH OF FIELD. “Bing!” That was the sound of the light bulb going off in your brain. It’s OK to be excited. It really IS that simple. Don’t be scared to go back and read it again if you need to, but don’t make it harder than it is.

The chart above is an illustration of Equivalent Exposures. Each setting above will allow the SAME amount of light to hit your sensor. The exposure will be the same in each instance, the only difference would be the depth of field.

Let’s do another little quiz:

You’re at a horse race. . . because that’s something normal people like me do all the time, we go to horse races. Anyway, so you’re at a horse race and it’s bright and sunny out, but with a few clouds in the sky. You decide to use an ISO of 200. So, using BDE, what’s your camera going to be set at? ISO 200, 1/250th (250 because it’s the closest shutter speed to your ISO of 200) at f16.

You take a shot of Ocean Muffin, the fastest horse in the race, check your LCD and decide that you’d like to see more movement in the shot. You want to show just how fast Ocean Muffin really is! What are do you need to do?? Slow down your shutter speed, that’s right. So let’s say you decide to drop your shutter speed by 2 full stops. So you’re now at what? You should have these memorized by now if you’ve read the other posts in the series. You’re now at 1/60th of a second. But remember, when you slow down your shutter speed, you’re going to be letting in more light, so what else do you need to do? Close down your aperture (higher fstop) by 2 stops. Now your aperture would be at what? F32, right.

That way you can keep the same exposure and still show Ocean Muffin in all his magnificent glory. HOWEVER! What if your camera only goes up to f22? OH NO NO NO! What ever will you do now? You need to drop your shutter speed by 2 stops to catch O.M’s movement, but you can only close down your aperture by one! What else can you do? I’ll give you a hint, check out Part II in the series on shutter speed (the link’s up top). That’s right, your ISO also affects your exposure, right? So, I’d go ahead and move my aperture by one stop and adjust my ISO by one stop, taking it from 200 to 100. . .that way I’ve adjusted my exposure by 2 stops to compensate for slowing down my shutter speed by 2 stops! YAY, the world is right again!!

NOTE: Because I don’t use a light meter, I almost always start out using BDE and then adjust accordingly until I find the right exposure for the light I am in. This is one of the many reasons to hail the LCD screen as king of the world and all things that are good. . . you can SEE if your exposure is dead on and tweak it bit by bit until it is! I’ll start out with BDE and then see that my image is too dark. . . so usually I’ll work with the fstop first. I’ll open it up until the image is properly exposed and from there I’ll use Equivelant Exposures to find the right exposure and depth of field I’m looking for! Easy cheesy.

I KNOW that some of you are ready to rip your hair out, because this can be really confusing. HOWEVER, go back and read the first 3 posts (I, II, III all the links are up top) . . . then read and re read this one, and I promise you it will become clear. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE feel free to ask follow up questions in the comment section. . . also PLEASE offer tips that have helped you move toward manual settings that may be able to help the rest of us! Let’s make it an open dialog and help each other out!!

Happy Shooting!

Natalie Norton is a wedding and portrait photographer who resides on the North Shore of Oahu, Hawaii. Check her work and more tutorials on her popular blog, Pics and Kicks at www.natalienortonphoto.com.

2008-12-11T13:15:00.001+08:00

11 Surefire Landscape Photography Tips

Source Digital Photography School

Photo by Auto matt

My first love in photography when I first got my trusty old Minolta SLR as a teenager was landscapes. There’s something about getting out in nature with the challenge of capturing some of the amazing beauty that you see. Perhaps it fits with my personality type - but I loved the quietness and stillness of waiting for the perfect moment for the shot, scoping out an area for the best vantage point and then seeing the way that the light changed a scene over a few hours.

While I don’t get as much time as I’d like for Landscape Photography these days - I thought I’d jot down a few of the lessons that I learned in my early years of doing it. I’d love to hear your own Landscape Photography tips in comments below.

Landscape Photography Tips

1. Maximize your Depth of Field

While there may be times that you want to get a little more creative and experiment with narrow depth of fields in your Landscape Photography - the normal approach is to ensure that as much of your scene is in focus as possible. The simplest way to do this is to choose a small Aperture setting (a large number) as the smaller your aperture the greater the depth of field in your shots.

Do keep in mind that smaller apertures mean less light is hitting your image sensor at any point in time so they will mean you need to compensate either by increasing your ISO or lengthening your shutter speed (or both).

PS: of course there are times when you can get some great results with a very shallow DOF in a landscape setting (see the picture of the double yellow line below).

Photo by hkvam

2. Use a Tripod

As a result of the longer shutter speed that you may need to select to compensate for a small aperture you will need to find a way of ensuring your camera is completely still during the exposure. In fact even if you’re able to shoot at a fast shutter speed the practice of using a tripod can be beneficial to you. Also consider a cable or wireless shutter release mechanism for extra camera stillness.

Related Reading - Introduction to Tripods

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3. Look for a Focal Point

All shots need some sort of focal point to them and landscapes are no different - in fact landscape photographs without them end up looking rather empty and will leave your viewers eye wondering through the image with nowhere to rest (and they’ll generally move on quickly).

Focal points can take many forms in landscapes and could range from a building or structure, a striking tree, a boulder or rock formation, a silhouette etc.

Think not only about what the focal point is but where you place it. The rule of thirds might be useful here.

Related Reading - Focal Points in Photography

Photo by OneEighteen

4. Think Foregrounds

One element that can set apart your landscape shots is to think carefully about the foreground of your shots and by placing points of interest in them. When you do this you give those viewing the shot a way into the image as well as creating a sense of depth in your shot.

Related Reading: Getting Foregrounds right in photography

5. Consider the Sky

Another element to consider is the sky in your landscape.

Most landscapes will either have a dominant foreground or sky - unless you have one or the other your shot can end up being fairly boring.

If you have a bland, boring sky - don’t let it dominate your shot and place the horizon in the upper third of your shot (however you’ll want to make sure your foreground is interesting). However if the sky is filled with drama and interesting cloud formations and colors - let it shine by placing the horizon lower.

Consider enhancing skies either in post production or with the use of filters (for example a polarizing filter can add color and contrast).

Photo by hkvam

6. Lines

One of the questions to ask yourself as you take Landscape shots is ‘how am I leading the eye of those viewing this shot’? There are a number of ways of doing this (foregrounds is one) but one of the best ways into a shot is to provide viewers with lines that lead them into an image.

Lines give an image depth, scale and can be a point of interest in and of themselves by creating patterns in your shot.

Related Reading: lines in photography“>Using Lines in Photography (mini-series)

7. Capture Movement

When most people think about landscapes they think of calm, serene and passive environments - however landscapes are rarely completely still and to convey this movement in an image will add drama, mood and create a point of interest.

Examples - wind in trees, waves on a beach, water flowing over a waterfall, birds flying over head, moving clouds.

Capturing this movement generally means you need to look at a longer shutter speed (sometimes quite a few seconds). Of course this means more light hitting your sensor which will mean you need to either go for a small Aperture, use some sort of a filter or even shoot at the start or end of the day when there is less light.

Photo by 3amfromkyoto

8. Work with the Weather

A scene can change dramatically depending upon the weather at any given moment. As a result, choosing the right time to shoot is of real importance.

Many beginner photographers see a sunny day and think that it’s the best time to go out with their camera - however an overcast day that is threatening to rain might present you with a much better opportunity to create an image with real mood and ominous overtones. Look for storms, wind, mist, dramatic clouds, sun shining through dark skies, rainbows, sunsets and sunrises etc and work with these variations in the weather rather than just waiting for the next sunny blue sky day.

9. Work the Golden Hours

I chatted with one photographer recently who told me that he never shoots during the day - his only shooting times are around dawn and dusk - because that’s when the light is best and he find that landscapes come alive.

These ‘golden’ hours are great for landscapes for a number of reasons - none the least of which is the ‘golden’ light that it often presents us with. The other reason that I love these times is the angle of the light and how it can impact a scene - creating interesting patterns, dimensions and textures.

10. Think about Horizons

It’s an old tip but a good one - before you take a landscape shot always consider the horizon on two fronts.

Is it straight? - while you can always straighten images later in post production it’s easier if you get it right in camera.

Where is it compositionally? - a compositionally natural spot for a horizon is on one of the thirds lines in an image (either the top third or the bottom one) rather than completely in the middle. Of course rules are meant to be broken - but I find that unless it’s a very striking image that the rule of thirds usually works here.

Related Reading: Getting Horizons Horizontal

Photo by curious_spider

11. Change your Point of View

You drive up to the scenic lookout, get out of the car, grab your camera, turn it on, walk up to the barrier, raise the camera to your eye, rotate left and right a little, zoom a little and take your shot before getting back in the car to go to the next scenic lookout.

We’ve all done it - however this process doesn’t generally lead to the ‘wow’ shot that many of us are looking for.

Take a little more time with your shots - particularly in finding a more interesting point of view to shoot from. This might start with finding a different spot to shoot from than the scenic look out (wander down paths, look for new angles etc), could mean getting down onto the ground to shot from down low or finding a higher up vantage point to shoot from.

Explore the environment and experiment with different view points and you could find something truly unique.

2008-12-11T13:14:00.001+08:00

Digital Storage for Your Images - Organization 101

Source Digital Photography School

How to store your digital images is an issue that faces every digital photographer at some stage. In this post ChristinaNichole Photography shares some tips on how to do it.

I once met a very talented photographer at a digital photography class. The topic of discussion was digital image organization. Of all the students attending this class, she was extremely distraught. When asked if she needed assistance, her response was, "I never knew how to organize my pictures before, so I kept them all in one file. Where do I start?!?

Not the best-case scenario.

Though not an overwhelmingly fascinating subject, without a doubt digital storage and file handling is one of the most important lessons a photographer can learn. In the digital age, when we have opportunity to store hundreds of thousands of images on one laptop or hard drive, things can get pretty complicated to go back and try to find "that one picture of Aunt Helen at Johnny's 6^th birthday party". Especially if you don't have an established workflow and file handling system.

Organizing your images will be one of the most time intensive and equally time saving tasks you can perform as a photographer. You don't want to spend hours looking for that one picture if you can simply search your catalogue for it by a single keyword or date.

Various photo organizing programs can assist you in your organizing. You can customize this organization with most programs if you import directly into the program. This list of programs would include Picasa by Google, Aperture by Apple, and Lightroom2 by Adobe. Though these programs will help you exponentially, it's helpful to begin with these general starting points:

Upload your images using a unique file naming system. This way, each image has a unique name in your catalogue. This makes for super fast retrieval later on and no worries on 2 images having the same name! You have a few options with file naming, just choose a system that works well for you, and don't change it. I find the following works best for me: Date, day, initials, image number: [2008-10-20_CND_0001.jpg]

Upload your images into dated folders. For example, if I have two shoots on the 20^th of November, I upload all of my images into that date [11-20-2008]. In my organizing program, I will then make separate collections for each shoot - all still in that single folder. [Folder >11-20-2008> Folder > Harmon Shoot]. Retrieval becomes a matter of less than 2 minutes.

