Week 5 Challenge!

Hey All,

This weeks challenge is "insects" since it's spring time and flowers are blooming.

Vince

RE: server update

Thanks for the update Vicky.

Hold onto your plant pics or take better ones. The deadline will be extended until we have the server back up and running. Until then, move onto the next challenge, which is pretty tough. I won't steal Vince's thunder so keep your eyes open for his announcement.

server update

Our server has been down for a while and is in the process of getting restored, should be up in a couple days.

May 2008 Week 3 Results

Hi Boys and Girls,

The third weekly entries are in and have been uploaded.

A gallery has been created which you can find here.
The original files can be found here.

Please do a review on your designated photo.

Becca – Frank Photo
Steph – Vic Photo
Vic – Vince's Photo
Vince – Steph’s Photo
Frank – Becca’s Photo

Becca


Frank


Steph


Vince


Vic


Keegan

Week 4 Challenge

Hello All,

Our challenge this week will be ... Plants! Large or small, part or whole just some form of plant life.

Have fun :)

Monthly Meet - 01

My fellow Photorinos,

The time of the month is almost upon us. As mentioned to you unofficially this month's meet will be at the Lilac Festival on May 25th at 1:15 pm. We will meet at Vince's church (I still have to get that address off of him). We will then walk around as a group and take photos of the festivities.

Wait, there's more! Considering it's our first time meeting and what not I've decided to split up the meet into two different dates. On Friday the 23rd, I'll be throwing a workshop to prep ourselves for Sunday's festivities. The workshop will be held in my basement with a presentation. The time to be at my place will be 6pm. We'll order in some pizza or have a little something going on the barbecue.

These are some of the things the workshop will cover:

• Proper ISO settings
• Proper White Balance settings
• What's the best automatic setting to keep on your camera for all situations that could arise
• Portrait compositions

If there are other things that you'd like to know about let me know and I'll address them that night.

I look forward to seeing you Friday and Sunday next week.

Cropping

CROPPING

You’ve just taken this great picture capturing all the detail in the scene and now when you look at it it’s suddenly lacking that spark of the better photo that it could be. It’s turned into the little photo that could.

What happened? There’s either too much distraction in the picture or the subject is suddenly uninteresting. Here are four examples of cropping:

EXAMPLE 1

Before

After

The cropping method used here to get rid of any distractions (this being the horse and the leftmost window pane) and to focus the viewer on the subject. The lighting on the couch and on the curtains is what gives this shot an added feel.

EXAMPLE 2

Before

After

While the subject matter is interesting, it’s too far back and doesn't focus on the direct subject matter. “Cropping in” was used to zoom in on the subject and make it the focal point of the picture. "Cropping in" is the official term used for this procedure. Keep in mind, you want to always try and shoot at max megapixel res so that you have the flexibility to crop in without losing too much detail.

EXAMPLE 3

EXAMPLE 4

Lastly crop using the rule of thirds! These are the final crops from the original images. I'll let you imagine where the lines are.

While striving to avoid cropping is ideal, it can be used to save a picture or to make it something more. Also, if you are intending to print your pictures, keep in mind cropping may make it harder to fit onto standard print sizes such as 4x6 or 8x10. As always with photography, try to think ahead and control the outcome. Enjoy.

May 2008 Week 2 Reviews

Hello All,

Keeping with tradition please do a review on your designated photo. Comment on Weekly Challenge 2 completed.

Becca – Vic’s Photo
Steph – Frank’s Photo
Vince – Becca’s Photo
Vic – Vince’s Photo
Frank – Steph’s Photo


As always, don't rip into each other!

Week 3 Challenge.....

Hello Boys and Girls,

With week2 officially done, it's time to start off the week 3 challenge. I was going to go for a Captain Planet theme (too bad Earth Day already past), but decided to restrict it a little more, so this weeks theme is.......



WATER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

May 2008 Week 2 Results

Hi Boys and Girls,

The second weekly entries are in and have been uploaded.

A gallery has been created which you can find here.
The original files can be found here.

Becca


Frank


Steph


Vince


Vic


Keegan

Victor's week2 pictures

While I wait for the rest of the enteries to be uploaded, here are my other shots.

click here if you want to see.

Once the others are uploaded, I will post them and make a gallery.

new ftp info

hi boys and girls.

I changed the ftp info to reflect the proper name of the group.

login is now: shutter
password and address the same.

It should be up and running by sometime tonight.

Posting and Commenting on our Blog Page

Posting and Commenting on Blogger

First, go to the sign in page. www.blogger.com

Next Type in your username and password and sign in.


You Should have Shutter Nirvana as a blog already. To create a new post, click on new post.



Create your post and click on publish.



To Comment on someone else’s post. Go to that post and scroll to the bottom of it. Click on Comments.


Type in your comments and publish it. Voila.

Cool article

Funny pictures, have a look.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=562561&in_page_id=1770

New Website

After discussions with Vince, he finally convinced me to use google pages to create a website so that it's easier to find tutorials and random postings. You can find the website here Shutter Nirvana . It's very basic right now, but we'll start fancying it up as we go. Steph is in the process of creating us an official logo. We're on our way to the big times baby!

Weekly Challenge #2 - Windows

Hello All,

Just to make it official, this week's challenge given to us by Steph is Windows! As always photos are to be posted by Sunday 11:59. I know I'll be up at 11:30 trying to figure out how to take my shot. Happy Window Hunting!

Vic gets to pick next week's challenge. Then Becca, then Vince.

Corrections

Oops, So this blog is called Shutter Nirvana and not Photo Nirvana. I will make the changes to the naming tonight (the login for the ftp will be the same since i'm too lazy to change that).

I believe it is Steph's turn to suggest the next challange?

That is all, carry on.

