So in the spirit of sharing, the following are some ideas  for those of you who haven’t got out with your camera in a while and made some photographs. Your challenge of sorts is to shoot take 10 different photos in the next month or so. These ideas and photos don’t take a professional camera, nor do they require you to travel to some exotic place to take better photographs. As you will see, these photos are the kind that can be taken nearly anywhere.

Start At Home

Start at home with everyday objects. Shoot something simple, but capture it as aesthetically as possible. As always, don’t settle for one shot. You’re shooting in the digital age, so taking several shots, from different angles and in different lighting conditions is simply not an expensive problem.

This photo represents a part of my morning routine. A cup of black coffee. Nothing special. But what captured my attention were repeated circles of the white cup and saucer, and the black coffee inside. The light coming from the kitchen window was overcast, so I was OK in that area. I took a few shots from above the cup, moved the spoon over some, and settled upon this photo.

Look around your house or apartment. Maybe there’s an interesting clock, bookcase, or musical instrument that you can photograph from an interesting perspective. Don’t let the ordinariness of the subject keep you from shooting it.

Capture Rain Drops

I must have shot photos for like five years before I realized the beauty of shooting rain drops. I’m not the kind of person who likes getting out in the rain. I don’t like the itchy feeling you get from wet clothes. But with this image, when that rain settled I took out my Canon Powershot G9, set it to macro mode and tried to hold the camera as still as possible. I was too lazy to get a tripod, which would have worked better. But since the shutter speed was 1/125th of a second, I was OK. I of course increased the sharpness using Aperture 2.0 software.

Shoot An Out-Of-Focus Shot

Following up on the rain idea, try another shot from your car window. But in this shot, don’t focus the shot.  Just raise your point-and-shoot or 35mm camera and take several shots. Look for some color or shapes to seep through the blur. If your camera’s automatic focus won’t let you take an out-of-focused shot, then turn that feature off. Don’t let your camera boss you around and keep you from getting the shot you want.

Shoot Some Art

Some critics say that photographing art is not really photography. It’s like you’re cheating by making an image out of an image. But that’s not so. You can capture art in context. Or you can ignore the critics and just shoot art for arts sake, plain and simple. Don’t shy away from using one artistic medium to capture another one. I took this shot while at a stoplight. My camera was on the car seat; I saw the photo in my mind before I raised the camera and fired off several shots.

Street Portraits

Okay, this one is for truly brave shooters. For a year, I committed to a self-project of photographing 100 strangers. That’s right, people I didn’t know and would probably never meet again. I discovered the project through a Flickr 100 Strangers group. It is the most challenging photo project I have ever done. It got me out of my comfort zone when it comes to people. Stranger portraits are not candid streets photos in which you take photos of people when they’re not aware of you doing so.  Street portraits are about photographing individuals you find interesting. To get these shots, strike up a conversation before you ask to take a photo. Tell the person about your project and politely ask to take their photograph. If they reject you, don’t take it personally. Just move on and find someone else. The best places to do these type of shots is in busy downtown areas or crowded outdoor events.

Go To The Zoo

Having a hard time finding good subjects to take that better photograph? Go to the zoo. Take your kid or significant other along and see what you can capture. If your city zoo is anything like mine, the animals aren’t going anywhere, and most of the time they can care less about about how many photographs you take of them. So bring along a long range lens of a minimum of 105mm, and see what you can capture in the “wilds” of the zoo.

Old Buildings

One the things I most dislike about where I live is that so much public space has been given over to commercial interests. Old buildings have been torn down, and there are few places that have survived from the demands of modernity. So when I’m out and about, I try to capture interesting old buildings, especially old churches and cathedrals. I’m not religious or anything, but I like capturing the architecture of these buildings.

I captured this photo by driving up to the top of a high-rise parking lot, which gave me a parallel view of the religious crosses. That little extra effort in driving made a difference in the image.

Shoot Slow

Sometimes photos should show the motion of something moving.  If you put your camera on what’s called Shutter Priority, you can set its shutter speed to like 1/25th of a second to capture the motion of a moving subject.

Try this out on moving cars or trains, kids playing, or at a sports event. This is a great way to learn about shutter speeds and an equally interesting way to capture motion.

Shoot Fast

In the same vein as the idea above, shoot to freeze action. Again, use your Shutter Priority, but this time raise the shutter speed to 1/400th of second or faster. If you need to, raise the ISO so that you get more light into the camera. See if you can free action of a moving subject. This shot is another one of my street portraits where I asked the skateboard rider if I could photograph him doing his thing. After I showed him some of the shots I took, he asked me to take a few more.

Paint With The Shutter

Okay, this is the last one in regards to Shutter Priority. I got this idea from reading Understanding Shutter Speed, by Bryan Peterson. This shot is about lowering instead of raising the shutter speed to say 1/5th of second, in a well lit area. Raise the ISO to about 400-600 if you need to, to let in more light. As you take the shot, you, as Peterson says, “twirl, arch, jiggle, or jerk the camera in an up-and-down or side-to-side or round-and round motion.” In other words, paint with your camera. Because the shutter speed is slow, the lens opening will not close up so quickly. Do this several times and you’ll really learn something about slow shutter speeds, plus make some great art.

Faceless Shot

People shots don’t always have to include faces of the people you photograph. Take some shots of someone’s legs, a hand or arm, or a person’s back. Get the face out of the picture and take on the challenge of shooting a faceless photo. This photo was taken very quickly as I crossed a downtown street. I saw these two bikes roll by and took the shot.

Mix Black-and-White With Color

This one involves doing a little Photoshop work after the photo is taken. Select a photo in which you convert it to black-and-white  and then brush back in some of the color. The process in Photoshop is fairly easy: Open the photo in Photoshop. Click on the adjustment layer at the bottom of the Layers palette. Select the Black & White adjustment. Make adjustments to your liking.

Next, set the foreground color to black, and then select the Brush tool. Re-size  the brush tool enough to paint back some color on the image. If you make a mistake, simply change the foreground color to white and paint back in the black-and-white part. This photo is of a dance class in which students a public performance.

Hope these ideas for taking better photographs are helpful. If you decide to try a few out, shoot me a link to your posted image results.  Or perhaps you know some more methods to shoot some really great photos?  Let us know what they are in the comments.

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The app is a multimedia magazine, featuring professional images and how-to articles by and about professional photographers. It doesn’t replace a well designed magazine or photography book, but it’s a handy resource on your mobile device.

When you first open the open the app, the home screen dissolves to a browser of high quality Nikon images, including portraits, travel, wildlife, and numerous scenic photos. Each photo includes “Info” and an article interview with the photographer of the selected image.

The one sentence “Info” for each images is very skimpy. It might include the name of the Nikon camera and a brief public relations type comment, nothing more. Here’s an example:

The extended interviews include a little background about the photographers, their work, the Nikon camera(s) they use, and a link to their website. Since this is a “learn and explore” app, it would better if the “Info”  includes things such as the camera settings used and how the photographer went about making the photograph, both using the camera and in post-processing.

The Learn section of the app includes so far about 22 different lessons, ranging from shooting techniques about close-up photography, the value of zoom lenses, and getting candid urban photos. Unfortunately, these “learn” articles are very underdeveloped. Some “how-tos” include videos of the photographer explaining his work. The two videos I watched were much more informative than the accompanying articles. I realize that videos are much more time consuming and expensive to produce, but they would be tremendously useful on a mobile app, even if users had to pay a small subscription fee.

The next section of the app includes articles taken from Nikon World, the company’s quarterly print magazine. These articles include much more detail about the process photographers took to make their photos or complete certain projects.  As you may guess, much of the articles begin with or center on the use of a particular Nikon camera.

The application also includes a glossary of photography and Nikon related terms. For example, this is how “Aperture” is defined: “The circular opening inside the lens that can change in diameter to control the amount of light reaching the camera’s sensor or film”. Unfortunately, this definition doesn’t include an illustration or an example to further explain the definition.

Finally, you can star any article, image, or definition to add to your “favorites” list. This is a handy feature because the company says that the app will be updated with new information and articles, so a favorites list will make it easy to locate bookmarked resources.

Overall, Nikon: Learn and Explore is a great idea for an iPhone/iPod touch application. The company might consider offering an a simpler online option instead requiring future updates of the application itself. I could also foresee it making iPhone/iPod touch-formatted manuals for each of its major cameras.

I’m not a Nikon shooter, but I‘m looking forward to similar applications for us Canon photographers.

So what features would you like to see in an application like Nikon: Learn and Explore?

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This feature has been a part of most point-and-shoot cameras for quite some time, but many camera users don’t use the feature to its fullest extent. Also, in the last few years, Live View has been built into 35mm DSLR cameras. Latest models of both the Canon and Nikon 35mm cameras feature Live View.

How it Works

With traditional digital cameras, you look through the optical viewfinder at the top of the camera, and compose and take your shot. Then you look on the back of the LCD screen to see how the photo came out. But with Live View, you don’t use the small optical viewfinder. You use the actual LCD screen to frame your photo while at the same time getting a simulated preview of your exposure settings before you take the shot. Many users, however, basically use Live View as the viewfinder and but not for previewing exposure settings. That’s because many users don’t shoot beyond the automatic mode of their camera. The following tips for taking digital photography will guide you through the process of using Live View to it’s fullest capacity.

Live View on Non-35mm Cameras

Live View works best on point-and-shoot and compact cameras because there’s no mirror inside that needs to pop-up to reveal the sensor. So in Live View, if you change any of the exposure settings, including ISO, aperture, shutter speed, exposure compensation or White Balance settings, you get a simulation of your settings on the LCD screen when you press the shutter halfway down. It works similar to automatic focus when you press the shutter halfway, you see the subject of your camera come into focus.

With larger monitors on the back of digital cameras, you can actually compose shots better using the screen as the viewfinder. The Canon Powershot series, especially the last three models (G9, G10, and G11) each sport a 3-inch screen that makes the traditional tiny viewfinder nearly useless. You can simply see more and compose better with the larger size screen.

The G9, for example, comes with the option to use Grid Guidelines that appears when you’re in live shooting mode. The grid is divided into 9 parts so you can use the traditional Rules of Thirds in photography to compose shots or just line up a subject.

Exposure Settings

Here are a few illustrations of Live View in action. In the first example, Live View mode is engaged and the shutter priority speed is 1/60 of a second, at f/2.8, which means there’s less light coming into the camera. In the second example, I changed the shutter priority to ⅙ of a second, and as you can see more light is allowed into the camera. Before the advent of Live View technology there as no way you could preview exposure in this way.

In another example, I’ve changed the White Balance settings to demonstrate another exposure simulation in Live View. With feature, you now can see if your White Balance is correct or what type of color cast you will have on the lighting before you take the photo. This takes a lot guessing on out the process, and makes for more accurate settings.

Live View on 35mm SLRs

Live View technology works best on point-and-shoot and compact cameras, but not as well on 35mm cameras.  Why is this? Well, Ben Long explains it best in his book, The Canon EOS Digital Rebel XS/1000D Companion Book: “To create an image on LCD screen, the image sensor needs to be able to see out the lens. But in an SLR [35mm single reflection camera], there’s a shutter and mirror between the sensor and lens, so the sensor is effectively, blind. This means there’s no way for it…to show you an image on the LCD screen. The XS, though, provides a special feature called Live View that does let you use the LCD screen as the viewfinder.”

With Live View on 35mm cameras, the auto focus is slower and there’s a slight lag in the capture of the photo. Even Canon points out the disadvantages with Live View: “The disadvantage of the Quick Mode AF is that to perform it, the camera has to momentarily lower the mirror and Live Viewing will “black-out” for a moment, as you press the button to activate the AF. Once you remove your thumb from the button, when focusing is completed, Live Viewing instantly returns.”

I use Live View on my Canon 50D for difficult-to-reach shots such as at a dance recital, concert, or even sometimes for group photography photos using a tripod. On the Canon cameras, Live View also features silent mode shooting, which comes in handy in places like churches or wildlife photography.