Once you have uploaded your images, go through and rate each image. It sounds like a pain, but once you get used to your system the rating goes by fairly fast. The rating options defer from program to program, but in Lightroom2, I rate my images on a 0 to 5 scale. Images rated 0 - 1 gets trashed. Images rated 2 get stored and major time is spent on editing them later. Images rated 3-5 are the ones I edit immediately and are happy with showing them to clients right away.

If you can, it is really smart to keyword your images. In image programs like Portfolio - dedicated to massive amounts of photo storage - and Lightroom2 also, each keyword will be kept in a collection of its own. If I have just finished a portrait shoot, I will keyword something like this: Client, location, type of images, expression [smiling, laughing etc], on location, in studioâ€¦etc. If my client is a mother who wants any other pictures of her graduating son that are smiling, I don't scroll through all my images to find those smile pictures. I simply go to my "smiling" keywords of that client and viola!

Organizing your images is a photographer's lifesaver that cannot be stressed enough! If you are a beginner, take some time to figure out what system will work best for you. Whether putting together a family photo book, or going back to make prints for a client from last year, or even archiving your images, image organization will save you time and energy in the future.

2008-12-11T13:12:00.001+08:00

9 Tips for Getting Backgrounds Right

Source Digital Photography School

Photo by igglybwiggs

Backgrounds present both opportunities and challenges to photographers. On the one hand they can put a subjects in context and make it stand out in a way that highlights it wonderfully - but on the other hand backgrounds can overwhelm subjects and distract from them.

Some of the common problems that photographers have with backgrounds include:

Distracting Focal Points - we’ve all seen this happen - we line up a shot of a friend to take as a portrait and just as we press the shutter someone else pops their head up over their shoulder with a silly face. The result is that the real focal point of the shot becomes the face pulling person. This is an extreme example of distracting focal points in the background but it’s something that happens quite a lot.

Protruding Elements from Subjects Heads - I nearly didn’t include this one but it’s so common that I just had to mention it. When shooting a portrait one of the common mistakes is for some background element to look like it’s sticking up out of a person’s head - like a horn. It’s often trees (as in the photo to the left) but could be anything. These shots can be quite comical but can also really throw the composition of a shot off.

Competing Lines - if your subject has lines in it and your background also has strong lines they can compete in such a way that the image becomes busy or so that the lines clash with one another.

9 Strategies for Dealing with Distracting Backgrounds

1. Check your Background Before Hitting the Shutter Release

Ok - this strategy isn’t rocket science, in fact you’d think it almost goes without saying - but unfortunately it doesn’t and many of the mistakes that I see in photographs could have been avoided simply by checking the background before taking the shot and taking some sort of evasive action.

Always scan the background of your shots before taking a shot. Look for colors that don’t fit with the rest of the image, bright patches that might distract the eye, lines that clash, people that don’t belong etc.

2. Move Your Subject

This is once again a fairly simple technique but is probably the first thing you should consider. Quite often asking a portrait subject to take a step to the left or right will fix things either by putting the distraction behind them or by putting it out of frame.

Photo by alterednate

3. Change your Shooting Angle

If you have distracting elements in the background of a shot but can’t move your subject another strategy is to move yourself and shoot from a new angle. This might mean rotating around your subject but could also include getting down low to make the sky the background or even getting up high and shooting down onto your subject to make the background the ground.

4. Using Aperture to Blur Backgrounds

One of the most useful things to learn as a way to combat distractions in backgrounds (and foregrounds) is to use the power of your lens to throw the background out of focus using depth of field. What you’re trying to achieve with this technique is a nice blurred background where you can’t really make out what’s going on there.

The easiest way to do this is to use a wide aperture (the smaller the number the wider the aperture). The wider your aperture the more blurry your background should become.

The quickest way to see the impact of this strategy is to switch your camera into aperture priority mode and to take a number of shots at different apertures. Start with an aperture of f/20 and work your way down - one stop at a time. Once you get down to under f/4 you’ll start seeing the background in your shots getting blurrier and blurrier.

5. Using Focal Length to Blur Backgrounds

Another way to help get your backgrounds nice and blurry is to use a lens with a long focal length. Longer tele-photo do help a little to get narrower depth of field (although the amount is less than many think). In actual fact the impact is smaller than it seems and the main reason for the change is that with a longer focal length the subject actually takes up more space in the frame. Lots of arguements have been had over whether focal length impacts this - you can read more about it here and here - I’ll leave it to the experts to discuss the finer points but will say that using longer focal lengths does seem to have some impact and is worth experimenting with.

6. Place Subjects In front of Open Spaces

Placing your subject a long way in front of other objects will also help to make those objects more blurry. For example if you have the choice between shooting your subject standing right in front of a brick wall or standing in front of an open field - the open field shot will have a much more blurred background simply because the brick wall is just centimeters from your subject and inside the focal range whereas an open field stretches off into the distance where everything will be out of focus.

7. Fill your frame with your subject

One of the most effective ways of removing distractions from backgrounds is to remove the background altogether by totally filling the frame with your subject. Get up close and/or use your zoom lens to tightly frame the shot and you’ll not only remove distractions but could end up with a high impact shot as well.

Photo by Keith Morris

8. Make your Own Background

Sometimes there just isn’t any suitable background and so you might want to consider making your own. This could range from buying a purpose built studio background or simply buying some cloth to do the job for you.

I know of one keep photographer who goes out shooting photographic portraits and carries large colored sheets of card with him to put up on walls to act as a background.

The other thing to keep in mind is that in many instances you can move things around in the background of your shots (especially if you’re shooting indoors). For example I was recently photographed in my home for a newspaper and the photographer had me move a number of pieces of furniture during the shoot because they were distracting in the shots. It took a little effort but the impact in the shots was quite incredible.

9. Post Processing

I’m no expert in using photo editing software but there are numerous ways of editing a shot after you’ve taken it to get rid of distracting elements. These can include blurring techniques, actual removing of elements and replacing them and techniques such as selective coloring (ie making your subject stand out by making your background black and white (or at least sucking some of the color out of it).

2008-12-11T12:44:00.001+08:00

7 Travel Photography Tips

Source Digital Photography School

Travel Photography is a lot of fun but presents some real challenges. Today Christina Nichole shares 7 tips to help you on your next trip.

I once heard travel photography described as one of the most important mediums of photographic communication. As the photographer, you are literally creating an entire culture for an audience of people who may never be able to visit that place. Of course, this privilege carries a heavy responsibility. You must be able to present a culture in a way that informs, educates, and entertains.

So, what do you look for? Here are seven tips that will guide you in your photographic travelsâ€¦

1. Look for "the big picture". Give your audience a bird's eye view of the location you have traveled to - full of color and vibrancy. Here, I have taken this shot on one of the highest peaks of Quito, Ecuador to overlook the city.

2. Capture things that are "out of the ordinary". What is distinctly different from your culture? These are things that your audience will find interesting.

3. Find shapes. Other cultures use shapes, curves, and lines in architecture very differently. Be constantly on the alert for buildings, fences, and paths that are unique to your culture.

4. Seek the light. Make any image stunning with some dynamic lighting. Inside cathedrals and churches facilitate beautiful lighting with stained glass windows and skylights. Wait until mid morning or afternoon to capture high sidelight that will pour through the windows and hit the floor.

5. Look for contrast. Whether contrast in light tones verses dark tones, or contrast as in textures and locations, this will keep your images varied.

6. Third world countries especially have extreme diversity of textures, colors, patterns, and content. As a photographer, you have to unify all the different elements to an image that will "make sense" visually.

7. Photograph that which captures your soul. A poor child? A destitute village? A tropical landscape? A busy city center? Take pictures of things that matter to you, and you will come away with visually gripping images no matter where your travels may take you.

2008-12-11T12:43:00.001+08:00

How to Photograph Children

Source Digital Photography School

How should I photograph my children? This was the question that I was asked over the weekend and one that I posted as a community discussion on the topic (thanks to everyone for submitting your child photography tips).

Below are a few of my own tips (in two parts - ’settings’ and ‘the shoot’) - keep in mind that it reflects how I photograph children and by no means do I have a monopoly on the only way to do it - feel free to add your own tips in comments below.

Photograph by thejbird

Photographing Children - Settings:

Lets start by looking at some tips on how to set your camera up when photographing children.

Aperture Priority Mode- I’d start by switching your camera into Aperture Priority mode. This will let you have some creative control over depth of field which can be an important factor in portraits. Learn more about Aperture Priority Mode. If your camera doesn’t have aperture priority mode - it might have a ‘portrait’ mode which can be worth shooting in to get those nice fuzzy backgrounds.

Aperture - I’d set my aperture at f5.6 to start with (you can adjust it up and down as you start shooting). This will throw the background out of focus (unless your kids are right up against a wall) but will give you enough depth of field that their whole face will be in focus.

ISO - Depending where you are shooting (inside or out) and what the light is like - set your ISO to 200 (lower is better if you have lots of light). If it is too dark and this makes your shutter speeds too long you can pump it up - but try to keep it under 800 or you’ll start getting lots of pixelation).

Shutter Speed - Keep an eye on the shutter speed that your camera is choosing. Try to keep it 1/200th of a second or faster if you can (if your kids are running around - to up to 1/500th or more). Like I say - if it’s too dark you can increase your ISO or even push your Aperture up a little. If you’re not confident with shutter speeds and your photos are coming out blurry because your children are moving too fast - you might try setting your camera to ’sports mode’.

Focus Mode - Set your Auto focus to single point focussing. You could leave it on the multipoint focusing mode but I find with kids that move around a lot that you want to know exactly where your camera is focusing quite precisely (this could just be me though).

RAW - If you have time (and the ability) to do some post production work on your images later try shooting in RAW. This will give you more license to edit your shots later. If you’re under the pump for time and/or don’t have the ability to edit your work - JPEG will do.

Flash/Lighting - I’m not sure if you have a flash unit or not that you can use but my preference is to limit the use of your camera’s built in flash. If you do have an external flash and you’re shooting inside - bounce it off a roof/wall (if they are white) or use a diffuser to give indirect light. Otherwise try to find situations that are well lit with natural light - this is my preferred situation - if you can do it in natural light you’re putting yourself in the position to not have to worry too much about your flash. If you’re shooting into the sun though - consider using your flash to give a little fill flash light.

