Review Histograms After Exposure
One big advantage of shooting digitally is the ability to view a histogram in the LCD screen on the back of your camera body. A histogram is a graph of the relative distribution of the data in your image from shadows on the left to highlights on the right. You can use a histogram to evaluate not only the tonal distribution but also the quality of your exposures. By viewing the histogram immediately after exposure, you can determine if you need to make additional exposures at alternate settings to get better exposures. Simply program your camera to display a histogram immediately after exposure. You'll find this immediate feedback will result in much higher success rates.
Kiran Bir Sethi shows how her groundbreaking Riverside School in India teaches kids life’s most valuable lesson: “I can.” Watch her students take local issues into their own hands, lead other young people, even educate their parents and start national movements.
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“Collectors are willing to pay steep prices for the world’s finest photography books. Rare editions from the likes of Robert Frank, Hennri Cartier_Beesson, Irving Penn, and Ansel Adams are among the most sought-after of all art books. Sometimes these books have captured an era or a location, sometimes they have helped to coin an artistic trend, sometimes they are simply the finest work of a particular photographer.”
Richard Davies comments on the 10 most collectible photo books and 5 more.
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As visual communicators, we’re responsible for everything that’s in the frame; we’re also responsible for everything that’s not in the frame. Deciding what’s in the frame and what’s out is a critical decision that can make or break an image. Here are two essential framing strategies.
1.?Use the frame to eliminate distracting information around a subject.
Take extra care with image information that touches the frame, as it will draw extra attention. Do this with significant compositional elements.
2.?Eliminate space around a subject to focus a viewer’s attention.
A lot of space between the subject and the frame can be used to call on psychological associations with space, such as freedom or isolation. Some space between the subject and the frame can give the appearance of the subject resting gracefully within the frame. Touching the subject with the frame strongly focuses the attention of the viewer and may seem claustrophobic. Cropping the subject with the frame can focus the attention of the viewer on specific aspects of the subject and/or give an image a tense quality, evoking evasion and incompleteness—this often seems accidental if less than half the subject is revealed.
There’s more than one way to apply these strategies. While cropping techniques are simple to practice, the reasons for their application and the choices made about how to apply them, as well as the final effects, may be exceptionally complex. You have two choices ..
1. Reposition the frame before exposure.
2. Contract the position of the borders of an image after exposure
If you plan to retouch, you’ll frame and crop differently …
Read more at Digital Photo Pro.
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Recently, I spoke with Scott Sheppard on NIK Radio. Scott wanted to talk about how to avoid “Photographic A.D.D.”. He asked, “So what do you do?” I replied, “You have two choices. You can spray and pray. Or, you can look before you leap.” I elaborate in our wide ranging discussion on how to focus your creative vision.
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Start a book project with Blurb BookSmart® and invite others to contribute with GroupBook.
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Manage color with Blurb’s PDF to Book workflow.
Learn more in my online Bookmaking resources.
Learn more in my Professional Portfolio workshop.