Category: Tutorial

Warning: 10 Deadly Post Processing Sins

Let’s start this month’s post with a photography post. I’ve found a good one on my ever beloved photography blog and I’ll share it with my readers. Enjoy.


First of all, I have to thank Darren, and this wonderful DPS community for supporting our family through the illness and death of our son. We are deeply and profoundly grateful to each of you. THANK YOU. Not really a way to segue from that. I won’t try. :)

This post is all in the name of good fun. These are over the top SNL esque examples. Please don’t be offended. Read more »

Basic photography: metering modes

It’s been a long time since the last time I write about basic photography. I just stumbled upon a great article on explaining metering modes. I’ll just copy paste it from DPS because I think there’s just no need to rewrite the whole thing. It’s already basic enough.

Credits to the original author. Here goes.

On today’s digital cameras, users have the ability to choose and adjust the metering mode, or how the camera measures the brightness of the subject. Metering settings work by assessing the amount of light available for a photograph, and then adjusting the exposure accordingly. Sometimes, however, the camera isn’t intuitive enough to get the exposure right when using Program, Shutter Priority, or Aperture Priority modes. Fortunately, the photographer has the ability to make manual adjustments to the metering mode used by the camera. (Refer to your individual owner’s manual to learn how to change the settings on your camera.)

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10 reasons to turn off your autofocus

When I started using a camera autofocus was something out of science fiction. I mean … it would never work in real life, would it? Apart from anything else, how could it know what you wanted to focus on?

turn-off-auto-focus-01.jpg

Now fiction has become fact, and pretty well every camera has AF as standard. It works, and works well. But it doesn’t always work perfectly. It can pick up the wrong thing or fail to find anything to focus on, causing the lens to ‘hunt’ back and forth. Sometimes it won’t even let you fire the shutter.

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How to Photograph Flowers

Preparation is key

Getting your gear together and in working order, choosing the right lens, having a tripod set up and then preparing to take the image. Pause and examine your subject before pressing the shutter. Some questions to ask:

  • how to crop it – get in close or take a wider angle shot?
  • what is the focal point/point of interest? Insect, stem, colour, texture, shape etc?
  • what angle will you shoot from to get the best perspective?
  • how much depth of field do you want?
  • how is the subject lit?
  • which flower is the best specimen for your photo?
  • what distractions are there in the background and foreground?
  • which is the best format to shoot in? (horizontal or vertical)

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Basic photography: understanding histograms

Every DSLR has a display feature called histograms. It looks like a graph with random data that any new photographer don’t know what it actually is. And maybe, won’t even care. Here’s a peek, it’s a reader that records how much light (how bright or dark) a picture is .

You should know that every LCD screen – camera, TV, or digital frame – could display different brightness level of a particular picture. What you see bright in this screen might not the the same in that screen.

This is why histogram comes in. It is the standard reader to record how bright a pic. A sample, you had an underexposed pic. So this should looks quite dark as shown in histogram. Now in your camera, it looks dark as expected, but it is quite bright in your computer screen. Chances are, your computer screen are set a little brighter than normal.

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