Merry Christmas and thank you!

My final Photoshop-editing before Christmas ;)

(Hyvää Joulua => Merry Christmas! in finnish)
Merry Christmas to all, it was a very nice course. I will remember all you guys with warm thoughts. Thanks to Steve for being a good teacher, it was a pleasure being there. And thanks for the good tip on buying the camera I was asking you about, we ended up getting the camera you recommended (the Canon SD800 with the wide angle lense). It had a lot of good reviews. Take care everybody!

The Online Photographer: On Testing a New (Digital) Camera, Steps A and B

The Online Photographer: On Testing a New (Digital) Camera, Steps A and B Excellent advise and an interesting procedure.

Heading East

Heading East One of the joys and challenges of photography is the empathy and imagination that you develop by being observant. I love wandering around, and as I wander I am surrounded by a thousand questions and a thousand feelings. Check the related links at the bottom of the post for more impressions.

Chris Assignments on his blog

I added some last minute assignments for this class on my blog. You can check them out, including the pictures at http://crisby.vox.com/
Thanks for the class, I learned a lot, and I'm having a lot more fun with my digital photos! Thanks everyone, Happy Holidays!

Photography of Jonathan Moller

Photography of Jonathan Moller Sometimes photography serves a higher purpose. "Our Culture is Our Resistance" is a set of Photographs that serve and communicate on multiple levels.

Editing a messed up Photo

This is the original picture of Professor Owens at RAHI graduation, it is way to dark and he has red-eye

In this edited picture I cropped in down, used level adjustments to lighted it, then used red-eye removal and finally sharpened this edited picture

Editing and enhancing your photographs

This is my original photo

In this first edited picture I croped it and then used the adjustment levels to brighten the flowers

In this second edited photo I used the the first edited picture and them put it into a grayscale

In this third photo I croped it down, gave it a soft focus effect and then burned-in an edge effect

How to Buy a Digital Camera - A 9 Step Guide

How to Buy a Digital Camera - A 9 Step Guide
If you are thinking about purchasing your first, second, third, or fourth digital camera this article is valuable. When your friends for family ask you questions about purchasing a camera send them this article.

Dan's Portfolio

You can find my portfolio under http://www.dansku.net/gallery
It's from my trip to Anchorage on 23rd-24th November 2006. I took quite a few pictures from that trip and will be sharing them with my family and friends:) This a pre-taste of what they will look like.

share portfolio

intention: family - my niece and two of my nephews

intention: OH yeah! Flames - you gotta love that! Feel the heat!
intention: getting a difference perspective
intention: documeting progress besides I love taking pictures of my husband!

intention: proof/ enjoying the beauty months laterintention: fun in the sun! Yes Alaska has sun!

Edited picture

Another picture I edited after my trip to Anchorage a while ago.

I started with these two files, the other one over exposed to compensate the dark trees and the creek and the other one under exposed to compensate for the bright sky and the mountains. With curves and masks I adjusted the overall balance of the exposures.


Combining the two pictures resulted this one below.


I didn't stop there. To make the scene more picturesque, I continued with the editing, ending up with this, voila! This one would even make a postcard...

Editing and Enhancing your Photograph

I would really like to get the background changed up but but fixing the blown out white shirt the picture looks much better to me. One of those projects that I will get to keep working on.

Here is a picture of my boss Bernice and her husband

The Online Photographer: T.O.P.'s Ten Best Living Photographers List

The Online Photographer: T.O.P.'s Ten Best Living Photographers ListI good list to start exploring. I do not know all these photographers, but I will.

JPG Magazine: Issues: 7

JPG Magazine: Issues: 7 I bought this magazine at Barnes and Noble. I liked it so much I subscribed. You can download the magazine as a PDF here, or you can scroll through the pages by scrolling through the Issue Preview. I enjoyed the photography, many of the photographs represented the kind of photography that I value.

Photography Composition Articles Library

Photography Composition Articles Library There is good information here, although I think that the best composition comes from feeling not thinking.

The River Yatra: Ganga Yamuna

The River Yatra: Ganga Yamuna The photographs on this web site transcend the beautiful. Spend some in depth time exploring. The real thing!

River Yatra

River Yatra Exhibitions A great set of photographs, explore this site for in depth photography of India. Beautiful!

The Online Photographer: Every Picture Tells a Story

The Online Photographer: Every Picture Tells a Story
An excellent description on the selecting photographs for display or presentation.