Also, many Live View features include facial detection which helps improve image focus faces. Of course, this feature is best used for group portraits instead of candid shots where subjects are moving around or are not directly facing the camera.

Though Live View is being added to both consumer and top of the line professional 35mm cameras, I would strongly suggest not purchasing such a camera for that feature. If you want the full of advantage of Live View, you’re better off purchasing a compact camera with that feature.

Finally, I recommend Live View as an effective teaching tool for digital photography. I use the feature on my Canon Powershot G9 in workshops to show how exposure settings work in the camera. And because of the live simulation, students are able to grasp the concepts a little faster. The ability to view, compose, and evaluate exposure settings in the LCD monitor is another breakthrough piece technology that makes taking digital photos easier and better.

So is Live View a feature on your camera? Which camera do you use and how well does the feature work?

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The following tips may be best understood if you take out your camera and its manual and try out the suggestions as you read this article. If you don’t have or can’t find your camera’s manual, you can go online and download a PDF copy of it from the manufacture’s site.

The illustrations used in this article are based on the Canon Powershot G9, but I will point out features that are typically found in most point-and-shoot and compact cameras.

Basic Settings

1. Setup Menu: First off, know how to find the setup menu on your camera. Most cameras come with default settings that you can customize for your particular needs or the way you shoot. Look in your manual to find out how to access your camera’s setup menu. Notice what kind of menu changes can be made with the control dials on your camera and the menu settings that you can bring up and select through your camera’s LCD screen. Some cameras, for example, will allow you to change the exposure mode of the camera with a dial on the top or on the back of the camera, while smaller pocket-size cameras will require you to open a menu setting to make those changes.

2. Date and Time Stamp: Most cameras come with quick instructions for how to set the date and time stamp in your camera. If you haven’t already done so, be sure your camera is stamping the correct date and time on your image files. This bit of information (or what is called metadata in the digital photography world) can be very useful for archiving and managing your photos.

3. Review Time: One of the best features about digital photography is the ability to review photos after they are taken. The default time for reviewing an image may be only a couple of seconds, but you typically can change that time, making it longer or shorter. Look up the word “review” or “play menu” in your manual to find out how to change the review time. I have my photos display for 6-8 seconds. This gives me enough time to consider if I need to retake the shot.

4. Picture Count: If you never want to miss a good shot, you should know where to find the picture count for your camera. Typically it can be seen on your camera‘s LCD screen when you review the images stored on your image card. Based the size of your card and the resolution settings you’re shooting in, the camera will display the number of photos you have shot. When you set the camera to take a photo, the number of captures you have remaining that your media card can hold should be displayed on the LCD screen.

5. Format Your Media Card: When you fill up a media card, it’s best to reformat it instead of erasing the image files. Avoid filling up your card completely. Change the card when you only have 5-10 captures remaining that you can put on the card. Also, don’t allow your computer or software application to erase images for you. Reformat your card on the camera itself after you have securely imported and backed up your photos to your computer. Look up the word “format” in the index of your manual for specific instructions.

Advanced Tips

6. Turn the Flash On/Off: Most with cameras come with a built-in flash. Your camera‘s automatic features may cause your flash to fire when you don’t want it to; for example when you’re shooting in a shaded area. So learn how to manually shut off and turn on your camera built-in flash. If you’re shooting in Automatic mode, you most likely will not have the option to turn off the flash, and in that case you’ll need to choose another shooting mode (like Program, discussed later) in order to shut off the flash.

Likewise, if your photos are coming out a little blurred, it means that you may need the use the flash or increase the shutter speed on your camera. If you can’t do the latter, it’s best the turn on the flash for that will automatically increase your shutter speed to 1/60th of a second, which is a better speed for holding a camera than at say 1/10th of a second. (I will discuss flash later in a longer article in this series.)

7. Shooting Beyond A: Most beginning photographers shoot in automatic mode. There’s typically a dial on your camera with a green Auto icon indicating that mode of shooting. When you shoot in automatic mode you’re telling your camera to make all the decisions about exposure settings when you take pictures. Your camera will read the amount and type of light coming into the lens and hitting the sensor and it will make the best guess for setting the exposure.

But if you learn how to shoot beyond the automatic made, you can have more control about those settings. Even you don’t understand what aperture and shutter speed means, you can more easily learn how to use Program mode, which is discussed in the next step. But in order to do this, you need to know how to change the shooting modes of your camera.

8. Program Mode: The first step to getting beyond Automatic mode is to use Program or P mode. This mode is similar to automatic in that it sets the exposure settings for the picture you’re taking; however,  in this mode, you can control better how much light is allowed to enter the camera. If you shoot a photo in Automatic and then shoot the same subject in the same lighting condition in Program mode at their default settings, they should look pretty much alike. But in Program mode, you can use what is called Exposure Compensation to adjust for lighting. Look up in your camera’s manual how to change the shooting mode to P or program.

9. Exposure Compensation: Okay, here’s the hardest feature you’ll learn in this series of tips, but it can make a big difference in the quality of photos you take. If you noticed that some of your photos come out too dark or too light, or that they just seem flat, you can use exposure compensation to adjust for lighting. To adjust for lighting, you can use what is called Exposure Compensation. You can only use this feature in Program, Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority or Manual Mode. It is typically deactivated in Automatic mode because, remember, you’re telling the camera to make all the decisions for you.

Look up the term, exposure compensation, in your manual and find out how to use it on your particular camera. It is typically a meter with a plus/minus scale for increasing and decreasing the amount of light coming into your camera.

In these two photos (both un-edited), the top one is shot in Automatic mode, and the bottom one in Program mode. In the first one, the image is slightly under exposed. With the second photo, using exposure compensation, I was able to allow more light in thus getting more detail on the subject (my daughter.)

Even if you don’t understand aperture and shutter speed, if you learn how to use exposure compensation then you can have more control over the lighting exposure of your camera. So right after you read this article, find a subject and practice with the exposure compensation feature. With digital photography, you’re not wasting film, so you can practice, practice, practice, and not have to spend a penny extra.

10. Self-Timer: Often times if you’re the main photographer in your family, you most likely don’t get yourself included in many of the photos you take. So learn to use the self-timer and a tripod so that you can take photos that include you, the photographer.

Also, the self-timer is a good way to shoot close-up shots of say, a flower or Ebay product shots. By using the self-timer and a tripod, you will get less camera shake in your macro shots and thus, less blurry photos.

In the next few articles on digital photography, I will share some advanced tips for taking pictures. But it will useful to hear back from readers what questions you have about using your camera and the art of taking photos. What problems do you encounter when taking photos?

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Flickr offers both free and paid subscriptions, and after you open your account and start building your own photostream, you’ll want to sign up for several of the tens of thousands of groups on the popular photo sharing site.

The following is a suggested list of the various types of Flickr discussion groups you might consider joining.

1. Your Camera Model Flickr Group

One of the first groups you should search for and join is one based on the camera you use. Nearly all popular digital 35mm and compact cameras have at least one Flickr group dedicated to it. If you’re a Canon user, for example, there’s the Canon DSLR User Group.

But more specifically there’s groups based on different models of Canon cameras, such as the Canon Powershot G9 group with well over 3,000 members. There’s groups for Nikon and Kodak camera users, as well as for Sonys and Panasonics.

2. Your Town or City

If you’re the kind of photographer who likes to get out and take photographs, search for a group based on the town or city you live in. If such a group doesn’t exist, create one. These Flickr groups can be a great places for discovering nearby shutterbugs, as well public locations for photo shoots. For example there’s one group called San Francisco Graffiti with 900 members. This niche groups shares some awesome finds.

3. Black-and-White Photography

If you like black-and-white photography, there are hundreds of groups on the subject that not only includes awesome monochromatic photographs, but also great discussions about lighting, post-processing, and film related issues related to black-and-white photography. One such Flickr group has nearly 85,000 members, and it’s name is simply, B&W.

4. iPhoneography

If you’re an iPhone camera shooter, you’ll want to join one or more of the growing Flickr groups on this subject. One such group, iPhoneography has over 600 members, while another group, iPhone Camera Shots has well over 2,000 members.

There are even smaller groups based on different and popular iPhone camera applications, such the Best Camera app group.  There’s not a lot of discussion in this group, but they share really awesome photos, and you can share yours as well.

5. Photography Tips

Beginning photographers will want to find a newbie Flickr group. One such group is Your Photo Tips and another was created by author/photographer Derrick Story, and it is called  The Digital Story Group . Derrick’s group, of about 1,000 members, includes discussions about all kinds of camera features, accessories and photography strategies.

Digital Photography School is also a group for both beginning and advanced photographers, as well as Amateurs which includes long discussion threads of favorite photos and camera tips.

6. Project 365

The best way to build and improve your photography skills is to take photos every day, or as often as you can. There are over 11,000 members of the popular Project 365 group that have or are attempting to complete a photo-per-day project. Even if you don’t reach the goal, you’ll improve your photography trying to.  There are several other smaller and similar project groups that you should also query using the keyword, 365.

7. Strobist.com

If you’re wanting to learn about using external flashes and lighting equipment, the must-join group is Strobist.com, started by 20 year-old veteran photographer, David Hobby. The group, with well over 62,000 members, is an outgrowth of his popular blog site of the same name.

8. Nature Photography

If nature photography is your hobby, check out this wild nature group of 22,000 members. The discussions are little sparse for a group of that size, but there’s lots of great photos of plants, animals, fungi, landscapes and flowers.

One popular thread in the group is “the best flower shot.” These “best of” topics are common in groups where you simply share your own favorite photos based on a discussion topic.

9. Artistic Photo Group

If you approach photography from a artistic perspective you might check out a popular and respected group called UTATA: Tribal Photography. Its 17,000+ members are made up of both professionals and serious shutterbugs. It has over 8,000 discussion threads with weekly photo projects for its members.

10. Photoshop Support Group

If you’re serious about photography, you’ll no doubt spend lots of time in Photoshop. Flickr’s Photoshop Support Group has over 92,000 members, with over 5,000 discussion threads about all aspects of the popular image processing program.

When you join a group, look for the typical “introduce yourself” discussion thread and add a few sentences about you as a photographer and why you joined the group. From there, add your own photos to the group, being careful to follow the posting rules of the groups.

If none of the above groups interest you, you might want to check out what Flickr staff members suggest. Each time you reload the Groups page you’ll get a list of three or four suggested groups. While writing this article and checking the Groups page, for example, a group called Cloudporn popped up. What a great idea. I love taking photos of clouds, so I immediately joined. There’s currently no discussions in this group, but its 5,000+ members are sharing some great images of spectacular cloud formations and lighting.

This list of groups is mainly based on my five years of being a Flickr member, and thus it’s partially subjective. So what groups do you suggest be on the list? Please include a URL to the group and maybe a line or two about why you think the group is worth joining.

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Except me. I have to know how things work. No good reason for that. Sometimes I have to read a bunch of technical jargon, ask a lot of questions and then relate the information to something else I understand, before I can truly understand what’s going on. That makes me a slow, but tenacious, learner. And really annoying when Jeopardy! is on.

The underlying technology of the digital camera is a light sensor and  a program. The light sensor is most often a Charge Coupled Device  (CCD) and the program is firmware that is embedded right into the circuit board of the camera. Kind of like the programs that help make your microwave oven or iPod work.

I’ll focus on the CCD first. Yes, there is another kind of light sensor that can be used and that’s the Complimentary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) type. The mechanics of how they do what they do differ, but the principles are the same.

Think of the CCD as being a grid of millions of little squares, each one kind of like a solar cell. You know that a solar cell takes light energy and converts it to electrical energy right? And you probably figured that the more light there is the more energy it makes and vice versa right? So you can see where we’re going with this whole CCD thing.

Each of those little squares on the CCD takes light energy and converts it to electrical energy. Each condition of the light – like brightness and intensity – generates a very specific electrical charge. Those charges for each little square are then transported through an array of electronics to where it can be interpreted by the firmware. The firmware knows what each specific charge means and translates it to information that includes the colour and other qualities of the light that the CCD picked up.