Lens - I like to take a couple of approaches when it comes to lenses. The main approach I take is to use a lens with some real zoom capability. I love to get my 70-200mm lens out which enables me to shoot from a distance and yet still fill the frame with the child I’m photographing (this lens also has the advantage of being fast (f2.8) and having image stabilization) - even my 24-105mm lens gives good range at the 105mm end. The other approach that can be fun is to shoot at the other end of the spectrum and shoot with a wide angle perspective. Getting in nice and close with a wide lens can give all kinds of fun distortion (which when used creatively can lead to some wonderful shots). If shooting indoors or in poor lighting you might also want to go with the fastest lens in your bag.

OK - so we’ve talked camera settings - lets move on to the shoot itself.

Image by darkmatter

Photographing Children - The Shoot

Before I give some specific tips about the shoot, I think it’s worth saying that you want to get the children that you are photographing as comfortable with you and the camera as possible. Showing kids photos after you’ve taken them, letting the child look through the viewfinder and even take a few shots (if they’re old enough), spending time with the kids before taking shots - all of these things can help set the child at ease. The more relaxed they are the better.

Location - Where you shoot will depend a lot on your situation - but try to think of a 2-3 scenes/settings that you could go to before you start shooting. If you have a few hours - pick at least one outside (a park perhaps), one inside (in their bedroom or play room perhaps) and try to find a spot where you have a fairly simple background (something with color can be good) for a few posed shots. Choose places where your kids have fun, where you can show them in their natural playful environment. If you’ve got the time go to the zoo, beach or some other fun place.

Photo by Brian Hathcock

Candid Approach - I try to shoot candidly with kids as much as possible. Get them doing something that they enjoy and just start snapping. You might ask them to stop/pause what they are doing every now and again and to look at you (at the top of a slide for instance) but over time you’ll find lots of moments in the normal run of their ‘play’.

Image by Jeff Kubina

‘Posing’ - With older kids you might find that they respond better to ‘posing’ moments. I find with little kids that they don’t often have the attention span for this (and they tend to pull the cheesiest smiles they can).

Photography by Larryboi90

Get down on their level - You’ve got young children so unless they’re very unusual they’ll be half your height. Shooting from an adult’s perspective looking down on kids will leave you with average looking shots. Get on their level, make the camera level with their eyes (or even slightly below) - do this and you’ll get much more intimate shots.

Photograph by carf

Alter Your Perspective - Having said that - sometimes you can get a really great shot by breaking this ‘get on their level’ rule. Shooting from directly above or below can also give a great result!

Picture by bass nroll

Photography by ToniVC

Get close/Zoom - you’ve got a lens with reasonable focal length (I’d probably prefer something a little longer myself) but you’ll want to get in reasonably close in order to fill your frame with your kids. At times it’ll be good to zoom out or step back in order to get their context - but your parents want to see your kids faces - so make sure they dominate the shot rather than their environment.

Photograph by thejbird

Focus Upon the Eyes - Pay particular attention to your kids eyes. If you’ve got the single zone focusing switched on - choose eyes as the focus point. You can get away with other facial features a little fuzzy but the viewer of an image always is drawn to the eyes of the subject.

Photograph by Herve Kerneis

Backgrounds - pay a lot of attention to the backgrounds of your images. A background can give context to your shots but also can be a real distraction. Before you start shooting clean up any distracting items. Make at least one of your locations a place with a fairly undestracting background. I like to try to find a colorful wall or even to set up a sheet/background for a few more posed shots with the child just standing there in front of it. Alternatively light your subject in such a way that there is no background.

Photograph by carf

Get Abstract - mix your shots up with a few more abstract shots. For instance take a picture of their shoes, zoom right in on their hands or eye lashes, get them framed so only part of their head is in shot. These more playful shots can be a lot of fun and will add variety to the end results of your shoot.

Image by melinkita

Photograph by mpisti

Clothes - my motto with clothes is to choose some that the child feels comfortable in and that reflects their personality. If you put them in their Sunday best but they can’t move freely - your shots will look stilted. The only other advice on clothes is that sometimes bold, plain colors can work well. Perhaps have a couple of outfits on hand that you change them into between locations.

Photography by Wazari

Shoot in burst mode - for at least part of your shoot switch your camera into burst mode (where the camera shoots a lot of shots fast). I actually usually shoot a whole shoot in this mode - but particularly when shooting outside or at a park where your kids are on the move it can be very useful. Look for ’series’ of shots that might go together in a multiple image frame on a wall OR which you could put together into one image with photoshop (a child running, sliding down a slide, on a swing, doing a dance, riding a bike…) - these can be a lot of fun.

Images by Diyosa

Photography by Glenn Loss-Austin

Include other People - one good way to help relax a child if they’re a little tense and to give an image a little more context/story is to add another person into the image. Whether it be a sibling, parent, friend - adding a second person into a shot adds another point of interest and introduces the idea of ‘relationship’ into your image. It can also distract the child from you and help them to be a little more relaxed.

Image by dlemieux

Speaking of fun - do your best to make the shoot as much fun as possible. Show the children some of the shots you take, ask them to do funny things, be funny yourself - all of this will bring energy to your shoot, help the child to relax and capture some of their spirit. The more fun they have the more genuine and engaging the shots will be.

Photo by Todd Baker

These are just some of my tips for Photographing Children - what would you add? Got some great kids portraits already? Share them with us in the Share Your Shots section of our forum.

3 Books for Further Reading on Photographing Children

Photographing Children Photo Workshop: Develop Your Digital Photography Talent

The Art of Children’s Portrait Photography

The Sandy Puc’ Guide to Children’s Portrait Photography (Sandy Puc Guide)

2008-12-11T12:40:00.003+08:00

Kick Your Photos Up a Notch

Source Deziner Folio

If you're a Photoshop expert, you should probably spend your time reading the other posts in this blog, because this entry is dedicated to our clients and basically anyone who is not a professional in photography or design but would like to give their photos a better look, whether they are intended for their website, brochure or for the family album.

Having a professional photographer take the photos for your new state-of-the-art website or brochure is highly recommended, because the quality of your photos will impact greatly the quality of the final product. A picture is the first element that draws the eye into a page (virtual or not), and the text message is usually secondary.But, if your budget hit bottom and you must take the photos yourself with the shiny point-and-shoot company camera, or if you must dig deep into the archives for past photos, there is still hope. Here is a list with the most common problems that you might run into, and their simple but very effective and easy to apply solutions.

The solutions described below are implemented in Photoshop CS3, but they work for previous versions of Photoshop, unless otherwise noted.

Problem: the photo appears overall dark, gloomy, dull.

Cause: entry-level digital cameras tend to underexpose. It usually happens when there is a large area of light (like the sky), which the camera uses as reference for the exposure, while the rest of the image remains much darker than it appeared in the original scene.

Solution: check the histogram of your image: Image > Adjustments > Levels (or hit Ctrl + L). If the right area shows a gap like in the image below, drag the white (right) slider until it meets the edge of the histogram (you will notice your image lighting as you do this). If the dark areas of the image are still too dark, you may want to drag the middle slider (the gray one) to the left as well, until you are happy with the results.

Caution: when you adjust the white slider, pay attention not to overexpose the bright areas of the image (they should not turn completely white).

Problem: photo appears flat, washed out

Causes: improper exposure, too much light, overcast sky, dust, mist, etc.

Solutions: First, check the histogram in the Levels dialog (Ctrl + L) - see the previous Problem. You might need to adjust both the white and the black slider, as shown in the image below. Then, choose Image > Adjustments > Brightness / Contrast and adjust the two parameters. To give the colors a little boost, choose Image > Adjustments > Hue / Saturation and increase the saturation by dragging the slider to the right. For even further adjustments, choose Image > Adjustments > Exposure. Drag the Exposure slider to the right (but be careful not to overexpose), the Offset slider to the left (to bring back some stronger shadows), and the Gamma slider to the left to make the image overall lighter.

Problem: The dark areas appear too dark, while the light areas are ok or too light.

Cause: underexposure, improper lighting, etc.

Solution: When the bright areas of your image are in danger of overexposure, you need to protect them while adjusting the darker ones to show more details. Choose Image > Adjustments > Shadows / Highlights. Make sure the Show more options checkbox is checked. By default, the settings for Amount and Tonal Width are set to 50/50, but this is usually too much, so you might want to slide those back some. Also, if the highlights of your photo are too bright, you can use the Highlights Amount and Tonal Width sliders to make them slightly darker.

Problem: color casts - the photo has an orange/red hue or a blue hue overall.

Cause: When shooting without the proper white balance selected, outdoor scenes may get a blue cast and indoor scenes under tungsten light may get an orange cast. Other types of lighting might generate color casts too. This is due to the color temperature of each type of light.

Solution: The simplest way to avoid this is to select the proper white balance before shooting. If the damage was done, it can be corrected in Photoshop by choosing Image > Adjustments > Photo Filter. Select a warm filter to correct a blue cast and a cold filter to correct an orange cast.

Problem: photo appears blurry, it doesn't show enough detail

Cause: camera shake during the shooting, the subject moved, or the subject was not in focus.

Solution: Blurry images can be avoided by using a tripod during the shooting, by choosing faster exposures (or the proper program) when shooting moving subjects and by focusing correctly on the subject. If however your picture turned up slightly blurry, you can try to correct this in Photoshop by choosing Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask or Filter > Sharpen > Smart Sharpen. Keep the Radius slider low, around 1 or 2 points, otherwise the edges of your objects might get odd-looking artifacts. The settings will be, of course, different for every image.

Caution: not all blurry images can be fixed with sharpening. If the blurring is very strong or the objects appear doubled ("ghosts"), the only solution is to re-shoot the picture. Unless you're going for an Impressionistic effect, of course.

Note: You should always sharpen (more or less) your images before printing them, even when they appear sharp, because the printing process usually takes away some details that can be seen only on screen.

Problem: Red eyes

Cause: Red eyes appear when the flash fires on the same line with the person's eyes. Compact cameras do not allow changing of the angle of the flash.

Solution: some cameras have the option to correct the red eye problem as you shoot. Otherwise, there's an easy fix in Photoshop. Open you picture, zoom in on the eyes, and then pick the Red Eye Tool, which you will find hidden under the Healing Brush tool in your Tools palette. (Note: if you have an older version of Photoshop, this tool may not be available). With the tool selected, click on each of the pupils and watch the red disappear!

Problem:horizon line is not straight.

Solution: open you photo in Photoshop. Double-click the Background layer in the Layers palette. Hit Enter to close the dialog. Hit Ctrl + R to bring the rulers visible. Click on the horizontal ruler and drag down on the image. You will place a guide this way, which you can position where to indicate the horizon. Drag other guides to indicate the vertical direction. The hit Ctrl + T to begin transforming your image. Angle your picture until the horizon appears parallel with the guide you set. Make sure the verticals remain or become parallel with the vertical guides. Then, select your Crop tool from the Tool palette and drag a square around your image, making sure to eliminate all the parts that are transparent, then hit Enter.

