Photo Quickies

PhotoQuickie originally started Photo Quickies to share our tricks and tips as we learn the art of photography, but sadly we haven’t been doing very well at achieving our goal. For sure, we did not intend to have a posting schedule that involved blue moons. In any case, PhotoQuickie has not thrown in the towel just yet, but today we would like to point out a couple of photography sites on our blog roll.

Digital Photography School is in our minds, what we intended PhotoQuickie to be. Articles about the basics of photography with examples. We must admit that they post quite frequently and regularly, so it must be a deal of work (and a plus for people like PhotoQuickie); although we think our posts are more self-referrential.

Photojojo is a blog that talks about applications of photography, or what can we do with our photos once we’ve taken them that doesn’t involve staring at them on our computer. PhotoQuickie is pretty lazy (see paragraph 1), and we haven’t tried to do any of their suggested projects yet, but the seem cute and interesting.

When PhotoQuickie started getting excited about starting a photoblog, we appropriated what we think was too much time from our day job. Why? well we had to find a software package that was the best for what we wanted to do.

Actually, PhotoQuickie is rather lucky. We have the resources to install almost anything and try it. The reason for this is because we own (in a pay the company every year sense) sufficient webspace to do what we want (for example, blog about our photographic tips, tricks, & gotchas). If friends of PhotoQuickies are thinking of starting a photoblog, and have the same resources as us, you’re in luck. Here’s a quick review of the software we’ve looked at.

• Pictoralis is a modded version of Wordpress (the same software we’re running here) made for photoblogs.
• Pixelpost is blogging software made specifically for photoblogs.
• Folderblog is simple and easy to install, drop the files in a folder and you’re set.
• Movable Type has tips on how to setup your MT installation as a photoblog.
• Nigiri Sushi is another Wordpress theme, check it out in action.

There are quite a bit more (check them out in the read more), as well as software for a gallery-like display (which is sufficiently different than a photoblog).

Before you choose the software to use, PhotoQuickie advises you to view the demo gallery and see if it looks to your liking. If not, many of these packages have themes to style your photoblog.

Read more about: Photoblog software.

PhotoQuickie has been blogging for awhile (can’t say we do it regularly here, so our advice is to subscribe to our syndicated feed), but it has only been recently that we’ve been playing around with PhotoBlogging. What is photoblogging? It’s much like blogging, except instead of words and paragraphs, we’re posting photos. PhotoQuickie thinks it’s an excellent opportunity to show off some of our work in addition to getting some constructive criticism.

Taking our own advice, PhotoQuickie, along with several of our photo enthusiastic friends, have started our own photoblog. If you’ve ever wondered what sort of photos PhotoQuickie takes, here’s your chance!

Read more about: Photoblogs

PhotoQuickie has been going on quite a few trips lately, to places that we’ve never been to before, so it is with much enthusiasm that we take our pictures. Besides the weather, the one annoyance for us is the sheer amount of tourists at well, the tourist attractions. They, for the most part, share PhotoQuickie’s excitement of being somewhere new and are taking photos as well. So our photos are littered with shutterbugs blocking the beautiful views.

The trick that we have found to solve this problem is to wake up bright and early to get the best shots. While there are still some early risers around, we stand a better chance to take a fabulous, people-free picture. PhotoQuickie works for our shots, and this is no exception. We would love to be able to relax and sleep in!

PhotoQuickie’s days of stumbling around bleary eyed, trying to see through the viewfinder may be over with the help of Tourist Remover that we found while surfing. It seems very magical but we’re not too sure whether we would completely embrace this option (we think there must be a catch somewhere).

PhotoQuickie came across research being done at Microsoft to fix photos taken with a flash. Personally, PhotoQuickie does not think highly of flash photography as the results usually can be easily identified as having been done with a flash. The objects are washed out, and certain angles reflect white splotches.

Microsoft’s approach is to take the same scene twice, once without the flash and once with. Then, the combination of the two photos will hopefully produce a better one.

PhotoQuickie has some reservations about this process. First, it is difficult to get two shots from an identical position with our shakey hands unless we use a tripod. And if we’ve remembered to bring a tripod, then we figure that we might as well adjust the exposure to compensate for the low light level.

Although, PhotoQuickie still likes this idea, and hopes that we see it soon in pocket-sized cameras. [via Digg]

PhotoQuickie has been experimenting with tilt-shift photography, well that is to say modifying some of our photos with a tilt-shift effect. What is tilt-shift? Well PhotoQuickie can’t really give you a complete definition, but pictures with this effect are easy to identify; the objects in focus look like little toys.

Given proper source material, applying the tilt-shift effect can have startling results. Being still an amateur, We hardly have good results. So here is a blog with tilt-shift photos that PhotoQuickie finds amazing. Another great source for examples and help is the Flickr Tilt-shift Minature Fakes Group.