This process is done for each of the squares in the grid of the CCD – so now you can see the miracle that it really is! Now picture (pun intended) a million little squares, each one different as though they were puzzle pieces. The firmware puts those puzzle pieces together to form an image that is recognizable to the human eye.

The process of putting it together is very much akin to what happens with your television or monitor. It does this using pixels. Each pixel is comprised of three basic colours – red, green and blue. By varying the intensity of each colour within a pixel, the variety of colours that can be produced is amazing indeed. This is known as a Bayer filter.

Get up close with your monitor – to the point where you can see the pixels individually. Don’t worry, that whole thing about going blind from sitting too close to the TV is an old wives’ tale. Except when it comes to my kids.  You might need a magnifying glass. Neat, huh? Did you see how there were more green pixels than red or blue? That’s because somebody figured out that the eye is not as sensitive to green as it is to red or blue.

I digressed. The next step is for the firmware to record the information it saw into digital code. That code can be used to accurately reproduce the picture time and time again. Call it a recipe for that specific moment in time that you captured. Now, that code can be passed to the view screen on the camera, or to a monitor or printer to be reproduced.

And now you know how that all works. Hopefully taking the mystery away hasn’t ruined the experience for you. I hope you enjoyed this high level overview of how these things work.

Are you a digital photo enthusiast? Did this article help you to understand the process better? Share your questions with us in the comments, and I’ll try to answer them.

Photo Credit: ralphbijker

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This will work for most people, but then there are the determined thieves who target the prized works of well known photographers without giving the poor schmuck a dime.

You see, watermarks aren’t 100% fool-proof; there are programs that some unscrupulous characters use to digitally remove the watermarks or to minimize them so they’re barely visible. Thus defeating the purpose of trying to protect images by using what is now a primitive method – not to mention crude and unattractive.

In this article I’m going to show you three great ways to protect your web images without breaking the bank on complex encryption programs.

Splicing

One method to protect web images is to cut them up into several different images and put them all side by side to form one whole image. Then, anyone who tries to save the image will only get a small segment of it. The result is that they have to tediously click around the image, guessing where the cuts have been made and then paste them all together. Big images such as the ones found on photographers’ and artists’ blogs can be cut up into over 20 or 30 pieces.

This acts as a deterrent to most copies and they’ll look elsewhere.

Probably the best program for the novice user to automatically splice images before they go live on your site is Super Simple Image Tiles.

All you have to do to activate it on a particular image, once you have installed it on your web directory using the instructions included in the download, is to slightly alter the image’s HTML. Most blogging platforms such as Wordpress and Blogger offer HTML editors alongside the text editor. Simply enter ‘Protect’ in the image HTML as I did in the screenshot above.

J-Query Plug-in

The way most people steal an image is to simply right-click on it and select ‘Save As’.

The tried and tested method, if you will. However, you can nip the problem in the bud by taking away the ‘Save’ function when someone right-clicks on your image.

The plug in for this is available right here to download for free, along with the instructions. It will also disable any kind of image saving toolbar or add-on in a browser which a user may utilise instead of right clicking.

The plug-in is as lightweight as possible and as such shouldn’t effect the speed or functionality of your pages, all the while keeping your images safe.

Again, this program simply needs to be installed onto your web directory as a plug-in which the big names offer on their dashboards.

Embed as Flash

The final option to protect web images is to upload your images as a flash file instead of as an image. This will disable right clicking as well but it also gives you more options about what to do with your images in terms of web-design which would be hindered if you were using a plug-in which may conflict with Flash design. Basically, you can style your images using CSS properties.

SWF–IR (the SWF originating from Flash’s file extension and the IR standing for ‘Image Replacement’) is available here. Upload it to your web directory.

Then, to put it to work on your post, place this HTML in the <head> section of your post:

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”swfir.js”></script>

So there you have it webmasters and photographers. Protect your images the best way you can for free by using the above methods. Remember, images are never 100% secure online but these methods will stop 99% of thieves from stealing your high-resolution originals.

BONUS: To see whether people have already copied your image(s) online, use Google’s ‘Similar Images’ app here.

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Now, with digital SLRs readily available and even the world’s first ever 3D camera now on the scene, the hobby (and indeed profession for many) keeps growing and growing in an era where still images and print was predicted to be obsolete.

The web is the greatest place for photographers to share photos and socialise, with Flickr undoubtedly being the biggest site for photographers to show off their snaps. But how about when it comes to editing their snaps or indeed just getting solid advice?

I have whittled down a list of many photography websites that I found into the five best sites for the amateur and semi-pro photographer.

Photoshop Express

This is a web app owned and run by the well-known Photoshop company – Adobe. It is a watered down version of their software and it allows the user to make basic editing to their photographs online before sharing them.

It’s really easy to use. Down the left hand side of the editing screen you have your basic tools such as ‘Auto-Correct’, ‘Crop’, ‘Touch up’, and ‘Remove Redeye’. These can all be used by clicking and dragging the mouse, which your average PC user, who has used MS Paint once or twice, should have no trouble with.

The list continues with some more advanced tools such as ‘Colour Saturation’, ‘Highlighting’, ‘Tint’ and ‘Focus’. All of these can transform a good shot into something memorable where the eye washes over the picture numerous times taking in all the attention to detail.

Across the top there are some upload tools and a link to your gallery. Photoshop Express lets you have up to 2GB of online storage – more than enough to upload a days worth of photographs waiting to be given a tweak here and there.

You also get you own gallery page under the Photoshop domain, for example, Mygallerypage.photoshop.com.

For more on Photoshop Express visit the MakeUseOf Directory.

PicResize

Pic Resize is a photography website that does pretty much what it says on the domain; it resizes pictures. This is an easy to use tool with some extra features thrown in.

When you get to the home page simply select the file you want by clicking ‘Browse’ and upload it. This will bring you to section two as seen in the screenshot. Here you can crop your picture, select what size you want to make it and add special affects such as ‘Sharpen’, ‘Greyscale’, ‘Rotate’ and ‘Blur’. You can do one or all of these options. Then click ‘Resize’ at the end of the page.

The final page gives you four options to choose from. You can preview the image, save it, publish it to the web or use the ‘Advanced Edit’ tool.

The advanced edit tool doesn’t give much more options but it is good for just giving it that final touch-up after the resize. You can crop, add text, blur, explode, and add a frame along with a few other small options.

Golden Hour

Golden Hour is a web app that tells you the best times to go out on the hunt for a mean shot in a certain area. Any photographer will tell you that they always go snapping at the ‘Golden Hour’ (or ‘Magic Hour’ as it’s sometimes known) because the sun is at the right angle of elevation relevant to the particular landmass selected.

All you have to do is click on where it is on the map that you plan on shooting and the app will tell you what times are the best to go. The hour is highlighted on a chart below the map and when you roll over it gives you some information as to why this is the golden hour for this location. The app will also tell you when there is a full moon coming up for those who want some good night time pictures.

Watermark

So after spending the day snapping like crazy, the photographer comes up against a new problem – copyright. As a freelance writer, I discovered my work stolen by two websites on two separate occasions when playing with CopyScape. The feeling of anger and to be honest, helplessness is awful.

What can you do? It’s the internet and tracking down someone is like looking for a needle in a haystack. However, with photographs the creators can protect them by adding in a watermark that will stop people from stealing their work.

A great (and free) online tool I found that can do this is a photography website called Watermark. This has a good free account option with the ability to upgrade to the premium account if you so wish. The free account does all you would really need. You can mark multiple photos at once and you can customise the watermark with different text, colours, size and effects as seen in the screenshot.

The only bad parts to the free account that you would notice is that a picture cannot be any larger than 0.5Mb which shouldn’t obstruct you much if you’re only posting them online. Also, it doesn’t save your watermark for when you come back later.

Both Karl and Jim have discussed watermarking alternatives here and here.

Fotopedia

Finally when the photograph has been taken, edited, resized and protected there comes the time to publish it. Sure, one could indeed use Flickr or perhaps a personal blog but for me, Fotopedia stands out from the rest.

With Fotopedia, photographs are organised and even voted upon by users as one of the main features to determine which ones should represent each category. Many of the photographs actually come from other web services such as Flickr as seen under them in the photographer’s credit area. You’re assured that you’re getting the best of the best however, as irrelevant or low quality photos are removed from the categories via the user vote system.

Fellow MakeUseOf writer Jim Henderson has done lots of photography-related articles here on MakeUseOf.   To see what he has done so far, check out his MakeUseOf writers page.

So what web tools and services do MakeUseOf readers use for their photographs?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Guess what – the new Seadragon does just that! You can share any large image you find on the web with this amazing new service from Microsoft Live Labs. Of course, everything featured here on MakeUseOf is free, but there’s more – there is no need to sign up anywhere. Just go to Seadragon and enter the URL of your image. It processes your image link and gives you URL that you can tweet, share on Facebook, or bookmark on Delicious, or whatever you wish. Let’s see how it works.

Suppose I wanted to share this wonderful panoramic high resolution photo of New York’s Grand Central Station by David Iliff, which is graciously shared on Wikimedia Commons:

You can see there is no fun sharing the photo in this way. The high resolution photo from Wikimedia Commons is 2500 x 1287 pixels, 1.13 MB in size. Here’s what you do to get your kicks by sharing the original image:

1. Copy the URL of the full-resolution image.
2. Go to Seadragon and paste the URL. Seadragon gives you a URL and an embed script code.
3. Share the URL with anyone or embed the script code on your blog.

That’s it! Here is how it looks:

You can use the embed script on your web page, blog, or eBay ad. If you are an artist, you can use it to create your own portfolio. Your viewers can view the high resolution image using any popular web browser on multiple platforms.

Notice how the image loads up very quickly even if it’s large in size. No more waiting for slow downloads for large images. If your viewers have Silverlight installed, the viewing experience is ultra-smooth and fast. But the beauty of this technology is that even if they don’t have it installed, it almost works the same way!

For iPhone lovers, Seadragon Mobile is available on the iPhone App Store. Using this free app, you can view large, high-resolution images on your iPhone.

You can create your own interesting images by creating your own panoramic photos, or stunning mosaics. Check out these 10 stunning photo blogs, download free high-resolution photos from this Digital Stock Photography Site, or check out the best sites to download very high resolution wallpapers.

Share your favorite high resolution images via Seadragon with us in the comments!

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The second scenario will work you up even more. Imagine the commonness of having more than one camera in the house. Each, lending to the graphical stew of your pictures folder. Of course, your exasperation can be easily cured by the timely habit of renaming photos when you transfer them. Arranging photos chronologically (according to dates) also makes retrieval a snap.

Today, most digital cameras have an internal clock which tags the photos with the exact time when it was clicked. This information is embedded as meta-data (meta-data is data about the data) in the photo itself.

The EXIF (Exchangeable image file format) and DCF (Design rule for Camera File system) standards are specifications for this meta-data. EXIF, in simple terms, defines the camera and image information in the files. DCF defines standards which ensure compatibility between different recording media like a camera and a printer.

It is this photo information that software programs tap into when they read the pictures. And using this information makes arranging photos by timestamps as easy as clicking them.

Automatically Batch Rename Photos With the Date They Were Shot with Namexif

When we say ‘Namexif’ aloud, it sounds like a blend of ‘name’ with ‘fix’ and also ‘exif’ (a portmanteau). The free software does exactly that. Namexif batch renames photos with the dates they were shot. This helps to ease the chronological assortment within your pictures folder. Of course, photos compulsorily must have the EXIF data.

Namexif is a lithe 700MB batch renamer with a simple interface. The timestamp software is a standalone executable. It runs on Windows 95, 98, 2000, XP and Vista. Namexif works snappily in three steps –

• Run the program – select and add the individual files or the folder where the photos are stored. Click Next.