FLICKR

Here is my FLICKR account URL. This is a neat program to share photos with my friends and family. Some of my friends use RINGO, and the programs seem similar. I do like that this does not take up room on my computer. I also like that I can make it private or public. I look forward to trying this out a bit more.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/47355067@N00/?saved=1

Organizing my Photos

I have been organizing my personal and work photos by year and then by event, I did download Picasa and it went through all my pictures. I like my original system, other than I can tag a photo for the massive searches, i do like being able to tag for various things like fire or family. I played with the Picasa program and it has some nice features and maybe I am just stuck in some of my ways as to not like the new, but it was fun to try somrthing new and different, but as for know I think I will stick to my old stand-by.

The Toy Polloy--Smells Fishy!

The Toy Polloy--Smells Fishy! I love the look of these photographs. I have been noticing, when scanning my old negatives, that I really like some of my odd and flawed photographs. I want to try some of these tools.

Dan's improved photo

We took this photo at the White Mountains of me and our car. As you can see, it's too dark because it was taken towards the sun a bit too much. Doesn't really look like a nice, bright sunny day, does it.

With some adjusting of the levels and some dodging of the darker areas of the image (me, the car and the shadows of these two), I was able to bring out the brightness of that day.

Dan's 3 edited photos

This picture was taken 11.11.06 on the White Mountains where a couple of us made a day trip. One of us even took his snowboard...

This is the original:

Turned into B/W by converting the photo into Lab-mode and deleting the A&B-channels. The remaining L-channel was given a small boost by turning up the lightness with curves.

Edited to give it a speedy look with motion blur.
Added dark vignetting around the corners to give it more substance.

This has some more editing done on it.
I used specific filters to give it the snowboarding-style grungy effect.

The Online Photographer: Seen It Before?

The Online Photographer: Seen It Before?
As always from this web site, this is a thought provoking and helpful way to evaluate your photography.

Amazon.com: Real World Image Sharpening with Adobe Photoshop CS2 (Real World): Books: Bruce Fraser

Amazon.com: Real World Image Sharpening with Adobe Photoshop CS2 (Real World): Books: Bruce Fraser
If you want to be an expert on sharpening this is the book! Sigh.......Steve

The Photoshop CS2 Book for Digital Photographers

The Photoshop CS2 Book for Digital Photographers
If you want to use the photographs in the book to do the exercises you can download them from this URL.
Steve

Dan's quick edit

This is taken of a ditch near where I live. I saw this junk, just dumped there and thought about the symbiosis between the human and the nature...

First, I rotated the picture a few degrees and cropped it. Then I wanted to ephasize the illness of the whole by turning the picture into B&W, except for the rusty barrels and the brown water. I even enhanced the saturation of the barrels to make them stand out more. Mixing B&W with colour is a really easy thing to do and it works powerfully.

How it was done?

I used two layers, the original as the backround layer and a copied layer of the same image. The copied image on the top was turned into B&W just by desaturating it. Then, where the barrels are, I erased the top image with the eraser tool revealing the extra saturated colour image below, thus leaving everything else B&W except for the erased parts.

How you appreciate your digital photography? - Digital Photography Now

How you appreciate your digital photography? - Digital Photography Now
This is an interesting article and provides some context to think about the quality of digital cameras.
Steve

Daniel's Flickr

I got my new Flickr site up and running. Good way to share your photos and give them tags for other people to "accidentally" find your pictures:) It's also fun to see what other photos there are with the same tags as yours. The downside is the limited bandwidth.

How do I get organized?

I downloaded the Picasa and installed it on my computer. It did a nice work scanning my photos. It scanned all my directories and the directories of the program files, too, which created quite a lot of junk. The junk took a while to clean up. It was somewhat easy to clean it up by simply hiding the unwanted folders. The program is a nifty way to categorize your photos without moving the physical location of the actual files. Giving the names of "albums" i.e. tags, you can group the photos accordingly. You can also do some basic picture editing with it, too. Such operations as rotating, cropping, automatically correcting colours and so on are really easy to do with the program. I created some albums, like 'Holidays', 'Fairbanks', 'Finland' and 'CD Covers'. By right-clicking a picture and selecting it to be moved into an album you have created, you can create virtual albums of any sort. You can also submit photos directly to the Blog if you wanted to. It is a handy tool for an easy way to organize your pictures and even share them online. I don't have that many pictures yet that they would need extensive organizing, but it's good to know that with such a free tool I can do it in a very short time. I will keep this program in mind (though there are other similar programs available, too) and give it a thought when I really need to organize my photos.

