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Inspiring Landscapes Tips for Photographers - by David Dilworth"Amateur photographers discuss equipment, Professional photographers discuss business, Fine art photographers discuss light."
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Tips for Expert Photographers Sharpest Photography ____________ In Focus Does Not Always Mean Sharp (c) Copyright 2009 David Dilworth More Depth of Field means Fuzzier Images Most photographers don't learn all the important parts about focus. They learn how to focus a lens once they have a scene framed and they learn to maximize "depth of field"; stretching the range of near and far objects "in focus" by narrowing the aperture hole (increasing the F-stop) as much as possible. What they don't often learn is that smaller apertures make images fuzzier (technical term), or less sharp. Many photographers, including some experts, mistakenly believe that making an aperture smaller has no effect on image sharpness. Taking that to an extreme was the Group F/64. F/64 is the tiniest aperture on large format cameras, barely larger than a pinhole. This group was perfectly well-intended because at that time fine art photography valued soft images - not sharpness, and this group's goal was sharp, clear images. However, there is a downside to tiny apertures; a serious optical phenomenon that makes your images fuzzier as the aperture size and sensel (pixel) size on your digital sensor chip gets smaller. Its called diffraction. (For the rest of the article see -- ) |
Tips for Beginning Photographers 1. Use a tripod. 2. Set your camera on Automatic or "P" (for Program) until you can reliably take photos you are happy with. ("Aperture" or "Time/Shutter" or Manual modes are not needed for 90 percent of photography and digital camera automatic modes are now very good for most photographs.) 3. Use a Tripod. 4. Use Lowest ISO possible (probably 100) 5. And Finally -- Any professional can tell you are NOT serious about making high quality, sharp images if you don't use a Tripod. (And yes, they can tell by a quick examination of your prints.) |
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High Quality PC Software for Photography - Most is Free File Management (Painless, Single-key Image View) - ZtreeWin (This software is simply outstanding! It is not free, but so useful, so good, and so reliable it should come with every computer. Thank you Kim Henkel.) Image Viewer (Instant Raw and Jpg) - IrfanView (free) (Instant view of a single image; supports almost every one of hundreds of photographic image file formats including Raws.) Image Viewer, fast from thumbnails (with one-key Raw file convert to view) - FastStone (free) Image Lighting Corrections - LightZone (Excellent and painless for recovering weak highlights and shadows, though it is annoyingly slow. $$$, but free to evaluate.) Anti-Virus - Avira (free for personal use) ( I no longer use Anti virus products from McAfee, Norton or any products from Symantec. I am not alone in having horrible experiences with their products and "support." On my own systems, in business and when I help friends these are the first products I remove and replace them with Avira.) Virus Resistant Web Browsers - Opera (free), FireFox (free) (I never use MicroSquish Internet Explorer as so many viruses directly attack through this perpetually leaky and slow browser. And anyone who tells you Apples/Macs have no viruses is bragging about their own ignorance.)
Not PhotoShop ! Aughhh ! As an award winning fine art landscape photographer, and an award winning software programmer, expert in several dozen image programs and hundreds (probably thousands) of computer programs, I say with abhorrence - Adobe Photoshop is the most awkward program to use I can recall. It almost seems designed to be awful. Just one tiny example - 99% of all Windows programs allow you to quit using Alt-F4 - but not Photoshop. (The CIA just admitted that VP Dick Cheny and Rumsfield forced Guantanamo Bay detainees to use it.) It tells you a lot about a product when there are so many tutorial courses and add-on products just so you can use it normally. However, giving credit where it is due, as horrible as Photoshop is to use, Adobe's LightRoom is almost the polar opposite; its almost easy.-------------------------- DON'T Get Caught in the "Priesthood" Trap. The Priesthood Trap Ask any surfer if you can learn to surf and the answer will almost always resemble "No, only a god (like me) can surf. You have to be born with it; you can't learn it." This is so false it is silly (almost anyone who can stand up can learn to surf), its intended to intimidate non-surfers, creating a "priesthood" of people pretending they have powers unobtainably beyond those of mere mortals. Such "Priests" also had to "pay their dues," by spending a lot of time learning painful lessons, so why should a novice get an easy quick ride to surfing. Academia is even more famous for its needless Priesthood; making Ph.D. candidates jump through hoops having nothing to do with education is just one example. I suspect that more than a few Photoshop users are caught by the "Priesthood" Trap. It is my opinion that anyone who uses Photoshop, or GIMP, exclusively for photo editing has likely never used easy and capable image correction software. You might note -- 1. PhotoShop was not written for photographers, it was written for graphic designers. I have no idea if it works for graphic design tasks, but PhotoShop is painfully awkward for correcting images; and GIMP (which is free) is an embarrassing clone of it. 2. Every capability, let me emphasize this - every capability in Photoshop can be done easier by other software -- and just as well if not better. You might need more than one program to do the functions you use in Photoshop, but which ever functions you need - another program can do it easier. 3. Other image correction programs have capabilities dramatically superior to PhotoShop: recover shadows and highlights with LightZone's accordion light corrections, noise reduction by Noise Ninja or Neat Image; Raw conversion Sharpness, Resolution and Color accuracy by many, and absolutely any other file management program compared to "Bridge," and more and more... 4. As awful as Adobe's Photoshop is to use for photography, their new Lightroom program has good and reasonably easy image correction abilities, maybe because it WAS written for photographers. # # # |
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