• On the next screen choose the date format you want from the three pre-sets given. In case of high speed shooting mode, where the times may differ by sub-secs, the format adds dashes (-) to tell filenames apart.



• You have the option of keeping the original name or adding your own name as a describer. In case the camera (or photo) does not support EXIF standards, then the original name is kept intact.

Namexif is a simple no frills app for a necessary task. It does not require an install and can be carried around like a portable app. My only other demand would have been an option for a custom timestamp and a way to edit a photo’s embedded date. If you like lightweight, self running simple software then you can give this a shot.

Automatically timestamp photos with Stamp

Stamp is another free software which batch renames image and video files chronologically. It can also batch process entire folders and add a timestamp to the beginning of each filename. Stamp is an improvement over Namexif on several fronts. It can directly transfer photos from most cameras. It batch renames audio/video files too.

Also, unlike Namexif, Stamp saves the renamed image files in a different folder (gives an option of copy or move) thus preserving the originals. Some of the other power features include -

• Stamp gives the choice between five different file formats which fall across – DCF convention, History Data formatsCustom format.



• Custom format is handy for generating long or short filenames with descriptive information like location of shoot.



• Stamp comes with various filters which lets the user control the processing by including certain files and excluding others.



• Stamp features extra options for file handling like preview function which displays a summary of predicted results and an error reporting log.

The Stamp user guide is exhaustively detailed in its help with the software feature set. The 2MB free software is supported by 95, 98, 2000 and XP.

Of course, there is a tool like Picasa which in itself is a complete photo management application. It also automatically renames photos by date. Renaming photos by date is quick and simple with these two little file renamer alternatives. After a few gigabytes of photos we will find that arranging photos chronologically rather than by name is easier for instant recall.

You can also try out the cross platform JetPhoto which Jeffry has written about in a previous post.

Let us know how easy (or difficult) it has been for you after spring cleaning your pictures folder…

Image Credit: Viernest

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• For converting a digital photo for an enlarged hard print.
• For flipping a photo from vertical to horizontal and stretching it.
• For making an obscure image area more clear.

And here’s a simple reason why we should not –

Pixels are the smallest units of an image. The number of pixels in an image is called the resolution.  Imagine an image composed of thousands of little squares or dots. Each little square (or pixel) has its own color information. Enlarging an image using any program means increasing the pixel size or separating the pixels and this results loss in image information and lowers quality.

Upsizing an image also means that the program needs to figure out how to compensate the increase in image area. At best, an image editing program approximates how to represent the extra information.
Image manipulation involves a lot of mathematical rules called algorithms.

For those interested in more background, a Google search gives a lot of info. For instance, here are a couple of resources –

- A tutorial on image interpolation and digital photo enlargement.
- Increasing Image Resolution – from About.com

So casting aside the overtly theoretical stuff (important nonetheless!) let’s dive into two useful photo tips to resize images without too much of a drop in quality.

FIRST METHOD: The Re-sampling by 10% Technique

Here’s a brief but brisk way to digitally increase picture size. This old photo tip involves using an image editor to resample an image by gradual 10% increments. Photoshop easily handles this using the Image Size commands.

1. Open your image in Photoshop. (Screenshots are of Photoshop CS2)
2. Click on Image – Image Size from the menu. Alternatively, right click on the image title bar and select Image Size.
3. Choose Bicubic Smoother in the Resample Image dropdown.
4. In the Pixel Dimensions setting, use the dropdown to select Percent instead of Pixels. Make sure the little chain link is set…else check the Constrain Proportions setting.
5. To resize the image by 10%, change the width/height to 110 from the earlier 100 percent. Click OK to resize the image by 10%.
6. You can continue to resize by increments by 10% till an optimum size where you can see that the visual quality hasn’t degraded by much. To undo a previous action, click on Edit – Undo Image Size or use the History palette to select an earlier state.

The snapshot below shows a section of an image taken through five increments of 10%. From an initial size of 500 X 369 to an enlarged size of nearly 800 X 600.

If you need to resize images more often, creating a Photoshop Action which does the job automatically is always better.

1. In the Actions palette, click on the New Action icon.
2. Give it a descriptive name like Resize By 10. You can also assign a shortcut key from the Function Key dropdown. Click on Record and start following through the steps mentioned earlier (Step 2 to Step 5). The actions get recorded and can be replayed again and again with a click of the play button (or the function key) for any selected image.
3. After each increment, visually assess the image quality. After a certain percentage, image loss with blurring will be perceptible.

The resize by resampling can be achieved by any good photo editor. If you do not have Photoshop, you can resize similarly with the free IrfanView. The commands and there location might differ, but the technique is nearly the same

IrfanView

If you don’t have an image editor close at hand, then there’s an online option too.

SECOND METHOD: The Reshade Method

The second photo tip is to "reshade." Reshade.com offers a standalone image enlargement software package for Windows. The photo enlarger though is a paid download. As an alternative there is an online image resizer which is free and does the job equally well.  The free online service though limited offers some notable features…

• You can use it directly from your browser (via a URL or an upload).
• You can resize images for free to any standard monitor resolution (max 1920×1200px).
• You can zoom to 2X of your original image size i.e. maximum 200% of the original resolution.
• You can crop part of an image, remove noise and improve its quality.
• You can upload images without a login which imposes certain restrictions like your images won’t be stored (that’s good in a way!), only allowed 3 uploads a day and you won’t be able to crop an image.

Browse to a locally stored image or submit it through a URL. The Submit button takes you to the image resize settings (as shown in the screenshot). Along with the resize settings, Reshade gives you five image enhancements checkboxes to play with – Center crop, Stretch, Denoise, Smooth and Crop.

You can then proceed to download it to your computer or post it to forums or social networking sites with the links provided. Do keep in mind that if you intend to post it, then it’s better to login and keep it in your online account.

Enlarging an image from its native resolution is paid for by lower quality. The best advice that goes around is to take a picture with the highest resolution possible and then downsize it. But in situations which ask for image upsize, these two solutions can prove helpful.

Do you have a tried and tested method to resize an image? Do you have any photo tips of your own? Let us know…

Image Credit: Cartel Soviet

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Step 1 – Show off your best

No one is ever going to know what sorts of photos you are interested in unless you get some of them online. If you take photographs regularly, upload regularly. Really, what excuses do you have?

Second only to getting the images online is making sure they can be found. I’ve spoken about tagging before, but perhaps an example might help?

If you want other folk to find your photos, you need to take some good guesses as to what they might search for, and add those word or phrases to your photo as tags.

Some people like to look at photos of roller coasters. I think this is the only one I have, so I’m not one of those people, but I’m not immune to wanting people to like it. So I’ve tagged the image with the search phrases I think people might use to find it.

Needless to say, your list would differ from mine. I posted this a few years ago as well, and these days I’d probably add ‘roller’ and ‘coaster’ separately as well.

But the focus here is to find other people’s images, so let’s move on.

Step 2 – Join groups

Aside from searching for images in Flickr, you can search for groups. Just in case there is any confusion, a group is like a set, except that it’s designed for multiple people to use. Most groups are public, but you can also restrict the membership of a group.

Search for groups that contain things you are interested in. That could be objects (like roller coasters), colours (careful with your spelling), techniques, moods… I’ll be surprised if you can’t find at least one Flickr group on any reasonably broad subject, and you’ll generally find hundreds.

Join groups. Add images. Comment on other images you find there. Go on.

Step 3 – Create your own group.

Eventually, you might find that you’re searching for something that’s too specific for a group to already exist, and you’ll need to create one of your own. That’s going to take a little more work, so decide if you’re up for it first.

Just as an example, I like to take photographs of rusty things. Peculiar I know, but I’ve even exhibited on the subject, so I’m definitely not alone. Anyway, I became interested specifically in images that were rusty, and also blue. At this point, feel free to substitute your own obsession.

I’m going to cheat anyway, as this group already exists. I’ll create a similar one for yellow rust pictures.

Creation

After checking that a group doesn’t already exist on the subject, create a new one here.

You can see that various types of groups are possible. Given that we’re looking to find people, let’s make it public.

Supply a name for the group, and add some idea of what it’s all about. Make a decision about whether there’s anything that might be in the group that kids shouldn’t see. Click Next.

Decide what non-members of the group should be able to see.

Decide what to call the administrators and moderators.

You can make a whole set of choices about administration, addresses, moderation etc. Just remember you want people to join. Which leads me to the next part…

Invitations

You can use all the means at your disposal to invite folk to your new group. You can email them, send them a text from your phone, put an advertisement on national television. Whatever you like. Flickr has its own method as well, so you can easily invite your contacts.

Go to the main page for your group and look at the top menu.

Click the invite Friends link, and invite anyone you think might be interested.

Of course for this to be useful it assumes you already know the people who might want to join. If you don’t, you need to locate some images that might fit in the group, and invite them instead.  Let’s switch back to my real group of blue + rust to see how this works.

Basically, other than images I stumble across in Flickr, I want to know about images which are tagged with both blue and rust. You see why it’s important to correctly tag your images?

Click the search link on the main Flickr page, and then click on advanced search. You want something like this:

Run the search, and depending on what you’re looking for you’ll almost certainly get back a stack of images.

Click on one that’s of interest (such as my friend Kate’s wheel), and fill in the boxes…

Hit Post Comment, and you’re all set. Take a look at Kate’s image to see how it comes out.

Maintenance

One of the toughest parts of running a group is keeping things moving. You always want new members, more images, interesting competitions and discussions.

Assign some other folk admin privileges so things don’t stall if you’re busy. Start conversations.

The query process above is great for getting things started, but it’s not great for ongoing invitations. You need a way to be automatically told when new images arrive that might suit the group.

That’s where we add a little more technology…

The Flickr API is able to generate RSS feeds on the fly, based on a query string. Then you sign up for the RSS feed, and every few hours you get some more images to invite. How this looks depends on both your browser and your feed reader, but the way it works is fairly clear in the link.

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=blue,rust&tagmode=all&lang=en-us&format=rss_200

Take a look at the query. Just replace blue and rust with whatever you want to search for, separating any additional terms with commas.

And that’s it. Now you have a group, some members, some images, and a way to build on it.

I’d love to know if you’ve used any of this and if you have any other tips or tricks. Let me know in the comments. Oh, and… any chance you might want to join my group?

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However, the downside is that all those photos are going to cost you. It’s important to understand the term “royalty-free” (RF) for those websites. RF images are not in the public domain, nor are they free to use without purchasing a license.

Luckily, there are plenty of websites for copyright free photos that won’t require you to dig into your pockets.  Here’s 5 of them.

Freerange

Once you register for a free membership at Freerange, thousands of high-resolution stock photos will be at your fingertips at no cost. All of the website’s images can be used for personal or commercial projects.

For photographers, Freerange also offers Google AdSense revenue sharing when you contribute. Check out this list for more of the top websites to sell your stock photos.

Stockvault

With over 13,000 free copyright free photos, Stockvault connects designers and photographers. The photo sharing website offers all of its images for absolutely free personal or non-commercial use.

Check out more about Stockvault in MakeUseOf’s Directory.

FreeDigitalPhotos

FreeDigitalPhotos neatly organizes its thousands of photos into easy-to-find categories and sub-categories. Every image is available for free download but if you want a larger version or a high-resolution version, they’re priced at $5 and $10, respectively.

stock.xchng

SXC.hu has over 400,000 photos to choose from by more than 30,000 photographers. The website maintains that all images are free, but you must abide by its image license agreement.

Some of the site’s artists may also need to be notified about using some images, and in most cases, you’ll need to give credit to them.

Flickr

If you still haven’t found what you’re looking for, you may want to actually try Flickr. The popular image hosting website has millions of images from its users who have offered their work under a Creative Commons (CC) License. All you have to do is simply pay close attention to the type of licenses each image falls under to use it appropriately.

Keep in mind that Flickr photos offered under the CC Attribution License requires you to give credit to the photographer.