Conclusions
I hope these simple tips will help you improve your pictures. However, if your task is more complex and beyond your skills, you should ask a Photoshop professional to handle it. Ardis Creative offers retouching services to our clients, from simple adjustments to high-class compositions. You can see a gallery of before-and-after here.

Note: All the image used in this article are from sxc.hu and can be used without restrictions, as per their authors agreement. Some have been modified for the purpose of exemplification.

Thanks to Madalina Iordache-Levay for sharing this article with Dezinerfolio. Source: Ardis Creative

2008-12-11T12:40:00.001+08:00

Portrait Retouching for Beginners

Source Deziner Folio

This tutorial shows a couple of simple techniques you can use to enhance your portraits. I will focus on retouching the skin, the eyes, and the teeth (whitening). To follow this tutorial, you must already know some Photoshop basics: working with layers, making simple selections, and using basic tools. If you wish to work on the same image, you can download it here.

Step 1: general adjustments

As with any photograph, before you get into detailed retouching you should fix the general flaws: in lighting. For more tips on how to adjust general digital photography problem, visit this tutorial.

In this case, our image has an obvious overexposure problem on the girl's blouse, but this is beyond the scope of this tutorial, where we will focus only on the face

Let's open the shadows a little: go to Image > Adjustments > Shadows/Highlights and fill in the settings from the image below.

We recovered more details from the shadows, but we lost the depth and the picture appears flat. Go to Image > Adjustments > Exposure and fill in the settings below.This way we get some depth in the shadows (but don't overdo it, especially on low resolution images, because you will easily blocky areas of plain black).

Next, let's adjust the Curves to obtain a better contrast and more volume (Ctrl + M and draw a curve like in the picture below).

The picture already looks much better than the original, so let's take it further into the retouching.

Step 2: cleaning the skin

Cleaning the skin is usually done with a combination of the clone tool and the healing brush. The main difference between the two is that the healing brush preserves the texture of the skin better. The clone tool keeps the texture exactly only when used with a hard-edged brush, which is not something you want to do when retouching the skin. The healing brush doesn't work all the time (especially in areas close to edges ), that's why the best thing to do is to use the combination with the clone tool.

When retouching skin, you want to keep as much of the texture as possible. Some beginners love to use the blur tool (or even a filter like Surface Blur) to smooth the skin, but this will only give it a plastic, artificial look. Also, when retouching areas like the shadows under the eyes, or wrinkles - don't overdo it! It's best to keep your retouching into a separate layer so you can adjust the opacity and find the most natural look.

So, create a new layer (Ctrl + Alt + Shift + N) on top of your background and hit the J key for your healing brush tool (or S for the cloning tool). In the options bar at the top, make sure that the Sample option is set to Current & Below. Basically, use the healing brush to clear blemishes, freckles, imperfections on skin, and use the clone tool (at low opacity, I usually start around 25-30%) to lighten the areas under the eyes, to smooth wrinkles, to soften sharp shadow edges. In our case, the model's skin is not too bad, so the retouching will be minimal.

Clean up the acne marks spot by spot, the freckles on her nose and the loose strands of hair with the healing brush. Then lighten up the shadows under the eyes with the clone tool, on a separate layer. I used a soft brush around 20 px large, at 20%. While at it, soften the line of the shadow under her chin. Then, on a separate layer, with the healing brush, try to bring back some of the texture of the skin. The advantage of having these retouchments on separate layers is that you can erase parts you don't want and alter the opacity so you can get the most natural look. Here's my result:

Step 3: brightening the eyes

Bringing out the eyes will make the difference between a dull portrait and a one that captivates the viewer. Professional photographers use careful lighting to catch the vibrancy of the eyes, but you can use your retouching skills to enhance the glance of your subject.

In our portrait here, the model's eyes are pretty much shaded and in desperate need for some brightness. However, keep in mind that, again, moderation is key: do not whiten too much the white of the eyes because it will look unnatural!

Let's start by selecting each eye from the original picture. You can use the polygonal lasso, although I recommend for most selections the pen tool. If you use the pen tool, outline the shape of the eye and then load the shape as a selection and, while on the background layer, hit CTRL + J to copy the selection in a new layer. If you use the lasso, hit CTRL + J when you're done (same effect as above). Do the same for each eye.

(For the basic use of the pen tool for selections - without knowing Bezier curves - see a tutorial I wrote a while ago and posted on my fine art website: Cutting and blending techniques. Here it is.

We will use these layers to adjust the white of the eyes. But before that, let's select the pupils and paste the on their own layers (on top of the eyes layers). You can select them from the original layer or from the new eyes layers. Don't forget to label your layers accordingly and to organize them in groups!

Now, for each of the eyes layer, go Image > Adjustments > Brightness & Contrast and set the Brightness to +20. You may notice now some red specks on the whites, which you can clone out with the clone tool.

Now, select the pupils' layers and repeat the Brightness & Contrast adjustment, but this time with much higher parameters (brightness 90/ contrast 60, or just experiment until you like the result).

The eyes have improved a lot, but we got some red artifacts is the pupils, which we can get rid of easily. Select the layer of the left pupil and hit Ctrl + U to bring up the Hue/Saturation dialog. From the Edit drop-down choose Reds and use the following settings: Hue: +15, Saturation: -32, Lightness: 0. This way, we shifted the reds towards a green hue. Hit Enter to apply the settings. Then, select the other pupil's layer and hit Ctrl + Alt + U. This combination will bring up the Hue/Saturation dialog with the settings last used already filled in, so you can just hit Enter and you're done!

(Tip: use the Alt key in combination with other shortcuts for Adjustments or even for Filters, to start with the settings last used instead of the default settings).

There are more enhancements that can be done to the eyes (like painting in catch lights and shadows), but for now we'll stop here and move on to the next step.

Step 4: whitening the teeth

Unless you've just come from a whitening session at your dentist, anyone could use some post-processing teeth whitening. There is an easy way to give this girl a brighter smile: select the teeth and paste them into their own layer. I useed, as usual, the pen tool (but you can use the polygonal lasso if you wish).

Once you have the teeth in their own layer, hit Ctrl + U just like before and select to edit the Yellows this time. You don't want to reduce the Saturation (it will only make them look grey), but to increase the Lightness (+45). Since they still look too dark, select the Reds in the Edit dropdown and increase the Lightness to +30. Be careful not to make them look grey! Hit Ok and then go to Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast and up the Brightness to +12. Then hit S to grab your clone tool and clone out the too bright spots (zoom in closely).

Step 5: further improvements

There's much more that you could do to improve this portrait, but it extends beyond the scope of this tutorial. For instance, her skin appears too dark on the lower half of the photo. Then, I would get rid of the shadow on the wall that you can see along her arms. In fact, a completely new background would be even better. The hot spot on her shirt could be fixed by cloning fabric from the other side. The scarf could use a more saturated red. And so onâ€¦ We're a long way from a magazine cover, but also a long way from the initial shot.

Thanks to Madalina Iordache-Levay for sharing this article with Dezinerfolio. Source: Ardis Creative

2008-12-11T12:39:00.003+08:00

Speed Up Your Photoshop Workflow

Source Deziner Folio

If you're a designer, the quality of your work must be paired with a reasonable amount of time for its completion. Working under tight deadlines and the competition on the market are just a few factors that should convince you that speed is important. And then, if you can do the same work in less time, it means you can use the gained time more effectively: for planning, for self-promotion or even for some fun!

Here are a few useful tips that you can use to speed up your Photoshop workflow:

1. Use Shortcuts

The best and easiest thing you can do to work faster is to use as many shortcuts as possible.Â You probably are familiar with Ctrl + S and Ctrl + Z, Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V, but you could do so much more! You can use shortcuts for all the menu commands and for all the tools, and more. Whenever a menu command doesn't have a shortcut assigned to it, you can define one with Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts (Alt + Shift + Ctrl + K, to be true to our statements).

Above: I have set my own keyboard shortcuts for the Shadow/Highlights and the Exposure command under Image > Adjustments. Also, I have reassigned the CTRL + P command from printing (which I rarely do, since I design mostly for the web) to the Photo Filter adjustment, which I use a lot more often.

Some of the best time-saving tools are those for navigation inside your document:

Hold down the Spacebar key to make the hand tool temporarily active and drag into your document;

Use Ctrl + Spacebar + Click anywhere in your document where you want to zoom in;

Add Alt to the previous shortcut (Ctrl + Alt + Spacebar + Click) to zoom out.

You can use these in the middle of painting, selecting, erasing, anything except for typing (true for most shortcuts), and once you release the spacebar key you are back to your previous tool.
My most used tool shortcuts (I can tell these by how faded the paint is on these much abused keys on my keyboard!)

V - the move tool (remember it by the resemblance of the letter V with the arrow)

C - the crop tool

BÂ - the brush tool

P - the pen tool

S - the stamp tool

G - the gradient tool

Easy to remember, aren't they?
Photoshop has a series of other shortcuts that aren't related to a tool or a menu command, which means you can't really read them in a tool tip. Here are some of my favorites:

Alt + click and drag to duplicate an object and position it in a different location (to simply duplicate a layer, hit Ctrl + J)

Ctrl + T for the transform controls. Then you can right click to have access to all the command from under Edit > Transform, including the very useful flip horizontal/vertical. To freely transform your object, Ctrl + click and drag on any corner of the transform controls (watch for the cursor to change from black to white before dragging).

Ctrl + Alt + Shift + E: this works when you have selected the top most (visible) layer in the Layers palette, and it places a snapshot of your image on a separate layer at the top (it's like saving a flat version of your comp and bringing it back into the comp as a layer).

For a comprehensive list of very cool and useful shortcut tricks, read this article at Web Design Wall.

2. Reuse your settings

When working with images of the same kind (as it happens often when retouching or preparing images for web), it's very likely that you'll need to use the same filter or adjustment with the same or close to same parameters. Then why start from the default values when you can fine tune from the previous settings?
How? Easily: use the Alt key in combination with any shortcut for adjustments or for filters. For instance, if your most recently used filter was Gaussian Blur, you can hit Ctrl + Alt + F to bring up the Gaussian Blur dialog with the setting you last used already filled in. Or, for Hue/Saturation, for instance, just hit Ctrl + Alt + U if you need to make similar adjustments with those used last time you applied Hue/Saturation.
Don't have a shortcut for the adjustment you want to reuse? Click on the adjustment in the menu and press Alt while it's opening (you might need a little exercise to "catch" it - if you press Alt before you click the menu option, you will close the menu).

And of course, you can always save presets for adjustments you need to apply to multiple images.

