You are an aspiring photographer, your dream is to grow into a pro, but you got confused with a bunch of tips and tutorials you find online, in books and in magazines? Then start leaning photography and developing your skills with these three easy steps.

COPY MASTERPIECES

One of well-spread techniques used in teaching painting or graphics is making copies of works of recognized geniuses. When a learner looks at the masterpiece, s/he sees only the result and it doesn’t help him/her understand how it was created. When you copy an outstanding work of art, you realize what techniques the author used while creating it. Although, there can be many things in the masterpiece that seem obvious and well-leant (as composition, contrast, color solution), the attempt to copy offers you much more questions to answer.

This exercise can be used in photography as well. You want take a good portrait – look at works from a collection of a famous photographer or at least look through a magazine. Choose the portrait you like and try to copy it – imitate everything: pose, lighting, finishing.

When we go abroad to see new countries, we often find photos of interesting places in the Internet, or buy postcards. Then we create our own photos keeping in mind what looks good and what not in the photos we saw. Thus we use the experience of other photographers and learn from it and create our own original images.

Look through photo albums, visit photo galleries. Choose what you like and try to copy, but add something from yourself to each your ‘copy’. Thus you will learn a lot of new techniques and at the same time won’t stop developing your creativity. Don’t be afraid of copying in order to learn technical things, but don’t forget to STOP ONE DAY AND GO YOUR OWN WAY!

ANALYZE YOUR IMAGES

With digital cameras it is very easy to analyze your photos. The camera remembers all information about the image. You just have to look at your images and analyze them using the information about camera settings. The image is too dark? It can be the result of too large aperture, or small shutter speed. The image is noisy? The reason can be an automatic mode of the camera which shoot at a high ISO settings.

To put it simply, if you want to correct you mistakes and not to do the same mistakes the next time, you have to know what you did wrong. We are lucky that modern technologies make it very easy to find our mistakes, we just have to spend some time on it.

PRINT YOUR PHOTOS

Photography had always been associated with prints. But after digital technologies came into our life, we can easily avoid printing our images: we can use a computer or TV monitor to watch our photos.

Despite the fact that it is more convenient and cheaper to keep your images in your computer, I would highly recommend to print your best images. PHOTOS OFTEN LOOK DIFFERENT ON THE MONITOR AND ON PAPER. It could happen that prints are not so vivid and colorful as their electronic variant, but often photos look much more beautiful on paper. Many times I realized how good a photo is, only after I printed it and put in a suitable frame!

Besides, electronic images can’t go on the wall, or to your friend as a present. It also is easier to show printed photos. Art is art only if people can see it, so let other people see your images.

Technorati Tags: digital photography, photography tips, photography tutorials, photo news, photo contests

1. Who are you? Please give a brief background information.
My name is Laurie Painter, I am from Silver Cliff, WI. I am 39 years old, have two beautiful daughters, one beautiful 3 month old grand daughter and another beautiful granddaughter one the way and due any day now.

2. How long have you been doing photography?
I have been doing photography since Iwas 12 years old.

3. How did you start doing photography? What got you interested in it?
I got started in photography when I was about 12 and I asked my grandma if I could use her 110 camera, which was pretty old but still worked. as to how I got interested in it, well, I guess it was because I wanted to take some pictures of my uncle’s horses and it just progressed from there on and has now become my passion.

4. Do you earn living from photography or you do photography as your hobby/ your half time job?
at the moment it is my hobby/passion. I would eventually love to earn a living from my photography.

5. What’s your day job?
I am unemployed at the time and am looking for a job so I can save up enough money to upgrade to a DSLR camera. and I will then take a few photography courses at a college so that I can eventuallu get my career going.

6. Do you have special education? Did you take courses or go to a school learn photography?
I only had a course of photograhphy in my senior year of high school.

7. Are you specializing in a particular area of photography? What are your favorite places/objects to shoot?
I want to specialize in professional freelance photogrpahy. some of the things or places I like to shoot are animals/wildlife, concerts, waterfalls, scenery, cityscapes, sporting events, etc.

8. Who are your big photographic influences?
I have come to like Art Wolfe. I haven’t really got into the names of other photographers yet..I know I have seen quite a few that do the National Geographic pictures but I don’t know their names right offhand..I guess I will have to do some research on some photograhers..LOL

9. How do you educate yourself? Do you read special literature, visit photography galleries? What photo books/magazines do you have on your bookshelf?
Well, I haven’t really read any books or magazines so I would have to say that I self educated myself..but I would like to eventually do some research/reading.

10. What equipment and software do you use (camera(s), lenses, film, etc.)?
I have a Minolta DiMage A2 8MP digital camera..it has a fixed lens. And I use various versions of Photoshop but prefer to use the Photoshop Elements software.11. What is your opinion on post-processing, especially enhancing pictures?
Well, I do mostly just the basic enhancing of post processing and I like it…even if it takes a little bit of enhancing it is still your own work that you are enhancing and you should be proud of your work non the less whether it has a little post processing done to it or not.

12. What advice would you give someone who is interested in photography and wants to improve their photography skills?
I would tell them to go for it. esp if it is something they really love doing.

13. What’s the most challenging aspect of photography for you? What’s the best part of it?
Hmm, the most challenging part..I haven’t really had much of a challenge on things yet. But I’m sure I wil once I get into the DSLR aspect of digital photography and I can get to some sporting events..I think that will be an interesting challenge for me. The best part of photography for me is my passion for it, as well as to see how well my photos turn out and people coming up to me and commplimenting my work.

See Geminiroze’s profile to find more information and more photos.

Technorati Tags: digital photography, photo news, photographer interview, digital camera review, photo contest

Canon Group is one of the leading companies that produces different multifunctional devices. It is famous worldwide for its high quality digital photography devices. Today Canon Group presents to you their new buble jet printer Canon S330 that has many useful functions to create high quality photos and sharp monochrome text.

New Canon S330 Color Bubble Jet Printer S330 is more affordable than competing thermal ink jets. The print head is produced with the use of patented silicon-wafer fabrication techniques that create a high nozzle density unit capable to place ink droplets with amazing precision. S330 features extremely compact footprints and low operating noise levels. Good quality of text and pictures and a rather low price make it a good printer for office and home use.

Canon S330 prints clean text at a speed of 5.9 pages per minute. Though its gray-scale and color prints on plain paper are quite traditional, printing on photo paper is really impressive showing rich color and fine detail. Its high density head is the secret to the all-round performance. It allows S330 to produce borderless photos (4″x6″) in just 80 seconds. And if  you use Canon’s High Colour inks and Photo Paper Pro, photo prints are lightfast for 25 years. For document printing, S330 also offers a high-speed performance. It can produce up to 14 ppm in black and white and 10ppm in colour. S330 takes full advantage of Canon’s Advanced MicroFine Droplet Technology to produce a consistent microscopic droplet size of only five picolitres. Combined with Canon’s new high intensity inks, this delivers sharper blacks and more vivid colours for great photographic results.

Canon S330 is compartible with a PC via USB and is equipped with the additional Easy-PhotoPrint software for for creating documents that use photos, PhotoRecord software for organizing and PhotoStitch for for combining photos of adjacent scenes into panoramic images.The printer also takes advantage of  Adobe Photoshop Elements and advanced software functions such as Vivid Photo, Photo Noise Reduction and Photo Optimizer Pro. Its drivers provide an access to a rich feature set that includes support for duotone printing.