Want more? MakeUseOf’s Directory of Apps has got details on MorgueFile, yet another website database for free high-resolution digital stock photos. If you’re still having trouble looking, try out PicFindr, a stock photography search engine.

If you know of any other good sites, let us know in the comments.

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The Mac and the cameras

So I connect my digital camera to my Mac almost all the time; saving those precious moments to the hard drive.

There are two applications that I use to manage my photos: iPhoto (which always opens automatically), and the camera picture transfer software from my camera manufacturer – just for the sake of backup.

But the source of photos is not only my own camera. My wife has a pocket digital camera. My kids are still babies, but soon they too will start taking pictures. And I believe that there are folks who have several cameras for each of their family members. Over time, managing all of the devices and all the pictures taken by them could be mundane tasks.

Luckily, there’s Cameras – a little Mac app to help you manage all of your cameras including your iPhone’s camera.

Shoot, Cameras, Manage!

This camera picture transfer software from Flexibits is less than 1MB in size. So downloading it wouldn’t be a problem. The installation process is also a snap; you just double-click on the “Cameras.prefPane”. Cameras will then reside in your Mac’s System Preferences.

You will have a blank “Cameras” Preferences Pane window. Make sure to check “Enable Cameras” and choose “Ask what to do” in the options of “When you connect new cameras”. These option allow Cameras to always run in the background and ask you what to do if you connect new camera(s).

After doing that little setting, I connect my camera to my Mac and… a pop-up window appears and asks what to do every time that specific camera is connected. The options are: do nothing, open iPhoto, open Image Capture, open other application, and automatically download. Choose one according to your preferences.

The nice thing about Cameras is that you can set different things to do for each different camera. If you want to, you can choose to simply download all images from all of your cameras automatically.

But if you are a professional photographer who wants to edit the shots from your dSLR with Aperture while manage images from other cameras with iPhoto, you can do so. Just set your preference in Cameras and you won’t be bothered again.

With a little help from Image Capture

My personal preferences is to manage all my pictures with iPhoto and keep a copy of each for backup. To achieve this objective, I ask Cameras to open Image Capture.

In Image Capture, I set the option to download the image from my camera to a folder (as the back up) and set it to automatically opens iPhoto after the downloading process has finished.

I also dug a little bit deeper into Image Capture’s options and choose to

• delete items from camera after downloading
• automatically download all items from camera
• set the camera’s date and time

With everything is set, all that’s left for me to do is to continue taking pictures and connect my cameras to my Mac. No more manually opening several apps and downloading the images.

Final Note and Wish List

As the ’s’ behind the name suggested plural form, Cameras is indeed a useful little app for those who have multiple cameras.

But I need to point out that if you have only one camera, Image Capture could do a better job in automatic camera management.

So, I think Cameras would turn into a much better app if the developer adds the ability to:

• do several task for each device, for example: first downloads the pictures, then renames them, then opens iPhoto, and continues with the task of creating copies of the images in folder X.
• manage other cellphone’s cameras other than iPhone. Almost everybody has cellphones these days, and almost all cellphones have camera built in. iPhone might be very popular, but not everybody owns it.

Do you enjoy photography? Do you have multiple cameras? Have you tried Cameras? Or do you know better alternative application? Share using the comment below.

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Well, I am not getting into the criminal underbelly, but just jabbering about a long existing software that makes it possible to recover deleted files from a memory card used on digital cameras. PC Inspector Smart Recovery (v4.5) is a free, Windows only software that does one job (actually two… as we shall see) and does it well.

Primary job: PC Inspector Smart Recovery is a freeware data recovery program from CONVAR for Flash Card/USB Flash Drive, Smart Media, SONY Memory Stick, IBM Micro Drive, Multimedia Card, Secure Digital Card or any other data carrier for digital cameras.

Secondary job: While it goes about its first job, it also offers a way to check the memory type for any errors.

I call PC Inspector Smart Recovery a ‘doomsday’ software. This one and others of its ilk help us to recover from our errors or those committed by our digital devices. If you think that the chances of losing some precious photo or video among the thousands we shoot with our digital cameras is one in thousands then give this software a miss. Otherwise, let’s give it a rip…

The download size of PC Inspector Smart Recovery is fairly compact at 6.1MB. The software is compatible with Windows XP (not tested for Vista).

These are the formats and digital camera types supported by PC Inspector Smart Recovery:

JPG, AMR, TIF, BMP, GIF, AVI, MOV, WAV, DSS, MP4, Canon (.crw) , Fuji (.raf) , RICOH (.raw), Olympus E-XX (.orf), Olympus C5050 (.orf), Nokia (3gp), Kodak (.dcr), Minolta (.mrw), Nikon D1H/D1X (.nef), Nikon D2H/D2X (.nef), Nikon E5000/E5700 (.nef), Konica Minolta, Sigma – Foveon (.x3f).

Installation is a no-brainer. And so is the use – in five simple steps.

1. Connect your memory card through your computer’s memory card reader or connect the digital camera/mobile phone with the provided data cable.
2. Start PC Inspector Smart Recovery. Select the drive letter (Select Device) used by the memory device from the first dropdown.
3. Select the file type (Select Format Type) that is to be recovered from the second dropdown. The Enhanced Options is for JPG format only. The default Automatic setting recognizes the format on its own. The With Thumbnails option assumes that your picture format includes thumbnails; the Without Thumbnails option assumes that your picture format does not include thumbnails.
4. Select the destination folder (Select where the images are to be recovered). Create a specific folder as opposed tp recovering them to an area like the desktop because the sheer number of images might create a mess.
5. Click on Start and the software indicates the progress through the progress bar.

   

Change the search mode…

The Settings menu lets you change the way the recovery is done. The Fast Mode is the default mode. The Intensive Mode scans more thoroughly and takes longer to complete. The recoverable file size can be limited optionally.

Check Media found under Menu – Function is a way to check the memory device for errors. Once started, the progress is reported by the software under the Media Check section. Any read errors like a ‘Not Available’ alert could indicate problems in the memory device, the card reader or the driver.

So has it helped me avert my doomsdays?

On my 4GB memory card with a sample of 160 pictures, I recovered all but six. Yes, the process was slow – about 160 minutes for an intensive scan. But the success ratio was great so I guess I can live with the slow speeds. Getting the lost pictures back at no cost is a definite deal maker for me.

There are a few others which fall under the broad category of file recovery software. Check these out. They might save your day –

3 Remarkable File Recovery Tools
Recover Lost Computer Files with Undelete Plus
How To securely Retrieve and Delete PC files

So, what do you do when you unintentionally lose your Kodak moments (minus the teeth gnashing of course)? How do you recover deleted picture files from a memory card? Do you have your toolkit of ‘doomsday’ software?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Here’s my attempt to make up for it.

First off, this isn’t difficult or complicated, and it is very cool. Windows XP and Vista used something called Known Folders as a standard set of places for you to store your files. In XP, the primary folder was My Documents, and there were some additional known folders inside that for My Pictures and My Music.

In Vista, some other folders were added to the picture, but the structure was much the same. There was one major change though. Microsoft removed the ‘My’ part of the names, so we ended up with Documents and Pictures. Windows 7 takes that base and does something stunning with it. Let me explain, and then I’ll show you an example.

Windows 7 contains a set of libraries. Each one works that same way, and they all take the place of the standard folders in XP and Vista.

A Library can be treated like a folder with a group of subfolders inside it, and can also pull some nifty tricks all of its own. The important thing to remember is this: the subfolders are not actually stored in the library. They are just made to seem as though they are. Each library has some default contents, but you can change these, and also create new libraries if you wish.

If you’re feeling a little confused, this example should clear it right up. You won’t need to see your doctor. Relax.

I’m a photographer, so the most interesting library to me is Pictures, but all of this applies to any library you choose. They all sit inside the Libraries, which is available as soon as you start Windows Explorer, so let’s start there.

As you can see, the four default libraries are here. Double-click the Pictures library to have a look inside it.

Inside Pictures is a single folder, called Sample Pictures. Now, come for a ride. It’s 2007, and you’re seriously early to the Windows 7 world. You’ve taken a whole lot of photographs, and you want somewhere to put them. Easy. Create a folder in the library, just the way you do anywhere else. Right-click in the open space, choose new – folder, and give it a name. Like 2007 for instance.

Now double-click that folder to open it, and put all your images in it. Let’s hope you managed to save more images than this, though.

Okay, now so far this is all just the way a folder would work, right? You could also create more subfolders in here if you needed to. No problem. But in this case, you didn’t need to.

Now, a year or so goes by, and you’ve been busy using up disk space with whatever you usually use to fill it. None of my business. in any case, You bought yourself a new-fangled USB hard drive, and plugged it in. It popped up as your E: drive, and you stored some more images there.

All good so far, except that now you have two places to look for images, unless you can remember which year you took them. Library to the rescue.

If we go back to the Picture Library, you can see there’s a link under title. It currently says 2 Locations. Click the link.

By default, the library includes files from your own Pictures folder and also the Windows 7 Public Pictures folder. We want to add another location. The place we stored the 2008 images. Click the Add… button, and browse to the folder that contains the folder you put the images in. So, don’t choose E:\pictures\2008, just E:\pictures.

Click the Include folder button, and then OK.

It might take a while to save the changes…

… but then, you’ll see that a new location has been added, and the photos are now all available in the library, just as though they had been moved there.

So why is this so cool?

• The pictures have not been moved
• The link is live. That is, if you add more folders inside E:\Pictures, then they will also appear in the library
• You can, with the right network setup, add folders from other computers to the libraries
• You can create whole new libraries if you wish

Most importantly, you can view things in the library in ways that you just can’t do with a folder.

Let me just add another folder to keep it interesting. Now that you know how it works, I’ll show you a short-cut as well.

Browse to the location that you have your 2009 pictures stored in…

Now click the Include in library button.

Choose the Pictures library. You’ll get that same delay as the files are added…

Browse back to the library, and you’ll see you have yet another year’s images.

Now, for some “Library-only” tricks.

See the Arrange by option, which is currently set to Folder? Change it to Day.

Now the pictures are sorted by the date on which they were taken. All of this is completely independent of the folders in which the files are stored. Try Month.

I hope you’re impressed.

One more. Try Tag.

I’ve written about image meta-data before. I’ve used some other software to add tags to these images, and now Windows recognises them. So, if I wanted to find all the images taken at Waihi Beach, I just need to do this. Double-clicking on one of the tags opens a folder with all the matching images inside, in date order. Very nice.

Try this with your music files and you’ll have a whole different set of options.

And that’s it. Libraries are great, especially for anyone who has been creating files for some time. But I’d like to know what you think. Will you use them? What for? Let me know in the comments.

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• [Google Picasa 101] – Saving, Exporting & Uploading To Picasa Web Albums (6)
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Digital Photography School

Tutorials, cameras, accessories, software. You name it, these guys know more than you think they do.

I’m constantly impressed with both the depth and breadth of knowledge here. I keep track of their RSS feeds on a daily basis, and they are responsible for a substantial proportion of the time I spend in front of my screen instead of out with the camera.

Interesting recent articles include a post on time-lapse photography and a review of the R-Strap camera strap replacement from BlackRapid. These things are cool, and I really want one.

If you use Lightroom or Photoshop, or just spend too much time at the computer after a session with the camera, the Post Production section is just what you need, but check out our own Idiot’s Guide to Photoshop first.

DPreview

If you’re a camera geek and you really need to know the specifications of your existing or next machine, it’s hard to beat this site.

dpreview takes reviews to a new level.

All of the specifications on all of the digital cameras I’ve ever owned. Great comparisons, wonderfully reasonable advice.

It’s the depth of this stuff that’s stunning. I recall waiting impatiently for weeks a couple of cameras back because I was unwilling to slap down a credit card on anything until I’d checked it out on here. And in the end, they changed my mind for me.

The only vaguely upsetting thing about this site is the way they blithely list my poor overworked 30D in the discontinued list. Oh, well.

Good feeds from dpreview, too, and the Buyer’s Guide is comprehensive, with a great features search capability.