3. Use actions

Writing actions is easier than it sounds! It's basically just recording the steps you are taking to complete a certain task in Photoshop, in order to reuse it afterwards with a simple click (or shortcut). A very simple and effective example: you've laid 20 web pages for a client, and you need to send them for review. Your layouts are in PSD format (because you'll need to be able to make changes to them), but you need them all in jpeg format, so you can make a multi-page PDF file. You can open the files one by one and save them jpegs (sounds like fun, huh?), or you can open them all in Photoshop (don't minimize them) and do this for one of them:

In you Actions palette, click the Create new action button at the bottom of the palette. Fill in the name and, if you wish, a shortcut combination. Then click Record. You will notice a red icon at the bottom of the Actions palette (it show that everything you do from this moment on in Photoshop is being recorded). Therefore, chose one of your files and save it as a jpeg. Then close the original PSD, without saving it. Back to the Actions palette, hit the square icon to stop recording. With your action selected, hit the play button for each of the remaining files and watch them disappear one by one! 30 seconds later, your jpegs are ready.

Note: you won't be able to reuse this action, unless you want to save the files in the same folder as the one used for this action.

You can also find on the web ready-to-use actions that you can use to speed up your work. It's an action that I use all the time when I cut out objects for a comp because it saves me a great deal of time.
You can also run actions directly from Bridge, on a large number of images. Select your images and then choose: Tools > Photoshop > Batch. A great tool for running complex actions. Choose the action you want to run and go make yourself a cup of coffee. When you're back, the job is done.

4. Use presets

There are numerous Photoshop presets available for free on the web and using them can prove to be a great time saver. From brushes to styles, from patterns to duotones and everything in between, these have been made available so you don't have to start reinventing the wheel. Like glossy buttons? It can take you some time to build one up from scratch with layer effects if you haven't done it before. If the timer is running, you might want to choose one that has already been created, and maybe tweak it until it meets your design's needs.

We offer beautiful Web 2.0 Layer Styles for Photoshop. You can find dozens of wonderful free brushes at Brusheezy. Do yourself a favor and organize a resource database that you can turn to in times of need! Or at least bookmark these resource places and others alike.

5. Save room for changes

You certainly don't want to start over with your design every time your boss or your client is asking you to change somethingâ€¦ When you're expecting changes, make a habit from working in a non-destructive manner with your layers/objects. Use adjustment layers instead of applying Hue/Saturation or Curves or anything alike directly on your image. Use the clone tool and the heal tool in a new layer on top of the one you need corrected (make sure to select Sample All layers or Current & Below in the tool's preferences). And, if you have CS3, use smart filters.

6. Organize your Layers palette

When you're working with very complex images, and especially when you know that others might need to work on the same file, you need to organize your layers so everything appears in a logical manner and everything is easy to find. Start with naming your layers. Names like Layer 0, Layer 39 and Layer 158 don't say much about what's on that layer. Organize your layers in folders. Color-code your folders for even easier identification. Lock the layers or folders that you don't want to accidentally modify.
Note: when working with a complex image, it helps turning the Auto-Select feature of the Move tool ON, so you can click on an image and instantly identify the layer it sits on.

Do you have your own time-saving tricks? Please share them…

Thanks to Madalina Iordache-Levay for sharing this article with Dezinerfolio. Source: Ardis Creative

2008-12-11T12:39:00.001+08:00

Design Trendz

Source Deziner Folio

All of us would have been working on different concepts/ideas over our designs. Here is a set of design styles we love to use.

Lights n Shadows

This is one of our favorites. These designs make you feel as if the elements were on a virtual stage with spotlights over them.

A Wallpaper of the same concept:

A Video Tutorial:

Reflections

There is nothing much to explain here… this too brings the feel of the image placed on a stage.

Tutorials:

Reflection Tutorial

PanosFX - Creating Reflections

Photoshop Effects - How to Create Reflection Text

Gloss

Our all time favorites…

Few Tutorials:

Adding a Gloss Effect Photoshop Tutorial

Gloss Orb

A Video Tutorial

Frames

Frames are very much used as image placeholders for galleries and slideshows. They seem to give a real photo frame style feel to the images.

Tear

Feels like the element tears trough the page…

Transparency

Remember the Vista UI and the OSX Dock? Transparency adds a new dimension to designs.

Peels

Peel effects are normally used over images and layouts that are non-liquid. There are a lot of Javascripts & Flash based solutions to this too.

Few tutorials:

Creating a page curl in PhotoshopÂ

Page Peel Effect Using Warp Tool

Create a Realistic Page Curl in Photoshop

Page Curl Effect Tutorial

Creating Paper Folds and Creases

2008-12-11T12:38:00.001+08:00

Online Project Management Tools

Source Deziner Folio Blog

Good Project Management is one of the keys to a projects success. Pretty sure every one of us manage projects in some kind or form. Here is a short list of some well known online Project Management tools. We use Basecamp with our Clients…

Don’t forget to vote on the poll below.

Action Method

Action Method is a radical approach to productivity and project management.

Basecamp HQ

Basecamp takes a fresh, novel approach to project collaboration. Basecamp solves this problem by providing tools tailored to improve the communication between people working together on a project.

activeCollab

activeCollab is a project management and collaboration tool that you can set up on your own website. Have an area where you can collaborate with your team, clients and contractors and keep projects on track while retaining full control over access permissions and your data.

ZOHO Projects

Plan, Track, Collaborate and Manage your Projects Online.

Go Plan

Manage multiple projects with ease using Goplan. Track project progress through task management, calendaring, note sharing and issue tracking.

Teamwork

Teamwork Project Manager is an easy-to-use online teamwork & project management software application that helps managers, staff and clients work together more productively online.

Huddle

Huddle combines online collaboration, online project management and document sharing using social networking principles.

Wrike

Wrike is an integrated online project management solution that helps you manage projects, teams and businesses.

Comindwork

Comindwork features set was built during 6 years extensive usage of the best industry management collaboration and bug tracking tools.

WebAsyst

Keep, manage, and share your projects information on the Internet.

1stManager

1stmanager is a totally risk-free, cost-free, installation-free online solution for Project Management and Team Collaboration.

Liquid Planner

LiquidPlanner is a simple but powerful alternative to Microsoft Project. It offers task management, project scheduling, and team collaboration in one central place.

5pm

5pm is a next generation web based project management tool.

DeskAway

DeskAway gives you an accurate view of your project progress and eliminates common problems when working in teams.

OnStage

OnStage is an online workspace, collaboration, and project management tool. It is a simple tool for complex ends.

2008-12-11T12:34:00.003+08:00

Weekly Linkies, 09/01/08

Source Beyond Megapixel Blog

Put Your Picture on the Cover of a Lonely Planet Travel Guide
Photopreneur
Competition ends on September 8 so you best get moving if you want to join.

Here's What I Think of Your Pictures
A Photo Editor
Rob tells you what he thinks of your pictures: "I want to see something real. I want to see something I haven't seen a hundred times before. I want to look at pictures that make me feel something."

3 Reasons Why I Refuse to Use Lightroom
Epic Edits Weblog
Brian shares his reasons for not using Lightroom. The post's comments section is a pretty interesting read, too.

Slow Shutter Shoot-Out: 3 Slow Shutter Speed Techniques
Digital Photography School
Guest blogger Charles Clawson gives three creative ways you can use slow shutter speed in your photography.

Lighting Ori's One Year Old Birthday
DIYPhotography.net
Udi shares how he took pictures of his son's birthday celebration. (Happy birthday, Ori!)

Nikon D90 Daily Diary and Canon 50D Daily Diary
1001 Noisy Cameras
If you want to follow the news, reviews, and camera porn on these two latest releases, 1001 Noisy Cameras provides daily diaries of these models. You can check back in for regular updates.

2008-12-11T12:34:00.001+08:00

Weekly Linkies, 09/27/08

Source Beyond Megapixel Blog

The last giveaway is now closed. Thousands of subscribers and only eight entries. Dude. On the bright side, we appreciate the entries even more because there were so few of them. Thanks to everyone who joined! As for the rest, we'd love to hear your suggestions so we can offer better things next time around. Shoot us an e-mail at info at beyondmegapixels dot com. Also, if you'd like to sponsor a kickass giveaway for the rest of our readers, we'd be more than happy to accommodate you.

The ever-reliable Random.org gave us our winning entry and it's #3, Anna of Hank and Willie. Congratulations, Anna!

Moving along, here are some good reads around the blogosphere for the weekend:

110 Great Resources for Photographers
Words: Irrational
A great compilation of online resources for photographers.

Photo Backup: It'll Cost You
Epic Edits Weblog
Brian discusses the importance and costs of keeping your digital photos safe. It's costly, keeping a proper backup routine, but completely necessary.

We can relate with the title as we're still smarting from our recent purchase (Western Digital My Book Essential Edition 1 TB External Hard Drive). That and our 4-month old MacBook is now running out of hard disk space.

The DIY R-Strap
DIYPhotography.net
Udi gives a rundown of the different ways you can use your camera strap. He also provides illustrated instructions on how you can make your own R-Strap.

Where Has All The Business Gone - Part 2
Digital ProTalk
This article gives some interesting points on why it's getting harder and harder to earn with photography these days. Be sure to read the first part of the article too!

Pola-Magic: Polarizing Filters Make Magic Moments
Beyond PhotoTips
Susheel discusses what polarizing filters are and how to use them.

Not familiar with filters? Read our Filters 101 articles (Part 1 and Part 2).

That's it for this week. Enjoy the weekend, everyone!

