Photo Quickies

PhotoQuickie is calling it quit and will no longer update this site. It should be no surprise, as we haven’t updated this blog for a very long time, and even the previous posts were half-hearted efforts. Thanks for visiting and/or subscribing to our RSS feed, and PhotoQuickie wishes you well with your photographic adventures and learning.

The site will remain up for a couple more days before we delete everything for good. If you want anything from the archives, PhotoQuickie suggests you grab it ASAP. Cya.

• All about lens flare, and how to prevent it.
• Interview with Hamad Darwish, whose photography made it into Windows Vista from Flickr.
• Can’t afford a lens hood? Then get some cardboard and print out a customized lens hood for your lenses
• AskMe: Why are sensors on point & shoot cameras so small?

• A photoshop tutorial to make those black-and-white photos that have 1 element of (striking) color.
• AskMe: What lenses to use when taking close-ups of hands and eyes?
• Some ideas on how to photograph smoke, with some beautiful examples.
• Creative photography by Chema Madoz — each photo has an interesting juxtoposition

• If your lens has image stabilization, you should probably turn off IS/VR when using a tripod.
• Is there really a difference between 5 megapixels, 8 megapixels and 13 megapixels?
• Not on my to-buy list: a gold platted SLR made by Pentex.
• An interview with MattBites about his gear and strategy for photographing food.
• What the heck does that diopter dial near your camera’s viewfinder do?
• How to get the best photograph of those lovely Christmas lights.

• 2 Minute Photoshop Tricks would be even better if there was a normal text feed inaddition to its podcast feed
• Photosynth, a technology preview from Microsoft, takes a lot of photos and renders a 3D scene out of it. Too bad it only works in IE6/7.
• Make a nice looking photo wall for about $60; nice photography not provided.

Oops, missed a couple of weeks:

• British photographer Platon shares his funny anecdotes of photographing famous people.
• Askme: How do freelance photographers identify themselves? (and journalists too)
• Very nice photoblog from the Time photographer at the White House.

• PhotoQuickie also has hazy photos from China, perhaps this approach will fix them, but we don’t count on it.
• Another challenge we find is to stabilize our camera when we don’t have a tripod, here are some great tips especially a bean bag!
• A Photoshop tutorial to post-process portraits in a Lichtenstein style. PhotoQuickie tried it but it takes some dedication to get good results.

• If you’re a Flickr user with a pro account, you might want to grab 10 free MiniCards from moo
• HP is advertising their digital cameras with a slimming feature, because obese people now outnumber malnourished in the world?

While PhotoQuickie hasn’t blogged as often as we hoped, we still surf and read about photography quite a lot. We expect our “Quickies of the Week” will be a regular feature with photography related links, but we expected to be Metamucil last time as well.

• Instructables on making a photo cube
• Canon Rebel XTi is out soon, and the trusty DPReview has an indepth look.
• AskMe: What are good, yesteryear digicams I can get for cheap?
• AskMe: Best (wide+fast) budget lens for a Rebel XT?
• Been going around the blogosphere, but How to make realistic hair in Photoshop

PhotoQuickie first read about the Lomo effect from the A-list blogger Kottke, way back before we were even interested in photography. It seemed a bit neat, but we had no idea why we would want to use something like that, nor why it made photos better.

Well, PhotoQuickie was fooling around with Photoshop the other day, and decided to take a new stab about the Lomo effect. What is the Lomo effect anyways? Well it is the style of photography produced by LOMO cameras, frequently characterized by vignetting on the corners and saturated colours. PhotoQuickie understands better by seeing an example, so here is one:

Post-processing your digital photos with this effect is rather easily done by following a tutorial such as this. PhotoQuickie quickly got tired of following these instructions over and over and created a Photoshop action as suggested in the tutorial.

PhotoQuickie has had more success (to our eyes at least) however with this slightly more challenging tutorial to achieve the Lomo effect, which uses curves. I suggest trying a few with the former then moving on the to latter to get a much better presentation.

Read more about: lomography, many things lomo,