Photo.net

Photo.net and I don’t have a whole lot to do with each other these days, but in the early days before flickr caught on, this was my favourite hangout. Back then, the interface was a little simplistic, and the content was… well eclectic is the best word to use.

These days things are much nicer. The content is well organised, and the members tend to be a little more skilled and experienced than the flickr crowd. They take it all a little more seriously too, and the site features some wonderful photographers.

Aside from sharing your images here you can find like-minded communities, learn more about your equipment and ask tough questions.

Blogs, monthly projects. It’s all there for the taking. Free and paid memberships ala flickr are available and worthwhile.

Photography.com

Photography.com must have the best URL in the industry, and if you choose to remember a web address this wouldn’t be a bad one for the job.

Articles abound, but that’s not all.

Links to photographer websites, access to stock photos, somewhere to build your professional photography website using ImagePRO. It’s all here. Careful with the links. They’ll take you to numerous other websites.

PopPhoto

Popular Photography is the reference site I’ve stumbled upon most recently. Their style is different, and their articles are thoroughly interesting, even when they might not be directly useful.

Where else might you find a post on photographing hot springs, for instance?

Great How-To articles are easy to find. Spend some time and pick up some new skills.

Need more?

You can catch up on photo news, find other photograph sites, or check out a seriously large photography blog.

So tell me, where do you spend you valuable time online? Do you have any secret resources the rest of us should know about? Let me know in the comments, when you eventually get back here.

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Photoshop can be quite difficult, if you throw yourself at it without preparation. You’ve probably got no clue how everyone gets that wizardry done, because you don’t know head from tail in that maze of buttons and filters!

Don’t despair, because MakeUseOf will be your guide in this intricate, yet magical world.

We’re proud to present An Idiot’s Guide To Photoshop, the starter’s manual for every Photoshop initiate to carry! This guide starts right at the very bottom, assuming no knowledge at all, and walks you through all basic aspects of the application. The guide even comes with three full pages of shortcuts, cheat sheets covering all the application’s possibilities!

Let MakeUseOf’s own Karl Gechlik from AskTheAdmin guide you throughout the different editing possibilities in 30 illustrated pages, and get you to know your paint bucket from your eraser.

Are you watermouthed yet? Got itchy fingers and want to get busy?

Get shopping now! Download the Idiot’s Guide To Photoshop here in PDF, no strings attached.

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Kate’s done a stunning job of reviewing my notes on a Mac, and letting me know what’s different. She didn’t even tell me I’m wrong on this post, but has a couple of things to note in blue.

Just to recap something I mentioned earlier, Picasa doesn’t generally change your files. It keeps a track of the changes instead. That’s great, so long as you are in Picasa. But if you go to take a look at your funky pictures elsewhere, you’ll likely be disappointed, because they still look the way they used to. So that’s the first part.

Saving and Exporting

Save

If you save your image, then a new .jpg file is created, your original file is backed up in a subfolder (Originals in Windows or .picasaoriginals on a Mac),and your changes are suddenly visible from Windows Explorer or wherever.

Also, on a Mac the .picasaoriginals is a hidden folder and can only be seen if you right-click on a modified photo and select Show Original In Finder.

Double-click an image in Library View to start Edit View.

Make whatever changes you need. In this case we’re going to crop the image. Go ahead and finish that.

If you hop out to Windows Explorer and take a look, you’ll see the image is still un-cropped, even though you’ve applied the crop in Picasa.

The Mac does a better job of this, and shows an icon of the edited version.

From the menu, click File, Save.

Click OK, and the cropped image will be saved back to your hard drive.

The original file will be backed up to a subfolder. You could end up with a few of these….

If that all seems a bit laborious, there’s also a way to do this for a whole folder. If you have made changes to any files in a folder, there’s a Save to Disk button in Library View to take care of it.

If you need to get the original image back you can go looking in the subfolder yourself, or you can Revert to the old file.

Right-click your final image, and choose Revert. Then Undo Save will take you back one saved version, or Revert will take you back to where you started.

Save a copy

This is all very similar, except you original file is left alone, no subfolders are created, and the new file name has ‘-1’ added to its name to distinguish it.

Save As

From the file menu, choose Save As. Same thing again, except you get to choose where to put the file.

Export

Select some files in Library View, and then choose File, Export to Folder from the menu. You can also click the Export button below the images. This option lets you decide where to put the files, what size they should be, and how high a quality of image you want. (More quality means more size,basically)

You can also add a watermark to the images. That’s something that I’ve covered in another post.

Click OK, and your images will be created.

Further afield

Picasa has a bunch of options to get your images on the Internet. The main focus here is to use something called Picasa Web Albums (PWA), but there’s nothing stopping you from saving your files and uploading them somewhere else. let’s look at what you can do with PWA, though.

First though, you need a PWA account. If you have a Gmail account, you’re all set. Use that. If you don’t, why not? Go on. Get one now. Sure I’ll wait.

Upload

Select some files, and click on the Upload button.

Before you can do anything with PWA, Picasa needs to login. Help it out.

Clicking on the Remember me will avoid a lot of repetition, but don’t do that if you don’t have the computer to yourself.

PWA needs some help to continue at this point.

By default, it wants to create an album with the same name as the folder the images are in. Three options. Accept the offer, select another existing album, or create a new one. You can click on the Album Title and Description boxes to edit the contents as well.

You have three options for the size of the images to upload. The guidelines that pop up are quite good. Remember that the larger the images that faster you use your 1GB free space.

You can make an album Public: which means it’s listed and publicly searchable, Unlisted: which means it’s difficult to find, but still able to be viewed if you know the address, and Sign-in: which means you need a login to view the images. Take care out there.

Click the Upload button to transfer the images.

Click the weirdly named Clear Completed when the upload is finished to return to Picasa. Note that your uploaded files are now decorated with small green arrows, indicating that they have been added to PWA.

You can also synchronise images with PWA. Maybe that’s another post….

Email

This is pretty simple. Select some images, and click the Email button.

First you’ll be asked if you want to use your default email application (Outlook in my case) or Gmail. Let’s use that. See, I said you need an account! Note that you can set either of these as the default for future emails.

Fill in the recipient addresses, and hit Send.

Share

Finally, if you like the look of those two options, you can basically combine the two. Click the Share button in the top right corner of the Library View.

Decide whether you just want to share the images you’ve already uploaded, or the entire file. Add some email recipients. Hit Send.

And that’s it. I hope you’ve enjoyed the in-depth look at Picasa, and that I’ve helped out with the learning curve. I’d love to know what you’re doing with it, and whether you’re having any problems. I’d also like to know what you might be using instead. Feed it all back in the comments please.

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Feel free to head back to the start, or just dive in here. Kate, who has been helping me with Mac version differences, tells me there is nothing of concern, so you can all sit together today.

We were in Edit View, and had worked our way through the Basic Fixes and Tuning tabs. Now we need to take a look at the third tab, Effects.

The other two tabs focused on fixing things. Making corrections and adjustments. Now we mostly want to have some fun.

Find an image, grab a coffee, change to Edit View, and click the Effects tab.

Sharpen

Most of these tools work in a similar way. You click on the thumbnail, and either get a result, or some questions. Sharpen only has one question.

Drag the slider to the right to sharpen the image, or to the left to soften it. Note that over-sharpening images is a common problem, so take it easy. You can’t actually fix a blurry image with this tool. You just think you can. Click Apply or Cancel.

Sepia

No questions with this one, or any of the others with a little (1) in the bottom right corner. You just get an old-fashioned image in multiple shades of warm brown. For some images this looks really stunning.

Click the Undo if you don’t like the result. Note that you can undo multiple effects if necessary. Weirdly enough, you can also apply effects multiple times. Try clicking on the Sepia thumbnail a few times.

B&W

Much the same, except we’re talking about shades of grey.

Warmify

And again, except this one changes some of the colours to make the image look warmer. The butterfly is warm enough already.

Film Grain

It’s difficult to see the effect on this image, but it looks great on anything that looks old-fashioned, and perhaps a little plain.

Tint

Two steps to this. Click in the Pick Colour box, and choose a colour from the resulting choices. Then decide on the Colour Preservation. Slide to the left to remove all the original colour. To the right to add most of it back.

Saturation

Just one slider. Drag it to the right to increase the intensity of all the colours in the image. Careful now. This picture has enough intensity already. Dragging to the left pulls the image closer and closer to black and white. Find somewhere you’re comfortable with.

Soft Focus

What happens here is that you have a portion of the photo which is nice and sharp, and the rest of the image is softened and blurred.

You can adjust the Size of the sharp area with the first slider, and the Amount of blur with the second.

You can adjust  the position of the sharp area by dragging the green crosshairs around on the image.

Glow

This is another strange effect, but it really does make some images look as though they are glowing, by brightening the white areas of the photo. You can adjust the Intensity and the Radius of the glow. Needless to say, there’s little point of trying it out on this image.

Filtered B&W

If you’re old enough to have dabbled with film then this might make more sense. The Filtered B&W effect simulates filling your camera with B&W film, and then putting colour filters on the front of it.

The outcome is that certain colours are blocked, and others are enhanced, but the result is B&W. Mess with it a little.

Focal B&W

Now it’s getting interesting.

With this tool you are able to keep the main point of your image in colour, while the surrounding area gradually fades to black and white.

You can adjust the Size of the colour area, and the Sharpness of the transition to B&W.

Graduated Tint.

This is the last one, and you can tell it wasn’t designed for buttefly photos. Graduated Tint applies a tint of the colour you choose to the top of the image. You can determine the Feather of the tint, which is just like the Sharpness in the previous tool, and adjust the Shade slider to decide just how much shading needs to happen.

When you’re happy with that, drag the crosshairs around on the image to adjust the height and angle of the shade.

So why would you want to do this? Skies mostly, actually. You can darken a boring pale blue sky to make it more dramatic.

Onward

That’s it. You now have control of all the tools. I just have one more thing to talk about. How to get your fixed, adjusted, modified, enhanced and funky images back out of Picasa and on the web. It’s easy, so keep your eye out for the post really soon.

In the meantime, how about leaving some comments so I know how it’s all going?  Perhaps you have found a special use for one of these tools?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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• [Google Picasa 101] – Saving, Exporting & Uploading To Picasa Web Albums (6)
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Now where were we? Editing.

Before we start making changes to your images, you need to understand something about the way Picasa works. The important point is this. As a general rule, Picasa doesn’t change your original image. It just keeps a record of the changes.

That’s good, but it means that if you look at the pictures outside Picasa then you won’t be able to see the changes. That is, unless you specifically Save or Export the files. More on that later on, but keep it in mind.

So, at the end of the previous post, we double-clicked an image, and that put us into Edit View.

Picasa isn’t an image editor as such. It doesn’t let you adjust individual pixels in your photographs. What it does is allow you to alter the images to correct or enhance them. Those enhancements are categorised in three distinct groups.

Basic Fixes

These are the things you’re most likely to want to use first. The idea is to quickly fix mistakes you might have made when you took the photo.

Crop

Let’s pick on an easy one. Cropping is the removal of unnecessary parts of the image to improve the composition. Select an image you’d like to crop. Click the Crop button.

You can manually choose the shape of the cropped image, or select from the list of shapes. Click on the combo box to choose.

You can also take a look at Picasa’s suggested crops. It’s interesting how often one of the three preview boxes is pretty close.

Once you’ve made your selection, drag the mouse over the image and adjust it until it’s the size and shape you want.

If you’re happy with the result, click Apply. If you’re not sure, click Preview to take a look at what the result will look like without the distraction of the rest of the image.

If you have used one of the preset sizes, you can switch between portrait and landscape orientation using the Rotate button.

If you change your mind before you finish, click Reset so that you can make a different selection, or Cancel to get out of the Crop module.

Now that you see how that works, let’s quickly step through the rest. First, the other Basic Fixes.