2008-12-11T12:22:00.001+08:00

Internet Acronyms for Photographers

AA - anti aliasing
ACR - Adobe Converter RAW, the RAW converter included in PS
ADC - analog to digital converter
A/D - analog to digital converter
AF - auto focus
AFAIC - as far as I'm concerned
AFAIK - as far as I know
AKA - also known as
ARS - anal aperture
AS - aspheric, usually describing an AS ground lens
ASAP - as soon as possible
B&G - bride and groom
BG - background
Blocked - shadow information is clipped
Blown - data highlights are clipped
BS - bullsh!t
BTW - by the way
C - Canon
CB - color balance (AKA white balance)
CCD - charge coupled device
CF - custom function, Canon camaras
CF - compact flash
ch - channel, as in red, green, and blue channels
CMOS - complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor
CP - circular polarizer
cPOL - circular polarizer
CRT - cathode ray tube
CW - Chuck Westfall, Canon's technical sounding board
Digicam - digital camera
DO - diffractive Optics
DOF - depth of field at the object plane
DOF - depth of focus at the image plane
DPP - Digital Photo Professional (Canon's RAW converter program)
DR - dynamic range
DSLR - digital SLR
EC - exposure correction
EXIF - exchangeable image file format
EV - exposure value
FAIK - for all I know
FL - focal length
F-stop - a Stop
FOV - field of view
fps - frames per second
FWIW - for what it’s worth
GB - gigabyte
GND - graduated neutral density (e.g. GND filters)
HDR - high dynamic range
HSL - Hue, Saturation, and Lightness adjustments
IDIOT - somebody that makes lists (like this one)
IMHO - in my humble opinion
IMO - in my opinion
IOW - in other words
IS - image stabilization
ISO - the “International Organization for Standardization”
IQ - image quality
KISS - the "keep it simple, stupid" principle
LCD - liquid crystal display
LD - low dispersion, a type of glass used for a lens element
LMAO - laughing my “you know what” off
LOL - laughing out loud
LR - Lightroom, Adobe's RAW converter program
LV - Live view
MA - micro adjustment (e.g. on the 1DmkIII camera)
MB - megabyte
MF - medium format
MFD - minimum focusing distance
MFDB - medium format digital back
mk - mark
MLU - mirror lock-up
MP - mega pixel
MUA - make-up artist
N - Nikon
NDA - non-disclosure agreement
NSFW - not safe for work
NI - Neat Image (noise reduction program)
NIB - New in Box
ND - Neutral Density (e.g. ND filter)
NN - Noise Ninja (noise reduction program)
Noob - a Newbie (new to the forum and/or photography)
NP - national park
NR - noise removal
NW - noiseware
OBTW - oh by the way
Oly - Olympus
OMG - oh my God
OOF - out of focus
OP - the original poster of a thread
OT - off topic
OTT - over the top
P&S - point and shoot (e.g. P&S camera)
Pano - a panorama created by stitching individual picture frames
Pics - short for pictures
PITA - pain in the “you know what”
PLS - please
POL - polarizer (linear POL "may" be assumed)
POS - a piece of “you know what, try sh!t for starters”
POS - point of sale
POV - point of view
PP - post processing (performed after the initial rendering).
PR - public relations
PS - Photoshop (image editor program)
PS - power supply
PSP - Paint Shop Pro (image editor program)
PTGui - program for stitching individual picture frames into a panorama
RAW - a 16-bit format file, minimum of in-camera processing.
ROF - ring of fire (AF point selection choice)
ROOTB - right out of the box
ROOTC - right out of the camera
ROFLAMO - rolling on the floor and LMAO
RSP - Raw Shooter Premium (RAW converter program)
RTFM - read the "you know what" manual
SLD - super low dispersion, a type of glass used for a lens element
SLD - super-luminescent diode
SLR - single lens reflex (usually applies to a film SLR camera)
Stop - a factor of two in illumination or light intensity
TB - terabyte
TC - teleconverter (usually 1.4X and 2X)
tele - telephoto lens (typical meaning)
ULD - ultra low dispersion, a type of glass used for a lens element
USM - unsharp masking
USM - ultra sonic motor
UWA - ultra wide angle (e.g. lens or perspective)
VR - Nikon's equivalent of Canon's "IS"
WA - wide angle (e.g. lens or perspective)
WAG - wild a$$ guess
WB - white balance
W/O - without
WTB - want to buy
WYSIWYG - what you see is what you get
YMMV - your mileage may vary
ZB - Zoombrowser, a canon program used for browsing

100% crop - a crop of the original JPEG file or RAW converted file, no resizing allowed.

EDIT: Comments addition
AV - Aperture Value settings
B&W - Black & White
CA - chromatic aberration
CPL - Circular Polarizer
DNG - Digital Negative - Adobe's proposed raw format
EVF - electronic viewfinder
GAS - Gear Acquisition Syndrome
IMNSHO - In my not so humble opinion
IR - infra-red
L - Canon's Luxury line of lenses
NDG - Neutral Density Graduated filter
SOOC- straight out of camera.
SWAG -scientific WAG
M - Manual settings
TTL - Through The Lens
TV - Time Value (shutter speed) setting

2008-12-11T12:21:00.004+08:00

Saturday Links Fever [2008-05-17]
Source from adidap.com

The Ultimate Ball Head Guide
EpicEdits
A very useful guide for tripod ball heads

Take Better Vacation Photos
Your Photo Tips
Preparing your summer vacation ? Damien will help you get better souvenirs back

Blog Statistics - Where Are You From?
PhotoNovice
Project calling everyone to share more info about the source of their traffic

60 Photography Links You Can't Live Without
Camera Porn
Another list of great photography blogs/sites/portfolios and another one not mentioning adidap.com. I should do something about that ! but what ?

12 Ways To Never Miss A Photo Opportunity
Digital Photography School
Guest post from Jim Goldstein tipping us how to maximize the chances of getting that picture we’ve always wanted

Sensor Dust

2008-12-11T12:21:00.001+08:00

Sensor dust: Cause prevention is better than cure

Sensor dust is probably one of the worst nightmares of DSLR owners. Manufactures are trying hard to solve this problem with the introduction of “auto sensor cleaning” features in the newest bodies like the Canon EOS 40D or 450D.
Sensor dust will show in pictures as dark spots that will appear constantly at the same place and will be more pronounced at small apertures.

As of today there is no “dust free” solution for DSLR cameras yet, the sensor will accumulate dust over time and you can either learn to live with it or clean it regularly, however some precautions could considerably reduce this problem.

Change lenses carefully: The time when the camera is the most vulnerable to dust is when you are changing your lens. I won’t go as far as telling you not to change lenses on the field however I have took the habit to changes lenses in the car or in the bag which is usually a cleaner environment.

Clean the lens caps: When I don’t use them the lens caps sits usually in my pocket where they are likely to gather a lot of dust. I keep a blower at hand and clean the caps (specially the rear one) before using them.

Turn off your camera before changing lenses: A charged sensor will attract dust ask your TV screen !!

Face down: When not changing in the bag, I tend to keep the camera facing earth to avoid dust “falling in”

HDR Color Cast

2008-12-11T12:20:00.001+08:00

Source from Before the Coffee Blog

HDR and Color Cast

After you process your HDR image you might notice a color cast when you compare it with the 0EV image. When I use Photomatix to process my HDR image set I can usually detect a warm/reddish color shift. No problem, you can use cooling filters or fiddle with the “hue” in the hue saturation adjustments or you can try Tim Grey’s method www.timgrey.com.Â He applies it to single shot images but there is no reason why it can’t be applied to HDR images.

Open Image
Dup the layer (Ctrl-J) (Cmd-J)
Go Filter>Blur>AverageÂ (this is the average of all the pixels and is displayed as a solid color).
Go Image>Adjustments>InvertÂ (this inverts or is the complimentary color)
Change blending mode to ColorÂ (reduce opacity, usually to about 25 and add color saturation back)

Below is an HDR image that has undergone the process and to see the before would not be very dramatic as the color shift is slight. The above steps reduced the blue cast to the image.Â To see how this technique can correct an extreme color cast I’ve shown a before and after of my daughter, Brooke (single shot). I left some of the warm tone by reducing the opacity to 20 because she likes the golden tan.

Feeddemon Tips

2008-12-11T09:51:00.001+08:00

How to Use FeedDemon’s Newspaper Instead of the News Item List

I received a ton of great feedback on yesterday's post about possibly killing FeedDemon's news item list - my thanks to those who took the time to comment!

It's clear that a lot of customers rely on the news item list, many of whom have been using FeedDemon for a long time. But it's also clear that many of these customers don't realize that FeedDemon's newspaper view has evolved to the point that it does pretty much everything the news item list does (plus a lot more). So I'd like to take a moment to describe how to use the newspaper view as a replacement for the news item list. I admit that it takes a little getting used to, but I know several people who dropped the news item list in favor of the newspaper view and now can't imagine using FeedDemon any other way.

Based on the comments, there are three main reasons why people like the news item list:

It enables quickly scanning headlines

It enables locating previously read items

It enables navigating via the keyboard

As luck would have it, FeedDemon's newspaper view offers these same benefits :)

Although the newspaper defaults to showing summaries, you can use the icons at the top right to toggle between full posts, summaries and headlines.

Personally, I like showing summaries because that enables me to quickly scan the first sentence or two of each item, but you can make the newspaper look more like the news item list by switching to headlines. Here's the same feed showing only headlines:

Tip: If you choose to show only headlines, try increasing the number of items to display per page (Tools > Options > Reading).

And while the newspaper view defaults to showing only unread/flagged items, you can change the newspaper filter to display previously read items:

Last but not least, the newspaper view offers even better keyboard handling than the news item list. When the newspaper has the focus (Ctrl+B), the following shortcuts are enabled:

Previous item	Ctrl+ArrowUp or K
Next Item	Ctrl+ArrowDown or J
Next page	Ctrl+ArrowRight
Previous page	Ctrl+ArrowLeft
Flag item	F
Send item (email, blog, del.icio.us)	S
Clip item	C
Mark item read/unread	R
Open/expand item	Enter
Open item link	V
Open item link in new tab	T
Open item link in external browser	E
Reload newspaper	Ctrl+F5

Tip: You can change these shortcuts by selecting Tools > Keyboard Shortcuts > Newspaper.

Now, I realize this post won't win everyone over - some people will still prefer keeping the news item list visible. But do me a favor and try keeping it hidden for a couple days and see what you think. And if you feel bold, try using the "Next Page" button to mark everything on the current page as read and move to the next page. That way you can stop marking individual items as read and speed read your way through your unread items.

If it turns out you still prefer using the news item list, I'd be interested in hearing how I could change the newspaper view so that you no longer need it. It would really simplify FeedDemon if I could drop the news item list, but I won't drop it until I'm confident that the newspaper view is a suitable replacement.

Tales from the Interview

2008-12-11T09:29:00.001+08:00

Source: The Daily WTF

Tales from the Interview: How Can You Expect This?!

How Can You Expect This?! (from K.D.)

I was interviewing candidates for a Unix system administrator position. One of the "broad" questions I tended to ask was purely intended to get insight into the candidate's problem-solving abilities, but also a way to see what tools and techniques they might suggest (rather than the old "here's a list of tools, have you ever used them?" type of questions, since invariably every candidate would insist they had used them all).

This particular candidate happened to be one of those where I was strongly leaning towards a "no" decision at the onset but continued with the interview just to maintain decorum, due to the way the interview started. When he came into my office, he stood in the center, sized up the room very carefully, then picked up the chair I had indicated and spent several minutes carefully placing it precisely in the center of the seating area. Precisely. This required perhaps half a dozen adjustments to its position, and several circuits of the chair to view it from all perspectives and ensure that it was placed correctly. Once he was satisfied, he sat down... and I opened my mouth to speak, then paused as I watched him go through the same sort of several-minute adjustment process to ensure that his pant legs were perfectly straight on his leg and that the crease down the middle was lined up exactly right down the center of each leg.