Photos gone wrong

This is my friend Ruth, her poor chin is my subject blurr

Depth of Field - look at the trailor not the turnouts(I did not use a tripod)

I have over exposed Engine 64 - ISO 1600 with a shutter speed of 1 second

Engine 64 is now under exposed - too dark - ISO 800 with a shutter speed of 1/125

While this picture of Engine 64 is a bit blue I had to really over compensate for the green that comes from the floresent lights

My Camera Reviews

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I was disappointed at some of the reviews I read. I have a HP Photosmart M417 digital camera. It is one of the cheapest 5 megapixel digital cameras available. The major problems in the reviews was that it stuggled focusing in indoors and in low light. Many of the users complained that it was very slow with the playback mode. They explained the image quality is too soft and noise is visible at ISO 100. Hearing all these problems, surprised me because I don't have any problems with the camera. This camera has built in help, built in red-eye reduction, good outside images, and has an easy menu working system.

Lesson 4 - Reviews

Taking Photographs: How does the camera work?
Look up three reviews of your camera and summarize their conclusions.
Use http://www.dcviews.com/ to find information on your camera.
Either print out your summary and submit it, or post it to the course web log.

Wow, this was really interesting to read. My camera is a Canon Rebel XT, it is a second generation camera from the Canon Digital Rebel. In all the reviews it talked about how this camera is smaller than the rebel, with more and better components. I can take JPEG and RAW pictures. This camera has lots of automatic function, yet there is still the capability to do many manual functions. This camera uses digital and film lenses, has optional external flash and takes pictures quite rapidly. Overall the reviews were good for this camera that is marketed at the amateur with a price less than $1000(until you start buying lenses and flashes☺). I have thoroughly enjoyed taking pictures with this camera and look forward to using some of the knowledge gained from these reviews to improve the pictures I do take.

Lessons 4 & 5

Lesson 4,
Summary of Reviews on Canon Digital Rebel XT (EOS 350D):
















The predecessor Digital Rebel (EOS 300D) was the first DSLR camera under $1000 for the consumer market. Digital Rebel XT (EOS 350D) is an upgrade of that model. The physical size of the camera is very small. It is one of the smallest DSLR cameras around. It weighs only 485 grams. Technical improvements have also taken place. This camera has a fast processor matching the more expensive professional models. It has a 8.0 megapixel sensor. The startup time is extremely quick, it takes only 0.2 seconds from off to on. The Canon can take 3 frames per second. It takes great pictures which are almost as good as ones taken with a lot more expensive cameras of the Canon family. All the reviews like the camera and recommend buying it. I’m glad I did.

---

Lesson 5,
Taking pictures wrong:


Subject blurred


Motion blurred


Correct Depth of Field


Incorrect Depth of Field


Incorrect white balance (too cold)


Warm White Balance


Under exposed


Over Exposed

---

There's nothing wrong with these pictures, I put them out just because they are "hot" pictures from the Nanooks Starvation Gulch Bonfire:)

TrustedReviews - Digital Camera Tutorial: Composition (Part 1)

TrustedReviews - Digital Camera Tutorial: Composition (Part 1)
Another good tutorial from Trusted Reviews

Hello,
Hoped everyone had a great weekend. I created blog at http://artsandphotos.blogspot.com/
I love to hear your comments about some of the photos I have taken. I will also be posting my assignments here.

Camera manual

Adjust the ISO?
- Manually adjusting the ISO is only possible using the creative zone modes (P, Tv, Av, M & A-DEP). There's a quick button next to the LCD display for the "ISO" which lets me go to the menu options and select either ISO 100, 200, 400, 800 or 1600 speed.

Color balance?
- Does this mean the white balance? If not, then I don't know how to adjust it on my camera.. If it means the WB, there's a similar button next to the screen "WB" which allows me to choose from 8 different options, auto, day light, shadow etc.. Works also only using the creative zone modes.

Exposure compensation?
- I can under/over expose my picture in the creative zone modes by simultaneously pressing down one button (Av+-) and turning another (Main Dial).

File size and compression?
- I go to menu and from the first tab I select size/compression. This will allow me to choose from L(3456x2304), M(2496x1664) or S(1728x1152). For each size there are two possible compression settings: fine and normal. Here I can also choose if I want to take pictures in RAW+JPG or only in RAW.

Exposure meter mode?
- In the creative zone modes I press a button next to the LCD. This is a button with a square marking and something in the middle of the square, looks almost like en eye. This takes me to the menu where I can select between evaluative metering, partial metering and center-weighted averaged metering.