Straighten

You can use this to tip your image to the left or right so that lines are horizontal and vertical. Or not, as you please.

Redeye

I don’t have a good example for this, because… well, you can see why. But it’s easy. Click the Redeye button, and drag the mouse of the eye you want to fix. Release the mouse and then repeat on the other eye. Click Apply.

If you’re feeling lucky, click on Auto, instead of all the dragging routine.

Auto Contrast, Auto Colour, I’m Feeling Lucky

These all work the same way. Click the button, and watch the improvement. For those of you with a lucky streak, I’m feeling lucky just does both of the others at the same time.

Retouch

This tool is wonderful. It lets you select a part of an image that has blemishes (like the bolts in the wall here, perhaps) and then select another part of the image to replace them with, and does a nice job of it.

Click Retouch, adjust the size of the brush if necessary, click the blemish, click the replacement. Click Apply, or cancel if it all goes wrong.

Text

You can add text to your images using this tool, and there are an impressive array of options, including font, size, border and transparency settings. Have a play with it.

Apply when you have a result you like, or Cancel to back out when you’ve made a mess.

Fill Light

This option lets you correct situations where the darker portions of the image are a little too dark. Just use the slider to adjust the result. Don’t overdo it, or you’ll lose some detail in the lighter areas.

That’s it. The basics are fixed. Next, click the Tuning tab.

Tuning

These settings are all about making careful adjustments to your image so that it is presented at its best.

The first slider, Fill Light is exactly the same as the one we just used in the Basic Fixes area.

The next two, Highlights and Shadows, adjust other parts of the image, recovering burned out details, deepening shadows etc. Mess with the three of them to get the result you want.

Take care with adjusting things too drastically. Your image might show evidence of the manipulation as a result.

The last option in the tab allows you to adjust what’s known as the temperature of the image. That is, to make it appear warmer or cooler than it is. It’s all to do with the colour of the light you took the photograph in, and the colour the camera thinks the light is. But don’t worry about that so much. Just use the slider.

There are also two buttons on the right hand side that let Picasa take a guess as to what you might want. They sure didn’t help with this image, but sometimes they do a great job.

Great place to take a break. You’re all tuned and ready to go. When we come back, I’ll tell you all about the third tab. The one that’s so much fun. Effects.

Get some practice in, and then let me know how it’s going in the comments.

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If you could get some sort of logic applied to the opinions as well, the value would go through the roof. That’s the whole basis of BestInClass.

Find a group of experts who actually know what they are talking about, assemble their opinions, tabulate the answers, and present them in a way that actually helps you to make decisions. For free.

There’s a catch, right? Well, aside from some harmless Google ads, it seems not. Come and take a look with me.

When you visit the site you’re presented with a basic options page:

Click the View Recommendations button.

An algorithm, claimed to have taken two years to develop, presents you with some recommendations, in order of preference. You’re either going to love or hate this. It’s something to do with being told by a computer what to do.

In any case, for the settings above, the recommendation was fairly clear.

Okay, now I’m a Canon guy, so I’d be fine with this, but if I had some reason to dislike the first option there are a string of three others below, including another Canon and two Panasonics.

So, a couple of things. Why should I trust the recommendations?

BestInClass has a group of experts to evaluate the cameras and provide a number of different opinions, and there is no sales bias. Doubtless there is some user bias, but that’s what recommendations are all about.

So, what if your requirements are more complex than can be captured in those initial questions?

Easy. Answer some more. On the left side of the results page is a huge list of tick boxes to narrow your choices.

For instance, the first box allows you to choose the brands of cameras you’re interested in.

The default is to search all of the available brands, but you can restrict the search to whichever brands you prefer.

Clicking the More button adds Fuji, Casio, Kodak, Leica, Olympus and Pentax to the list.

By the way, there’s no update button here. The list just changes when you release the slider.

Simple, right? Some options use a combination of live sliders and update buttons. Just have a play.

Clicking on a particular brand presents you with an Update button. Clicking that will present you with a new list of recommendations.

Time for a confession. A couple of cameras back I had the option of walking in and picking up a silver Panasonic camera, or waiting a week for the same model in black. I waited, so it would be hypocritical for me to make fun of the Color tickboxes, though I’m tempted. Pink?

Okay, so you have a resulting list of recommendations. Let’s dig into that a little more, by taking a look at the leader.

A summary about the camera is presented here, but if you need more detail, clicking on the link here, or the large image to the right, will take you to a detailed page for the recommendation by that particular expert.

You’ll see that the camera you were looking at is not necessarily in the number one spot on the Expert Recommendation page, because now we are only looking at the opinions of a single expert.

This page includes in-depth analysis, and comparisons. Pros and cons of the recommended camera are supplied (in this case the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3, which is, you must admit, a hell of a mouthful for a little camera).

Also included is a comparison chart for the recommendations.

Back on the initial recommendation page there are also links to opinions from other websites and customers, along with Amazon purchase links, and price comparisons. In all, a huge amount of valuable information.

So, is it perfect?

No, not yet. There seem to be some holes in the coverage, especially where new or elderly cameras are concerned. Don’t get me started on the fact that it’s all in US dollars, as well.

But it’s most helpful if you’re in the market. Now if only I could work out a way to get a good price for my EOS 30D.

You can also get some good comparison action from some of the competition too. Check out TestFreaks for a broader product base than just cameras, or allCamReviews for a custom Google search for cameras. Kallow provides for a rather, well, shallow look, specialising in single recommendations for each category.

Have a play, and let me know how you do. Are there some other sites you would use for this purpose?  Let me know in the comments.

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Whether it’s a hobby or it’s your job, making money from your photos can help supplement your income and help businesses get the right images for their brand. Many photographers are daunted by the stock selling process but in reality it is very simple.

Whilst you are able to submit your photos for review, not all stock photography websites will accept your work, so they would need to be of a pretty high standard to gain admission to a marketplace.

With that in mind, I would like to present to you eight websites to sell your pictures.

1. Snapvillage

Snapvillage is a microstock website from Corbis that offers a unique marketplace for pictures and illustrations. Users buy and sell images without restriction at affordable prices in an intuitive and interactive way.

Users can upload as many images as they like, the Snapvillage team then review them and post accepted images for potential buyers to see. Royalties are earnt every time one of the submitted images is purchased and there is also the option to set your own prices.

2. iStockPhoto

iStockPhoto claims to be the biggest stock marketplace on the internet. They offer images, video and audio and givce 20% of the base royalty rate for anything sold. There are other initiatives in place that allow users to gain more from their work, such as making the work exclusive to iStockPhoto.

3. Stockxpert

Stockxpert is a royalty free stock photography community with the goal to provide customers with affordable stock imagery while offering a powerful tool to photographers and digital artists who would like to sell their work. Stockxpert offer 50% of the royalty fee on each sale, with the ability to check on the balance earned in real time.

There are specific websites for international users, meaning photographers can be paid in their own countries currency.

4. Fotolia

Fotolia is the first worldwide social marketplace for royalty free stock images, allowing individuals and professionals to legally buy and share stock images and illustrations. They currently offer the largest image bank of free and affordable royalty free photos and illustrations on the internet.

Fotolia offer international versions of their site, where users are encouraged to express themselves via the community forums and blog. For every file sold, users receive a royalty based on their ranking and exclusivity on the site; most royalty’s are between 30% and 61%.

5. Shutterstock

Shutterstock offer many of their images to web designers, magazine editors and graphic artists whom sign up for their monthly subscriptions to buy images like the ones you may submit. In that time they are allowed to download upto 750 images of which you receive 25 cents for each sale. Once $500 is earnt, commission then rises to 30 cents per download.

6. ClusterShot

ClusterShot is different from the many stock photography sites out there in the fact you are free to submit whatever you want to the site and not have to run the gaunlet of passing a review. Clustershot think of themselves as an Ebay for photos, allowing you to submit as many pictures of your dog as you want. They have a very useful tool that integrates with your Flickr collection, allowing you to submit your entire collection for perusal.

Photographers can decide whether they set a fixed price or are open to offers.

7. BigStockPhoto

BigStockPhoto is an alternative to high-priced stock photography in addition to providing photographers with a marketplace to sell their work. They aim to bring power to the people who don’t want to spend huge amounts of money on stock photos, in turn repaying some of the revenue to it’s creator.

BigStockPhoto offers highest quality print and web resolution images – both photos and vector art – for virtually every use. Photographers will earn 50 cents for every image downloaded, with the option to withdraw funds once they amass $30.

8. 123RF

123RF is another subscription based website where buyers can either download to their prepaid quota or by using a credit system. Not only do 123RF offer a huge amount of stock paid images, they routinely release free to use images for it’s members.

Photographers gain 50% on the sale of one of their images.

Conclusion

There are a lot of different things to consider when submitting your photos. For example, it may pay to choose a specialised market for the subject of your photos, to work out what images are the best to submit or even what license you wish to grant your work. These are all important in regards to profiting from your work but also making sure you aren’t being exploited. As with all things of this nature, do your research and make sure you are clear on what you are doing before you submit to these sites.

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Before I get into the nitty gritty, I want to point out that we will not be able to differentiate between a small edit and a BIG edit. We can tell if an image HAS been edited from its original file but not by how much or what.

So if you are trying to tell if Suzy O’s picture is legit you can use JpegSnoop to see if the picture has been altered or it is still in its original form (when it was taken by a digital camera). But you will not be able to tell if Suzy added a border to the image after the shot was taken if it was modified any more than that.

Am I making sense? You can see if it was edited but not how much.

Let’s take a look at the program!

First you should download the 532KB zip file containing the 1.3MB executable file from the author’s home page, Impulse Adventure.

Like I said before, it is portable and does not have to be installed. I ran it and this is what I saw:

This is not an installer, just an license agreement and a check box to automatically check for updates. I believe these settings are saved somewhere as the second time I opened JPEGsnoop it did not give me this window or options. After that you can change your update preferences within the program’s configuration.

Check the “I have read the terms” box and click OK. Then you will be show the program’s main window as you can see below:

I immediately grabbed a digital picture I had modified and opened it up with JPEGsnoop. It was a 7KB JPG file with image modifications. I got this note that said it only scans in a low res version of the image and it will be fast. You have the option to open the file as is but it will take longer. Either which way click OK and move on.

I was instantly shown my images’ details as you can see below:

There is so much information included in the final report.  The middle of the report was removed due to space limitations you can grab the whole report as a txt file here: report.

The last paragraph is what you are looking for though – It is titled “Assessment”. Here it says “Image is processed/edited”. And directly above that you can find out what program was used to edit this image. Is it full proof? Hell no! But it is better than having no scientific basis for your picture assumptions! Do you use a similar tool? Let us know your favorite JPG analyzer program in the comments.

Also maybe you want to point us to some JPG’s on the web and see if we can figure out if the images are photoshopped or original?

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Never thought about that did ya? Well most of us wouldn’t – seeming as Flickr is a huge business that has been around for a while. But in this day and age it is possible for anything to go under.

Now let’s take a look at Downloadr. It can help us download flickr photos in bulk and backup our entire Flickr account. I started by downloading a tiny 20KB file called Updatr (you just have to love the naming convention right!?!?). Copy this file to a new directory, run Updatr and it will download the newest version of Downloadr.

Downloadr will then launch and you will see this screen:

I then typed in my username in the User field and hit search. DownloadR returns the first 10 items and 10 more for each subsequent push of the Search More button.

I highlighted one picture and clicked on “Download selected”. This allows me to grab the largest available file from Flickr of this picture. Once you click download selected you will get this normal “File Save” dialogue box.

That is all well and good when you have say 7 photos in your Flickr account. But let’s be a little more realistic. If you want to grab a whole bunch of images and save them all to your machine you will need to authenticate first by going to, Extras —> Authenticate:

You will get a few warning boxes asking you if it is ok to allow “Downloadr” access to your account. I saw two Windows Dialogue boxes followed by this web page opening:

I clicked “OK I’ll ALLOW IT” and I was ready to backup my images. I went back to my Extras menu and chose complete backup. I then got this window:

I hit the “Backup now” button. Downloadr got my Flickr ID# and then started downloading my images. In no time at all I had all my 200 images on my local machine.