Okay, I thought, we've established that he's a bit OCD. But maybe that could be a good thing? I'll continue with the interview.

I explained the current team structure -- at the time we had a rather small team and far too many servers to support. This was about 12 years ago, and the mid-range server administration area had just been formed, and things were, to say the least, chaotic. The servers could be practically any flavor of hardware and manufacturer, various operating systems, various versions, and a myriad of different applications running on them, sometimes installed by users and then dumped upon us to keep them running. Generally, every administrator could be called upon to respond to a problem on any machine. I had explained that we had started documenting the purpose and configuration of every server on an internal document server, some initial stabs at naming standards, etc., but that largely it was a free-for-all when a problem call came in. I believe in being up-front about the environment a person is applying to join.

I explained all this, and then opened up with my "wide-open" question. "So, Frank, let's say you receive a call from a user in the marketing area, and he says that their mailing is not going out. Walk me through some things you might do with this call, to determine the nature of the problem, and what things you might check to resolve the problem."

There are clearly no right answers, but some of the answers which have been provided by candidates in the past ranged from elementary housekeeping things like getting contact information and asking the user specifics about the problem, referring to the documentation to determine which server supported the marketing department, all the way through the candidate assuming that they can identify the machine in question and moving right into problem resolution, handily dropping references to checking various system logs, pinging routers, checking mail configurations, DNS settings, etc.

Not Frank. He sat for two minutes in total frozen silence. Then he burst forth with "what server is this? I don't even have an account on the servers in your company! How can you expect me to log on if I don't even know where the server is and no one has given me any accounts yet? If I had an account, I could log on. But I can't. You haven't given me an account yet. I don't have an account. I know I don't have an account on that server. I don't know what server that is. How can I log on? How can you expect this?"

I tried to calm him down, tried to explain the concept of a hypothetical question, but he just grew more agitated... but the crease in his pants legs remained perfectly aligned with the middle of his leg the entire time.

We Just Say That (from Anthony R)

Back in 2004, I saw an advertisement for a PHP web developer. After calling and setting up an interview, I anxiously awaited the next Monday to come around so I could strut my stuff. You see, I did not have job interviews often, and for some reason this one just felt promising.

It was pretty difficult to find their offices. The company did not list an address on their website, so I called up the receptionist to figure out how to get there. However, she gave me bad directions. And when I say bad directions, I mean she sent me to another office of a similar name on the other side of town. Apparently, she didn't know their address either, and just looked it up in the Yellow Pages. Obviously, they didn't advertise in the Yellow Pages.

Fortunately, I gave myself plenty of time and managed to arrived right on time. The interview was going smoothly at first: they asked me about myself, my previous experience, and so forth.

But then everything turned around.

"Do you know ColdFusion?", one of the two men interviewing me asked. I could tell he expected me to say yes.

"Not really," I responded, "but I do have a general understanding of how it works. I'm sure I'd be able to pick up enough of it to get by. Do you convert from ColdFusion to PHP?"

One of them replied, "Oh, PHP? Oh yeah, from the job ad. Actually, we just say that to attract people; we only do ColdFusion here."

The rest of the interview was downhill from this point. Within a few days, I had forgotten about the opportunity altogether and ended up picking up a real PHP job a couple weeks later. Oddly enough, one of the interviewers called me two months later to see if I was still interested in the position. When I told him no, he quickly retored "oh, well, we found someone else for the position, anyway!" Um, good for them?

Brought to you by the Non-WTF Job Board:

Overdue Retirement

2008-12-11T09:28:00.001+08:00

Souce The Daily WTF

Overdue Retirement

"I started work in my new job as Technical Manager full of enthusiasm, only to be thwarted by a flabbergasting array of absurd working practices imposed by the despotic dinosaur of a Development Manager I have to report to," Amanda L. writes.

"What makes this more fascinating is that:

"this list is not a collection of experiences or anecdotes picked up from different sources.

"this list is not an embellishment of any existing practices at this company.

"this list is a genuine and accurate description of the real working practices currently being practiced at this company — nothing here is invented, it is all true.

IT Infrastructure

"Viruses can be picked up via networks.
Hackers hack in to computers via networks.
Viruses are bad.
Hackers are bad.

"QED: networks are bad. It's obvious when you really think about it! Therefore, there is no company network.

"The company diary is on the Diary PC. We all have to log on to the PC to look at the diary. This means having to walk to another office and hope no one else is using the aforementioned Diary PC. Remember: there is no network.

"There's also an Email PC! This is another walk to a different office: all email addresses are in the same Outlook session. No one is allowed to have email access on their own PC (someone might download something from a hacker). If you are waiting for an important email from a client you have to lurk around the PC or keep having to walk back and forth between your office and the Email PC Office. The DM's recommended practice is to ask the person sending the email to call us when they've sent it.

"There is no file server, as that would encourage network usage. Files are transferred using USB drives (each member of staff has a USB stick or drive).

"Backups: not a chance! When I started I asked about the backup procedures. I was told that all the software was stored on the 'software notebook.' Yes, a notebook. After that announcement the conversation went like this:

Me: "Oh. How often is the notebook backed up?"
DM: "Erm..." [ He glances at a developer. ]
Dev: "Ermmmm..." [ Developer glances back at DM like a rabbit caught in headlights. ]
DM: "Ahhhh... er..."
Dev: "I think it was backed up about 3 months ago."
Me: "Riiiight... ok... and how is it backed up?"
Dev: "I think you have to run a script."
Me: "Any idea which one?"
Dev: "I think it's on the desktop."
Me: "Ok, thanks." [ At that point I decided it needed some independent investigation. ]

Configuration Management

"Source code control: heh, yeah, right... they have this 'source code notebook' on which all the source code is held (no servers — networks are dangerous, remember?). They use VSS for their web product but... they don't ever put comments in so it's impossible to roll back to a previous released version. They don't know about 'branching' so if they need to do an urgent fix they will apply the fix to the current in-development code base and attempt to patch up anything that hasn't been finished and deliver that as the fix.

"The Database. I looked at the SQL Server database they have behind their web product and asked 'How is version control done?' The exact response (not a single word of this is a lie):

"'We upload a version of the database to one of the customer websites and if it works we gradually copy it over to the other customer websites. We don't install it on all of them so that if we need to look at an older database version we know which customer website will have it and we just copy that back.'

"Because of (1) and (2) it is impossible to reproduce versions of compatible database and web software versions.

"Version control: They only have four versions of software:
- "Dev1: This is the version number of any software that is currently in development.
- "Dev2: This the version number of any software that has been 'finished' but not yet installed anywhere. So, when you finish work on 'Dev1' it automatically becomes 'Dev2' by virtue of the fact that you've finished work on it.
- "AlphaTest: If you copy a piece of 'Dev2' software on to a live server it becomes 'AlphaTest' version (but only if you copy it into the directory 'D:\AlphaTest'). Note: this is not referring to the installation of the software, merely the copying of the software into the aforementioned directory.
- "BetaTest: If you install something from AlphaTest into a customer site (and it works) you then copy back from the customer site to the BetaTest area (D:\BetaTest), overwriting the old BetaTest version. From then on all sites are installed from BetaTest — unless of course there's a newer AlphaTest version (indicated by more recent timestamps on the files in the AlphaTest directory).
"What may not be apparent is that the BetaTest version from, say, November 2007, is not the same as BetaTest version from, say, December 2007. So, if you say 'What version is installed for customer X' the response is usually something like 'They've got BetaTest from November 2007... oh hold on, I think they had an upgrade in January... what's that? They had one in February? Oh... hold on, I just need to check the timestamps on the files.'

"As there is no email all communication is via word of mouth or you have to write a memo, print it out, and then walk around handing out copies or leaving copies on desks and hoping people will see them and read them. I tried to argue for internal email using the argument that if I need to notify my team of something then it's a lot easier. He took me to one side, and in a fatherly way, told me the way to do that was to get everyone in to the conference room so I can tell them. I was tempted to tell him that having so many people in the same room was bound to help spread any viruses that might be going around but I thought the irony might be lost on him. Or that he'd sack me.

Amanda has been on the job for a few months now, and already feels that her retirement is overdue. Perhaps she should email her official resignation — once the email PC is free, that is.

Brought to you by the Non-WTF Job Board:

Open Web Awards Winners!

2008-12-11T09:24:00.001+08:00

Source from Mashable.

Announcing Blogger's Choice Open Web Awards Winners!

While voting continues until midnight Sunday to decide who is crowned the Open Web Awards “People’s Choice”, today we announce the winners of our Blogger’s Choice voting, as selected by our Blog Partners.

Over 100 Blog Partners have helped make this the biggest Open Web Awards to date with over 100,000 confirmed nominations and votes so far. Our blog partners come from 25 countries and are written in 10 different languages.

This year’s winners will be receiving the Open Web Award, thanks to Zazzle, just in time to celebrate the holiday season.

Remember: voting for the People’s Choice Open Web Awards ends this Sunday night at 11:59 pm PST, with a winners announcement on Tuesday.

Blogger’s Choice Winners

Mainstream & Large Scale Social Networks

Winner: Twitter
Runner-up: Facebook

Embeddable Widgets

Winner:
Clearspring
Runner-up: Sprout

Blog Plugins

Winner: ShareThis
Runner-up: AddThis

Social News

Winner: Digg
Runner-up: Mixx

Social Networking Applications

Winner: Ping.fm
Runner-up: Twitterfeed

Social Bookmarking

Winner: Delicious
Runner-up: StumbleUpon

Search & Social Search

Winner: Google
Runner-up: Scour

Sports & Fitness

Winner: Gyminee
Runner-up: Oneseason

Photo Sharing

Winner: Flickr
Runner-up: Picasa

Video Sharing

Winner: YouTube
Runner-up: Vimeo

Start Pages

Winner: iGoogle
Runner-up: Netvibes

Places & Events

Winner: Doodle
Runner-up: Eventbrite

Travel

Winner: TripIt
Runner-up: GeckoGo

Music

Winner: Last.fm
Runner-up: Pandora

Social Shopping

Winner: Wishpot
Runner-up(s): Tigerbow/Pikaba (tie)

Fashion

Winner: Coolspotters
Runner-up: Gift Girl

Celebrity & Gossip

Winner: Perez Hilton
Runner-up: Popvine

Mobile Applications

Winner: Evernote
Runner-up: Qik

Dating & Romance

Winner: SpeedDate
Runner-up: OKCupid

Wiki

Winner: Wikipedia
Runner-up: PBWiki

Politics

Winner: Huffington Post
Runner-up: CreateDebate

How-to

Winner: eHow
Runner-up: Howcast

Environmental

Winner: ThinkGreen
Runner-up: SocialVibe

Non-Profit Causes

Winner: SocialVibe
Runner-up: Kiva

Online Games

Winner: Playfish
Runner-up: Kongregate

Niche Social Networks

Winner: Wadja
Runner-up: Lifeblob

Congratulations!

