Lighting and Headshots

This is probably the most important and essential aspect in photography. Indoor or outdoors you will need to light your subject and trust me you need to understand lighting and learn to manipulate it. The first technique you should learn is three point lighting.  It is the most basic technique and one that every beginner starts with and all professionals know. From there you play with different set-ups and options.

Another format a photographer should know is beauty shots/ Head shots. These are close ups shots framed from right below the shoulder to about an inch above the subjects head. Models, and actors use these shots for comp cards that helps them get jobs. As a photographer you can help create these cards and make some money while you practice your craft in lighting. 

Composition with Photos or Graphixs

When you look at a picture what do you think about? How about when you watch TV? In all images without most people really thinking about it you look at the composition. The style of the image. Even the pictures I have within this blog follow rules that apply to composition. Even with graphics we do the same things, like observe where items are placed, the distance of objects, color schemes, symmetry and patterns. The biggest rule I think most designers follow is the rule of thirds, this rule is a series of invisible lines broken into thirds vertically and horizontally on the image you may observe or be working on.  Either conscious or subconsciously we each view a picture with thoughts of how they are composed. Then we feel the way they affect our mood or change our point of view. Send me links of images you consider to have striking compositions. I'll be glad you did and would share my opinion. Until next time think about lighting.

Pixels

Pixels are what every image from photography to video are made out of. All digital images come  down to every square Pixel. In fact the images on this screen your reading is made up from tiny square pixels. Pixels are in all digital still cameras, digital video cameras, plasmas, LED, LCD and computer screens, hence the term megapixels. Each square dot is measured by dots per inch and the more pixels, the higher the resolution, the better the image quality. Nowadays even the most inexpensive point and shoot camera has at least 8 megapixels.

Watch this video of a wonderful way an artist breaks the world down into Pixels, literally dots per inch and miles of them. Let me know what you think of pixels now?

Motion Graphics

Learn this trade and you could makes lots of money as a freelance Motion Graphic Designer. Basically if you learn this trade you can make your graphics or images move. What’s more cool or creative than making images you take or create move! In fact I came across this really cool tutorial from Jonathan Howler. He takes this image and splits different parts of it in order to make a still image look 3 dimensional. Its two parts so make sure you watch both, plus you would need two programs to make this happen: Photoshop and Apple Motion

Part 1


Part 2



I'm going to try this out, so if any of you have a photo you would like me to work on leave a comment and I'll reach out to you and I'll make it happen!

A New Lens Available on Hipstamatic

What's up people, great news! Right now for limited time a new lens is available on Hipstamatic. The Chunky Lens and I suggest you update or purchase Hipstamatic and get this new addition. It's only available during fashion week and then it will sell for 99¢ In order to install the program you have to own an iPhone, right now it's not available on any other platform. Sorry for the rest of you...

After you get the app make sure you join their new contest. While your at it join the Hipstamatic Community I'm sure they have a Facebook.

Images with the Chunky Lens and new film filter look like this:

or

Favorite Programs to Use for Editing Pictures

I want to thank you guys for signing up and reviewing my blog. Today I want to discuss a few programs that I've used as tools to edit photos or create graphics. The first is Adobe Photoshop the main software I use every time I work on a project. I've used Photoshop for the last 6 or 7 versions and currently we are up to Photoshop CS5. It's the industry standard for anyone who wants to succeed as a graphic designer, this program should be part of the arsenal in your tool belt. In fact Adobe is the leading manufacturer and you can visit their site and download a 30 Day trial and get a taste for what each of their products can do. I would download one and then the other at the end of that trial. Although some of you may want to jump in and buy it I would recommend getting the Production Bundle or the Master Collection depending if your into video editing.

Adobe products are not cheap but are worth it and they offer free services, although if you just want to dabble and play with graphics and have to no interest in making this your career or just don't feel like spending so much money there is hope for you. Another freeware program exist and its called Gimp, it's part of a community of developers who constantly improve the product and allows users that have programming capabilities to help improve the product along with them.

Once you get your hands on Photoshop join National Association of Photoshop Professionals, click below and see what I mean.

My New Photo Graphics Blog, You Like?

Here I am starting a blog about Photography and Graphics my two favorite things that keep me creative. I plan to share ideas, interesting tutorials, amazing pictures that I take or find. Hopefully you can share these thoughts, apply them and perhaps upload images and concepts with me.

The first picture I'm placing is an image of myself taken with my iphone with a program called hipstamatic. I encourage anyone who enjoys taking dramatic, analog, vintage pictures to use that amazing app. Just take a look at the image to see what I mean.

In fact I uploaded this picture for a hipstamatic photo contest, feel free to vote for me. In future blogs I plan to let you know about video/graphics and photo contest that you can also enter. Thanks for reading, please leave a comment and I'll talk to you soon.