Five Best Digital Photography Information Sites on the Web

It’s Blog Review Monday and I’ve combed the Web to find the best resources for improving your digital photography. You’ll find hundreds of digital photography tips by visiting these sites. You’ll learn about composition, camera settings, light, focus and more.

If you want a complete guide to digital photography, pick up the book, 101 Quick and Easy Secrets for Using Your Digital Photographs.

Here are the sites:

1. DP Tips Central–Digital photography basics, composition techniques, masters of photography.

2. Cambridge in Color–Interactive tutorials about exposure, focal length, aperture,  bit depth, histograms, noise dynamic range and more.

3. PhotoNotes–Dictionary, articles, camera equipment reviews and blog.

4. Bob Atkins Photography–Canon camera and lens reviews, digital photography news and articles.

5. Ken Rockwell–Nikon, Canon and Leica reviews, articles and gallery.

Cover of My New Book

Perspective

I aimed my camera down this Old San Juan street to show perspective. The yellow line adds a bright color to the frame.

Notice how things get smaller as you move back into the frame. This gives depth to the frame.

The shot is sharp throughout, which means is it has a large depth-of-field.

You can also see the curvature of the lens ever so slightly by viewing the the left side of the frame. The building has a slight “falling over” look.

Many famous photographers have taken shots that show perspective.  Dorothea Lange took a shot of an empty road in a desolate landscape. She had a keen eye for perspective.

The cover of my new book has a scene of Paris on the cover that shows great perspective.

You can see that here.

Supergirl

The nice thing about Hollywood, CA is the people who dress up as cartoon characters. There’s a Spiderman, Superman, and, posing in the picture on the left, Supergirl.

I found her not in front of Gruman’s Chinese Theater where these superheros usually hang out, but in the mall next door at Highland Center. She was more than willing to let me take her picture. She posed as if she were an expert.

It was nice to get just her in the frame. You can see every part of her outfit, not to mention how pretty she really is all by herself in the frame.

Black and White Conversion in Photoshop

You can change the contrast and gray tones in Photoshop easily. You can either do this in Photoshop Raw or in the main Program.

If you’ve shot in Raw, when you open the image it first comes up in a Raw window where you can tweak the image in many ways.

There are eight icons at the top of the Raw dialog box below the list of settings and histogram of your image.

The first thing you’ll want to do is tweak in the Basic Settings (the first tab). Just move the sliders (Exposure, Recovery, Fill Light, Blacks, Brightness and Contrast) around to get the effect you want.

The fourth tab over is HSL/Grayscale. After you click on that icon, you’ll get to convert to black and white by clicking on Covert to Grayscale. From there you tweak the color sliders (which are actually grayscale sliders) to hone in even more on the contrast.

In the main program all you have to do is navigate to Image>Adjustmenst>Black & White. Color sliders will appear in a dialog box (they’re actually grayscale sliders).

Click and drag on those to get the effect you want.

Smoking a Hookah

Last month I spent two weeks in Berlin. I combed the streets for interesting shots. Here are two guys huddled in a corner smoking a hookah.

The way they were laughing I would have thought there something other than tobacco in the pipe. I didn’t smell anything, though, so my suspicions were dampened.

There are many Turks in Berlin. Hookah smoking is a Middle Eastern tradition and Turkey is a hot spot for the activity. It’s now a pleasurable pastime in Berlin.

X in the Frame

One of the techniques great photographers have used when framing a photograph is to make an X across the frame. Here’s my X. The image was taken in Berlin.