After seeing some examples, PhotoQuickie was enthusiastic about trying this ourselves. We looked for some tutorials online and found excellent step-by-step instructures to duplicate the tilt-shift effect in Photoshop (a key step that is missing is to invert the selection before the lens blur). The second option we encounter was to build our own tilt-shift lens (of course we are too poor to buy a TS lens, and have lenses of higher priority to buy first), but that seems somewhat ghetto to our eye.

Read more about: What is a tilt-shift lens, tilt-shift photographers and their work,

Recently, PhotoQuickie was taking photos indoors at an event, and being the observant photographer, we changed our white balance to the little light bulb icon (which stands for tungsten, the material of the wire in a light bulb that generates the light). Unfortunately, our beautiful photograph had a strongly blue tint.

We opened up our photo editing program, today’s choice being Photoshop to try and fix it. To our surprise, fixing white balance is actually very simple. We opened the image, the went to the “Image” menu, went to the “Adjustments” option and selected “Auto Color”. That’s it! and it worked like a charm.

Seeing how it was not complicated, we tried to do the same thing in Picasa, the photo organizational tool from Google. Again, it was done with a click of the button; double click the image and select “Auto Color”. Although PhotoQuickie has a warning about a feature of Picasa, which is alternatively a pro and a con; the editing changes that we made in Picasa are not saved onto the original file, and so to send off our fixed picture to friends and family, we would need to select the picture and use the export function on the main screen.

Read more about: White Balance, Fixing WB in Photoshop

PhotoQuickie received an email from Winston with an idea that we had not thought of, he suggested using a memory card reader and a battery operated hard drive:

You can either connect your camera directly to the hard drive or use the card reader to off-load your images to the hard drive. Much smaller and lighter than taking your laptop with you. Also remember to bring your AC power adapter to charge up the battery if necessary.

Thanks for the tip Winston! We think that it is a great idea, as it would give us ample room to store other data files if necessary.

Booyaa also suggested several ideas of his in the comment including using a phone to transfer photos to flickr. It is a rather neat idea, and may be doable soon as companies such as Nikon and Kodak are releasing cameras with wireless built in.

We took a short trip ourselves across the ocean recently on which we worried about storing photos (which was also the seed that spawned this topic in our mind), luckily for us we did not run into any problems as it was quite rainy and we over-estimated the number of photos we thought we would take.

By the way, you will hopefully be glad to know that PhotoQuickie hasn’t died scaling mountains to get that perfect shot or anything; we’ve been quite busy in the new year and haven’t had a lot of time to spend on our photographing hobby, which is a convenient excuse for the lack of updates. If you’re tired of checking the site every day waiting for updates, try using our RSS feed instead (now available through FeedBurner).

PhotoQuickie has been tempted to try our hand at black and white photography so we invested some money into black and white film. Once we were at the local camera store however, we realized that we should have done some research into b&w film before we left the comforts of our home.

A helpful cashier guided us through our major decision as to whether to buy C-41 or “True” black and white film. We could not even guess what the difference was, but now can safely pass on that there are two big differences. First C-41, also called chromogenic film can be processed anywhere color film can, while True b&w can only be processed with certain equipment. PhotoQuickie was too embarrassed to ask whether a camera store could develop it while the supermarket couldn’t, or if we had to send it off to some pro lab.

The drawback to C-41 film is that the developed pictures may have a slight color hue. PhotoQuickie can’t say whether this is true or not as we haven’t finished and developed a roll yet, but searching on the net seems to indicate that it will be a sepia shade. We’ll keep you posted.

PhotoQuickie loves to pack light when travelling, but we also of course must bring our camera with us. This ends up being a problem on our longer trips when we expect to take enough photos to bore even our enthusiastic photography friends to sleep. The real fear here of course, is not that our friends will shun us for life, but rather how do we store all our photos while on the go? We’d rather spend our money on a nice trip than a pocketful of memory cards.

Our first idea was to bring our trusty laptop with us, but it is rather painful to have to carry it around everywhere. Besides we already have to keep a watchful eye on our camera equipment, so we’d rather not bring more gadgets for those with slippery fingers.

So PhotoQuickie has brainstormed some cheap alternatives to this little problem (yes, we are considering going away for a bit so this is weighing on our minds):

• Bring along some CD-Rs and head off to the local cybercafe to burn our efforts.
• Use one of those adapters to offload our memory cards to a digital audio player
• Setup our webhost so we can upload all our pictures online
• Hire a couple of carrier pigeons to mail our memory cards back and forth

Truth be told, we haven’t found a good solution, but it looks as though we will need access to a computer one way or another. If you have any good ideas leave PhotoQuickie and our readers a comment.