May 2008 Week 1 Results

Hi Boys and Girls,

The first weekly entries are in and have been uploaded.

A gallery has been created which you can find here.
These were made a little smaller for faster loading and easier viewing, the original files can be found here.

Becca


Frank


Steph


Vince


Vic


Keegan


I have also uploaded my other random shots here if you want to see.

If you guys want to do this for your other shots as well, upload them as a sub folder with your name in the appropriate weekly challenge directory (i.e. photonirvana/2008-05/week1-stripes/NAME and i will get on it.

Free Photo-editting tool

Hey guys,

For some quick and easy edits, as well as resizing, check out "The Gimp". It's a free photoshop-like program which maybe useful (i think PC and MAC).

http://www.gimp.org/

For creating the web galleries, we are now using Web Album Generator as it is free.

http://eunq.com/
http://www.ornj.net/webalbum/index.html
http://www.stegmann.dk/mikkel/porta/


First gallery coming up shortly.

Upload to FTP

Ok boys and girls,

I setup the FTP server. You'll need to get an ftp program (ie, smartftp, cuteftp, leechftp...ect)

ftp address is: dmitribobko.com
login is: photo@dmitribobko.com

I will email out the password for security.

The root directory will have all the months, and inside that will be folders for each weekly challange. Upload you photos (drag and drop) to the appropriate challange. Also, follow the naming conversion "name"-"##".jpg. Remember size limitations that Frank has set out "maximum 1600 pixels in anyone directions. I.e. Horizontally 1600 pix or Vertically 1600 pix. The image size should then be constrained 500-800 kB max"

Storing your Pictures

Weekly Challenge 1 has ended and the pics are uploaded to our ftp site. While we're talking about storing pics, this is a good opportunity to discuss ways of storing your pics.

PERSONAL STORAGE

What I like doing is using external hard drives. One to store my pics on and the other one is used to back them up. There's nothing worse than losing a day, week, month, or a year's worth of pictures that you can never get back. Trust me, I know! Now because I'm a dSLR shooter, I shoot all my pictures are in raw format. I convert each picture to 8-bit tiffs and 100% quality jpgs and store them in separate places.

Why tiffs? Jpgs are known to have a shelf life of approximately 7 years if you open them up and do some editing. Every time a jpg is saved, bits are lost. Doing this more and more will result in an error "File is corrupted. Unable to Open". Tiffs are non lossy formats and are excellent for editing as they retain all of the information when the pic was first taken. However, Tiffs do take up a lot more space and if hard drive space is an issue then, I would suggest keeping an untouched copy of your jpgs and an editing version of your jpgs which you can open and edit at your leisure.

For point and shoot camera shooters, often jpgs are the only format you can shoot in. To preserve as much information as possible, shoot in the largest megapixel resolution available in the camera. This will insure that the jpg will hold the most information.

As far as organization of your pictures go. What works for me the best is to organize my folders as below:


Folder - Month, Year
Folder - Tiffs
Folder - Jpgs

Of course many programs such as iphoto and picassa already do this for you so if you use any of these programs then what I'm blabbing is of no use to you. Then again it could be. While I do recommend programs such as iphoto, picassa, and lightroom, I also like to be in control of how my pictures are stored and where.

ONLINE STORAGE

Now if you're ready to take the plunge and venture forth into the internet to do posting, there are a lot of photo sharing sites such as Flickr. Course you have to pay a little for these sites, but for 2 bucks a month, it's hard to go wrong with one of these sharing sites. Not only do you get to meet other photographers, but you have unlimited storage and can share your pics with friends and family that way. They have great editing, organizational, and slideshow tools. You could also get your own server and host your images there as we have done with this site. The advantages to hosting elsewhere is that you can post to blogs and websites without having to worry about how much space you're taking up. For example, this is my photo blog Frank's Photo Blog using flickr as my photo hosting site. This is a long winded topic in itself and I'll elaborate further in future posts. Hopefully this is enough to chew on for now.

Rule of Thirds

INTRODUCTION

The rule of thirds is something that's frequently used in photography. It's a good rule for quick compositions and to make a photo interesting to a viewer's eyes. To use this rule, you can either mentally picture a 3x3 grid on your subject or look through your viewfinder with the "grid display" feature on. If you have a point and shoot the "grid display" feature should also be available to display on the LCD.

INTERSECTING LINES

Now that the grid is on either mentally or physically, the idea is to line up your shot so that your subjects fall on the intersecting lines or the four intersections. Take this shot of Vince for example. I've kept the top right intersecting lines on Vince's eyes so that your eyes are drawn to him as the most interesting subject in my composure. I've kept the other intersection on my coworker in the background to give the picture some depth. Placing the subject of your photo at any one of the 4 intersection points draws the viewer's attention exactly as you want it. That's pretty much it to the intersecting lines.

FILLING THE THIRDS

Another way to use the rule of thirds is to place your subject matter in one third of the picture. Pick any third of the picture and place all of your subject matter in there. Depending whether you place your subject matter in the top or bottom thirds, changes how much you see above or below the horizon. This can be a cool effect to mess around with.

GENERAL "RULES OF THUMB"

Now, I tend to eyeball my thirds lines when taking a quick shot. Here are some good general rules of thumb that I setup with every shot.

1. I generally place people off the center of the shot and on one of the vertical lines.
   
2. For landscapes, I try to fill a third of my picture. If I'm showing off the sky then the lower third will be my horizon and below. If I'm showing off what's on the ground then all my sky is the top third.
3. When taking a closeup shot of someone, I imagine both of their eyes on the top two intersections, and the mouth in the bottom third

Keeping the rule of thirds in mind has become second nature to me. Every now and then I try to break it because you can get some dramatic shots that way too. Enjoy.