Macro focusing?
- This is one of the basic zone modes. I need to choose this mode, focus, zoom and shoot. All the metering will be automatically done by the camera.

Flash mode?
- In the creative zone modes I can choose to have the flash burst even if it doesn't automatically pop-up. This can become handy if there's too much light coming from behind the object, a person for example. To choose not to have a flash at all, I need to turn the dial to the non-flash auto mode. In the basic zone modes flash photography is fully automatic. In creative zone modes, flash can be used whenever necessary. Canon EOS 350D offers an extensive line of features for playing around with the flash and I really don't know yet how it all works.

Lesson 4 and 5 Camera Skills

L45CIOS258TO1.pdf (application/pdf Object)
Lesson 4 and 5 Camera Skills is posted online.

Five photographs I wish I took and didn't

I've put up the assignment for this week on my blog. You can get there by following the link in this post. I also found a review of Photoshop Elements version 5 done by PC Magazine. It is also listed on my blog.

5 photos I did not take

College Parties

The crazy parties definitely come with the college life. Last year we celebrated St. Patrick’s Day in our tiny apartment. Everywhere you looked was green from cups, to steamers, to hats, to balloons, to confetti, and our clothes were even green. I wish I captured all the laughter and craziness that was going throughout that night.


The Soccer Life

I wished I had a photo of this day…all my life I've been playing soccer for my dad's law firm. About two summers ago our team was unstoppable. We won game after game after game…it was the happiest feeling in the world. When we made it to the championship we were all pretty nervous, excited, and a bit tired because it was eight in the morning. We played our hearts during that game if we stumbled or fell we would keep on going. In the second half we were in the lead 2-0 and after that last whistle blew we jumped for joy and ran allover the field saying we’re number one.



Willy

Willy was our friendly energetic golden retriever that we dearly loved. Even though he bugged us when we were watching TV or when we were trying to eat at the dinner table. I remember on the night before Christmas we must have had five pies laid out and ready for Christmas brunch the next day. As we woke the next day we had a huge surprise in stored for us. Willy, the trouble-maker, ate all our delicious pies!! When I reached high school Willy became old and very weak so one day we took him to the vet and put him to sleep. I will never forget Willy, but I wish I had more photos of him.


No One Cared

I know this sounds pretty harsh, but I’m not too fond about beta fish. My mom used to have this bluish beta fish that she loved so much. Some how the fish got sick and his tail began to rot. Everyone knew this fish was done for by the looks of it, but my mom kept giving it medicine day after day. One day I heard my mom squeal, “He’s dead!” She then took out the fish net and scooped the poor guy out of the tank. My mom walked slowly towards me with the fish and said, “Would you like to say any last words.” I probably had the most confusing look on my face and I just had to laugh. I’m thinking it’s just a fish for goodness sake flush the fish down the toilet. I wish I took a photo of my mom right when she said those words because she sounded so sad and convincing.



Cruising in the Caribbean

A long time ago my grandma treated my mom, sister, and I to a cruise ship in the Caribbean. We were busy bees on that ship attending all the amazing shows and attending activities on and off the ship. I believe I got caught up in all the fun that I felt like I didn’t have the time to take any photos around or off the ship. I was going to take a photo of the stingrays but for some reason I thought it would distract them. I wished I took photos on the cruise so I would have a better memory of the whole trip.

5 pics not taken

5 Pics I didn’t take, but I wish I had…

This is kind of hard trying to think back of the moments not captured on film…

1. I wish I could be enough courageous to take pictures in the open, of people I don’t know. There are a lot of occasions when I think this is not an appropriate place or time to take a picture, even though it would be the most perfect time to take one or two. For example when you’re shopping at a local store, at school, at work etc… This is one thing why I haven’t taken some pictures I wish I had, the lack of courage to take the camera out of my pocket…

2. As a kid, we went to England for two months with my brother to spend the summer with our relatives there and I came back only with one photo. I wish I had taken more pictures back then.

3. I haven’t got practically any photos of my friends back home. This is intertwined with the first one…

4. Either didn’t have my camera with me, or…

5. …the moment was too short to take a picture, cannot specify which particular moments those were, sorry…

L3CIOS258TO1.pdf (application/pdf Object)

L3CIOS258TO1.pdf (application/pdf Object)
The week 3 lesson outline is posted. There are many links about basic concepts of photography. We will be covering camera skills for three weeks.

Dan's Gallery

Some pictures I have taken from the town I study, the town where I live and from my travels. The Gallery can be found by clicking here