I clicked OK and Downloadr showed me the folder that contained my images, A job well done!

Another app which you could use for your Flickr backup needs is FlickrDown which Mark profiled here.

Do you backup your online accounts? If you do – how? Share your brilliance with our readers…. in the comments! If you’re aware of any other tools to download Flickr photos in bulk, please post them in comments as well.

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We also covered this area in 6 quick ways to jazz up your photos.  Varun also recently covered AndreaMosaic.

But if you have a large number of images stored locally, and you run Windows, then Foto-Mosaik just might be a better bet for you.

A photo mosaic, just in case I’m racing ahead, is an image made from tiny copies of a lot of your other images. All will become clear.

But first you obviously need to go ahead and download and install the application.

Once it’s installed, you then need to add a large (the larger the better) number of images to the database Foto-Mosaic needs to do its work.

Click on Add pictures, and name the database something useful. You can also change the folder used to store the database if you wish. Click Next.

Foto-Mosaic can extract the necessary images from pictures of movies. We’re sticking with pictures here. Next.

Browse to the images you want to use. In my case I’ve taken the folder that contains my screensaver images. I’ve also told it to use any subfolders it finds there. Don’t mess with the resolution settings this time around. Click on Show Preview even though it slows things down. Next.

Your chosen images will flash by one by one in the preview window…

… and progress will be shown down below. If you have a lot of images, or they are very large, you might need a coffee. For those of you who are numbers geeks, the process averaged 4 frames/second, and the 12,000 images produced a database of 370MB.

Two more things…

First, you need to browse to the image you’re creating the mosaic from. This is the image from which the software is going to build a new picture. Then you need to tell Foto-Mosaik where to put the result.

I used an image I have on Flickr, but at a higher resolution locally:

With a detailed section consisting of the man’s head and shoulders:

Then click Next yet again…

and select the database you just created. Would you believe Next?

Time for some options. The first is the number of tiles to use. The more the better, within reason.

The second option is the orientation of the resulting image. It should be the same as the original image normally.

The third option is the size of the tiles to use. The defaults are a good place to start.

The last option is how many times to use the same tile. You can experiment later, but stay with the default of 5 for now.

Umm… Next!

A number of analysis steps take place, and then the final image is constructed.

This next option determines how much of the image is made of the tiles, and how much is overlaid by the original image. I left that off for now, but you can adjust the slider back and forth and hit the Preview button to see the difference it makes.

Next again, for the last time.

The image has been built, and you can close Foto-Mosaik. Just for a change of pace, click Close.

If you browse in Windows explorer to the location you chose for the image, you can open it and take a close look.

My first result looked like this:

A closer view revealed a fairly grainy attempt.

I adjusted the number of tiles from 1,000 to 10,000, and the results were much more acceptable, though the resulting file was accordingly rather large.

The details are still pretty bizarre.

Just because it was so much fun, I then re-ran the same process with the repetition option set to 100, instead of 5.

Obviously your results will depend entirely on your raw material.

So, how did you go? If you gave it a try, how about uploading the result somewhere, and posting a link to it?

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Looks quite good and special, especially if you are using photgraphs of fond memories spent together. So I started using GIMP and ended up with a pretty good looking result, the problem however was the time and effort it took me to achieve the result. It was a 7MB image when saved as as a JPEG, so you can very well imagine what I accomplished!

The token was very much appreciated, however I was determined to find an easier way to achieve similar results. As an alternative, one could hack around a Photoshop Action or a GIMP script (or perhaps look for one), but that is too much work and would not be very flexible. I ended up trying a bunch of software and found AndreaMosaic (photo mosaic software) to be really good.

The first time you run AndreaMosiac, it tells you that you need to create a collection. A collection is used to specify the images that you would like to use to create the photo mosaic or the images that you want your final image to be made up of. Specify all images that you would like to use for the said purpose. (TIP: Choose as many photos here as you can, the more the better.)

Once you have created a collection you are ready to create the mosaic. Set up the options according to your requirement, you can set Mosaic Size (the size of the final image), resolution of the final image and the number of tiles you want your final image to be composed of.

If you don’t have enough images or cannot specify enough images to fill up the entire area of the image you are hoping to create, then obviously some of the images will be repeated. You can specify settings for such a repetition under “Tile Duplication”. Specify how many times an image can be repeated in the final result and spacing between duplicate entries.

AndreaMosaic will try to use images having a dominant yellow color in places where your final image needs to be yellow a green color image for green areas and so on. You can control this by using the color range drop down list. Keeping it to a minimum will give you better results but it would require large number of images in your collection (so as to find a close matching colored image). You would need to find a trade off and try out some settings.

“Tile Variants” allows you to specify if an image in the collection should be used as it is or Mirrored, flipped etc. That’s it you are set. Hit ‘Create Mosaic’ and let the software do its work. And let me tell you it doesn’t take much time. Within no time you will have created a Photo Mosaic.

You might have to try out different settings a few times to get the results that you were looking for, however a little getting used to will give you nice and neat mosaics without having to work with huge files inside Photoshop or GIMP.

Additionally you can click the “More Options” button to tweak some of the advanced settings. Allowing you to choose quality, format, video/movie frames, tile borders etc.

Other mentions:

I also tried Foto Mosaik and Pixisnap and found them reasonable, however I like AndreaMosaic better. That is however my personal opinion, check them out and see if you disagree with me!

Shoot out a comment if you think so? I am sure there are plenty of resources to acheive similar results, do you use one? Let us know in the comments.

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The CleVR FAQ recommends trying to overlap about 25% of the frame, but also states that their stitcher is quite forgiving. It is also recommended that you use a tripod or monopod to ensure a high-quality panoramic photograph with few parallax errors.  Be sure that you’ve taken your pictures side-by-side because CleVR will only stitch photos that are taken in this manner.

To use the stitcher, you will first have to sign up for a free CleVR account. Once you’ve logged into your new account you can use the photo stitcher. When you visit the stitcher page, you’ll see a prompt to click to install the stitcher.

You’ll have to install Adobe Air if you don’t already have it, as the CleVR stitcher is an Adobe Air application. Once you’ve installed the app, you’re ready to launch and stitch your photos together.

The CleVR stitcher couldn’t make stitching any easier. In three simple steps, you can stitch a photo: select your images, sort them in order, and click the stitch button. The photos you see in the screenshot below are from Hamed Saber’s beautiful Tehran panorama photo.

To demonstrate the stitcher, I took Hamed’s photo and split it into five separate photos and then stitched them back together with the CleVR stitcher. Below is my stitched version of the photo. There is one parallax error that I noticed in the left half of the photo, so the stitcher obviously isn’t perfect.

Alternatives to CleVR

Hugin is a completely free and open source program to stitch panoramic photos together. It is essentially a front-end GUI for a set of open source panorama tools. The panorama tools are command-line programs that do all of the magic behind the scenes, such as selecting control points (points that are shared among photographs), blending color and brightness, etc.

Here are a few other free photo stitching programs:

• Autostitch (this is what Hamed used for his Tehran panorama)
• PTgui
• PTAssembler

One thing I like about Hugin and the other photo stitchers is that, unlike CleVR, they do not require the photos to be taken side-by-side.  They will stitch together a grid of photos instead of having to place them all in a line.

What free programs have you used to stitch photos together? Share with us in comments!

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When you take a picture with a digital camera, your camera embeds information into your image which contains a thumbnail, as well as the type of camera you used to take the picture and some other interesting tidbits.

You might be thinking – SO WHAT? If I am posting my picture online what the frick do I care if the thumbnail of my image is embedded. Sure if you have nothing to hide than you should not be worried.

But if you are snapping pictures with a stolen camera or you are editing your images to hide something contained in them – then you should be aware of MetaData, and know how to remove that metadata from photos. That’s right the thumbnail is NOT updated as you edit the image, it is the original thumbnail. So if you are photoshopping yourself – make sure the original picture didn’t show you in a compromising situation!

We have seen instances in the past few years of people getting nailed because their fancy smancy camera embedded their GPS location into their MetaData. Even a not so techie person can view the MetaData and use it against you! There are plenty of sites for that, CameraSummary is one of such image data extractor websites.

Let’s teach our paranoid friends how to remove their MetaData from pictures and ease their minds.

We can start by downloading a small application called JPEG & PNG Stripper. It is a 75KB file that does exactly what it promises. There are not many options and you really cannot go wrong. It is a simple drag and drop operation that will clear up your skeletons in the closet.

No matter what you are trying to hide or protect, this awesome free application will scrub your images down lickity split. It also has command line options and you can do entire folders in one shot. You are actually saving a small amount of space as well because that MetaData does have to live somewhere!

Let’s take a look at how it works. You simply fire up the application called Stripper.exe. It does not need to be installed, just run it and drag a file to the window to be cleaned.

That’s it. It is as simple as that! We confirmed that the MetaData (or lack thereof) has been totally scrubbed – never to be seen again.

From the Author’s Website:

The image quality IS NOT AFFECTED. Includes command line support. Just specify a folder or file on the commandline (wildcards allowed)

And here are the options for my fellow command line geeks:

/GUI={0|1}
/IGNORE-READONLY={0|1}
/PRESERVE-DATETIME={0|1}
anything else on the command line is treated as a folder or filename (allows wildcards)

examples
stripper /gui=0 c:\path\test.jpg
stripper /gui=0 c:\path\test.* /ignore-readonly=1

Do you remove your MetaData from photos? Do you use MetaData for some other sort of snooping? Put us on in the comments!

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“Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.” -George Bernard Shaw

Of course art can be found online if you open your eyes and follow the signs. Below are some pointers and discoveries I made.

Photography

Photos have been a way to capture delicate moments of history, everyday life, extraordinary details or impressions since the early 19th century. I recently introduced 10 Stunning Photo Blogs displaying the regular works of contemporary photographers.

Here I would like to share an art installation showing 178 people passing a spot on a bridge in Berlin over the course of 20 days. The installation is called “We’re All Gonna Die – 100 meters of existence“.

Video & Music

One of the greatest places to look for contemporary art online are video platforms like YouTube or Vimeo. Film is the youngest type of art and probably the one that currently enjoys the most attention. I found it incredibly difficult to pick pure sound files, so I combined video and music for the combination of both.

Below are three examples of extraordinary video/music compositions that deserve to be called art.

The first one is a music video for a song from Oren Lavie called Her Morning Elegance. Reminds me a little of Peter Gabriel. Incredible piece!

The second one is a video of Carina Round sitting in her apartment and playing a song to the beat of droplets of water dripping form the ceiling into a bucket. Ingenious and beautiful!

This last video is a piece I discovered browsing randomly. It pretty much relies on the same technique as the first video, but the canvas is the city of Berlin. The pictures were assembled by samuelle3, a Spanish artist whose website will be featured below as well. But first watch his wonderful piece OUROBOROS.

Animation

Animations technically fall into the video category, but I wanted to give them a little extra exposure. A fantastic website to discover animations is aniBoom and I discovered the site via the artist Trevor Piecham who has his animation 15 Steps hosted there.

Art.VideoSift

If you enjoyed the videos above and want to discover more artistic films from all different sources, check out Art.VideoSift, a website where members can “sift” through videos and vote for what they like, i.e. Digg for videos. Users can not only vote on videos, but can also create playlists of their favorite videos and interact with other members. The British Comedy playlist is the number one voted on the site.

Websites

The Lens Zero, nothing, the nothing that is… …at any time. An online art installation created by Lee Lewis. Did you capture the message?

If you enjoyed sam3’s video, you may want to see more of his work. Sam3’s website reveals a great collection of art installations, wall paintings and drawings.

This post is of course limited and only shows a small selection of what may be found online. What is art to you, where do you find it and how do you enjoy it most? Please enlighten us!

Picture credits: thanx

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