Congratulations! Now it’s time to boast your win! When you receive your award, feel free to proudly display it. In the meantime, feel free to grab one of these graphics and place it on your site:

OWA Sponsors Love The Web

The Open Web Awards is made possible by our sponsors. By supporting the Open Web Awards, these companies reward and encourage innovative web technologies. We can’t thank them enough for sharing our passion: building great web companies.

Platinum Partner

“PartnerUp brings small business and social networking together to create a community where entrepreneurs find the people, resources and information to grow their businesses.”

Gold Sponsors

“iStockphoto is the world’s leading image market and a revenue-sharing social network. Browse 3.5 million images and videos starting at $1 or become a contributor.”

“With Quintura's advanced visual-based search and analytics solution, content publishers can increase site usage while creating new ad revenues”

Prize Sponsor

“Infinite and Instant, Zazzle is the only on-demand retail platform for consumers and major brands, offering billions of retail quality, one-of-a-kind products, most of which are produced within 24 hours.”

---
Related Articles at Mashable | All That's New on the Web:

Mashable.com Awarded Most Improved Blog
Announcing the Open Web Awards After Party
Mashable Presents The 2nd Annual Open Web Awards
Home and Introduction
Open Web Awards: Judge’s Choice Winners Announced
Open Web Awards Updates and Blogger’s Choice
Nominate Mashable in The 2007 Performancing Blog Awards

Exploding Offer

2008-12-11T09:22:00.001+08:00

Copied from Joel on Software blog.

Exploding Offer Season

If you're a college student applying for jobs or summer internships, you're at something of a disadvantage when it comes to negotiation. That's because the recruiter does these negotiations for a living, while you're probably doing it for the first time.

I want to warn you about one trick that's very common with on-campus recruiters: the cynical "exploding offer."

Here's what happens. You get invited to interview at a good company. There's an on-campus interview; maybe you even fly off to the company HQ for another round of interviews and cocktails. You ace the interview, of course. They make you an offer.

"That sounds great," you say.

"So, when can you let us know?"

"Well," you tell them, "I have another interview coming up in January. So I'll let you know right after that."

"Oh," they say. "That might be a problem. We really have to know by December 31st. Can you let us know by December 31st?"

Tada! The magnificent "exploding offer."

Here's what you're thinking. You're thinking, well, that's a good company, not my first choice, but still a good offer, and I'd hate to lose this opportunity. And you don't know for sure if your number one choice would even hire you. So you accept the offer at your second-choice company and never go to any other interviews.

And now, you lost out. You're going to spend several years of your life in some cold dark cubicle with a crazy boss who couldn't program a twenty out of an ATM, while some recruiter somewhere gets a $1000 bonus because she was better at negotiating than you were.

Career counselors know this, and almost universally prohibit it. Every campus recruiting center has rules requiring every company that recruits on campus to give students a reasonable amount of time to make a decision and consider other offers.

The trouble is, the recruiters at the second-rate companies don't give a shit. They know that you're a college kid and you don't want to mess things up with your first real job and you're not going to call them on it. They know that they're a second-rate company: good enough, but nobody's dream job, and they know that they can't get first-rate students unless they use pressure tactics like exploding offers.

And the worst thing that career centers can do is kick them off campus. Big whoop. So they hold their recruiting sessions and interviews in a hotel next to the campus instead of at the career center.

Here's your strategy, as a student, to make sure you get the job you want.

1. Schedule your interviews as close together as possible.

2. If you get an exploding offer from a company that's not your first choice, push back. Say, "I'm sorry, I'm not going to be able to give you an answer until January 14th. I hope that's OK." Almost any company, when pressed, will give you a chance to compare offers. Don't worry about burning bridges or pissing anyone off. Trust me on this one: there's not a single hiring manager in the world who wants to hire you but would get mad just because you're considering other offers. It actually works the other way. When they realize you're in demand, they'll want you more.

3. In the rare case that they don't accept that, accept the exploding offer at the last minute, but go to the other interviews anyway. Don't cash any signing bonus checks, don't sign anything, just accept the offer verbally. If you get a better offer later, call back the slimy company and tell them you changed your mind. Look, Microsoft hires thousands of college kids every year. If one of them doesn't show up I think they'll survive. Anyway, since we instituted that 13th amendment thing, they can't force you to work for them.

If you do find yourself forced to renege on an offer, be classy about it. Don't do this unless you are absolutely forced to because they literally refused to give you a chance to hear from your first choice company. And let them know right away you're not going to take the offer, so they have a chance to fill the position with someone else.

Campus recruiters count on student's high ethical standards. Almost all students think, "gosh, I promised I'll go work for them, and I'm going to keep my promise." And that's great, that's a commendable attitude. Definitely. But unethical recruiters that don't care about your future and don't want you to compare different companies are going to take advantage of your ethics so they can get their bonus. And that's just not fair.

Not loving your job? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

What Kind of DBA are you?

2008-12-11T09:16:00.001+08:00

What Kind of DBA Are You?

Depending on the environment in which they work, a DBA might perform a number of different tasks. Greg Larsen identifies these different tasks, categorized by work environments.

mDesktop 2.0

2008-10-04T21:21:00.001+08:00

I think i would try this in next few day. Look so nice and easy. BTW all article below is from Windows Mobile experts review.

Review: mDesktop 2.0

We live in a time of amazing technology. The advances that have been made in the last 20 years are positively astounding. As computers have gotten smaller and merged with our phones, issues have started to pop up regarding form factors and interfacing with the device. Various permutations of hardware have manifested themselves in Windows Mobile devices. Touchscreen and non-touchscreen; qwerty keyboards, standard dial pads and devices without any hardware keyboard at all have been attempted by various manufacturers. All styles have their strengths and weaknesses.

In recent years, attempts have been made at extending the interface through third party hardware and software have come and gone. Software that allows you to remotely control your handheld through your computer's mouse and keyboard have met with some success. Hardware options such as Celio Corp's Redfly platform have been somewhat slow to gain traction.

MotionApps, makers of mSafe and others; has developed a tool that takes the interface extension to a new level. Like SOTI's Pocket Controller, mDesktop takes the remote interface idea to a whole new level. Instead of only replicating the screen to your desktop, and translating mouse clicks and key presses; mDesktop actually reads and interacts with the data on your Windows Mobile device while presenting it in a custom interface that allows for increased productivity. It's not all sunshine and roses however. Keep reading to see the good, the bad and the quirky.

Concept

The idea behind mDesktop, is that on a device the size of modern Windows Mobile phones, there is productivity lost due to things like small screens and keyboards. Bringing the data to a full sized screen and keyboard not only makes it easier to type and see, it adds an element of simplicity to the experience. You no longer have to navigate menu items to find the appropriate application; a tabbed menu gives you quick access to much of the available functionality.

Phone

The phone function in mDesktop provides you with dial pad as well as a list of the contacts on your phone. The phone can be dialed by either clicking on the numbers on the screen, or by typing a number or even a contacts name on your computer's keyboard. Once the number is dialed; buttons appear on screen that allow you to place the call on hold, end the call or to activate your phone's speakerphone.

SMS

mDesktop allows you to view all of your SMS messages in a message by message or threaded view. Additional functionality such as printing your messages or copying them as plain text or HTML to your clipboard add amazing flexibility to a function that is normally incredibly simplistic when you stop and think about it.

Contacts

One of the most difficult tasks for me using the standard Windows Mobile interface is managing my contacts. Frequently I want to copy and paste something or do some simple edits and it will take two or three times as long as it would with a full size computer. mDesktop allows for basic contact management and creation through it's interface. The only available fields are First Name, Last Name, Company, Mobile Phone, Email, Work Phone and Home Phone; so it doesn't really help you with the more advanced edits that you would have to do. It also doesn't allow for any kid of drag and drop or copy and past functionality from Microsoft Outlook (I know Windows Mobile can sync with Outlook, but I see some value in being able to copy and paste a single contact instead of syncing the entire address book).

Agenda

Calendar items (and Tasks) are another type of data that benefits from mDesktop's interface. Tasks are as easy as typing in a title and pressing enter. Calendar items require a bit more configuration due to the different data that is required.

The Agenda application could be a lot better in my opinion just by gaining some features that many of us take for granted in desktop based calendar applications. There is only one way to view your calendar from within mDesktop, and that is in a list view that is grouped by the day of occurrence. A standard set of graphical or timeline views would improve this application immensely.

Pictures and Files

The Pictures application allows you to view pictures located in device memory or on a storage card. mDesktop allows you to navigate through folders in the file system and display pictures in a thumbnail view. Limitations start to manifest themselves when you want to do more than view the pictures. Right clicking on a picture gives you the option to view the picture in an popup window within mDesktop or to view it in the default image viewer on your machine, and the option to Delete. There is no copy/paste or save function at all. I would have thought that this would've been a no-brainer. The File application does allow you to copy/paste, rename and create a folder as you would expect.

Screen

The Screen application gives you a view of the actual view of your device's screen as well as giving various buttons to emulate the standard hardware buttons that we've come to expect on Windows Mobile. Similar to other remote control type software that I've come across in the past, there is some lag time between clicking on a control and the action being passed to the device.

Other

This is where mDesktop really starts to shine. The Info tab gives you detailed information about your device hardware. Processor specs, IMEI, phone number, memory size/capacity, and battery type and charge level are all displayed in groupings to increase readability.

The Install application is the coup de grÃ¢ce. Applications and favorites can be installed by simply dragging the file (cab or shortcut) to the Install screen.

Conclusion

MotionApps has a good, solid concept here. There is some excellent functionality packed into mDesktop, but they also dropped the ball on some things. I realy would like to see the holes in the Contacts, Agenda and Pictures applications to get plugged. The fact that some functionality that we have come to expect is missing is a little frustrating. I also would have liked to see some attention payed to email, as this seems to have either been overlooked or MotionApps felt like that is what synchronization is for. I for one have some email accounts that I only access on my phone, and it would've been nice to have some options there.

All in all I would have to say that the decision on the purchase of mDesktop depends entirely on what you're going to do with it, although the cost is fairly reasonable ($19.95 from MotionApps). If you're planning on having text messages that you're going to want to print out, or you really like the idea of adding favorites and installing applications through a simpler interface; then this might be a good investment for you. Personally, I would wait on the current version, but keep my fingers crossed for additional functionality in future releases.

Ratings (out of 5)

Concept: 5

Features: 3

Usability: 5

Overall:

Pros

Great Concept

Inexpensive

Cons

Missing key features