Rrrrrrrr

It’s hard to find sometimes but it’s making a resurgence, black and white film. If you’ve never used this film now is the time to try it out. Here are some tips to using b&w film and what you can expect from the results.

1. Forget color. This is the hardest thing to do and the number one reason that you will not get good results with b&w film.

2. Look for contrast. Once you can ignore color look for contrast. You will want your image to have a bit more contrast than you would normally want in a color image.

3. Consider shooting situations that are more formal. Black and white film gives such a wonderful timelessness to an image and it’s perfect for formal situations.

4. Keep your photos simple. Black and white film simplifies so don’t fight it. Keep the images simple by keeping close to your subject or place your subject against a simple back drop.

5. Babies and pets look great on b&w film. Place the pet or baby on a white background and you’ll be stunned at the beautiful results.

Black and white film creates a timeless simple look. It’s wonderful for portraits and formal events. After shooting a few rolls of b&w you’ll notice that you start to pay attention to composition of your image more, since you don’t have to worry about color. If you’re just learned photography try using b&w film for awhile it will help you teach yourself good composition. Think of light and dark, black and white, and good composition and you’ll find that b&w film could be a whole new hobby for you.

Copyright 2004 Kelly Paal
Kelly Paal is a Freelance Nature and Landscape Photographer, exhibiting nationally and internationally. Recently she started her own business Kelly Paal Photography (www.kellypaalphotography.com). She has an educational background in photography, business, and commercial art. She enjoys applying graphic design and photography principles to her web design.

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* Can I develop my own photographs?

Yes, you can. By having your own darkroom, it is possible that you can develop your own photos. You first need to set up your own darkroom and buy darkroom equipment.

* What equipment and supplies do I need in a darkroom?

A darkroom requires many kinds of equipment to get you started in developing your photos. It is expensive, so you should prepare a sufficient amount of money to get into this hobby.

The darkroom necessities are:

• Enlarger
• Negative carrier
• Lens Board
• Lens
• Safelight
• Print trays
• Timer
• Thermometer
• Funnel
• Chemical jugs
• Developer, stop, fixer
• Printing paper
• Mixing rod
• Print squeegee
• Dust brush
• Graduates
• Negative Storage
• Dark Bag/ Dark room
• Film tank
• Film reels
• Film

Above is the equipment you need for a darkroom. However, you still need additional equipment to set up a complete darkroom above and beyond the former, which includes:

• Paper cutter
• Color print drum
• Motor base for print drum or rotary processor
• Color head or filters
• Color printing paper
• Color chemicals
• Jugs and graduates for color chemistry
• Color print viewing filter kit
• Light table
• Dry mount press
• Mounting tissue
• Bulk film loader
• Film cassettes
• Darkroom sink
• Water board
• Film drier
• Print drier
• Toners
• Jugs for toners
• Exposure/color analyzer
• Repeating printing timer
• Photo Oils/pencils
• Print tongs
• Hypo clear, photo-flow
• Easel
• Polycontrast Filters
• Film clips
• Print washer
• Blotter book
• Projection scale
• Antistaticum
• Canned air
• Loupe
• Cropping guide
• Film washer
• Cotton gloves
• Spotting dyes
• Spotting brush
• Contact printer
• Grain focuser

* What makes a good darkroom?

A good darkroom should be light-proof, spacious, have dry and wet areas, have ventilation, have bench space, be organized, have a safe light, and be comfortable to work in. Since you will be working with chemicals, it is important that you have enough space to maneuver to avoid tripping over dangerous chemicals.

Travis Partrige is a regular contributor to photographer guides and photography-related sites such as Photography Question and Answer. Website: www.PhotographyQA.com

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Snow! You either love it or hate it. But, for sure, it gives the chance for some great photographs. Wrap up warm and get those shots, but remember a simple rule.

Snow is cold and sloppy. It this wasn’t bad enough for the photographer, there is one other problem to face: snow can fool your camera when exposing.

Snow is white and a blanket of snow shows the camera exposure meter a blanket of white. Consequently, the camera will average all the white it sees and attempt to produce an image that is “average” or “mid grey”. This means that snow turns out not white, but some dirty, murky colour.

But how do you ensure that snow on your image is the virgin white that your eyes see? It’s easy.

Because your camera sees a vision of white, it will underexpose the image leading to murky highlights and detail. You need to tell the camera to change the exposure - just dial in some overexposure. This is usually in the form of extra “stops” of exposure on your camera but you will need to refer to your camera manual to see exactly how this is done.

An overexposure setting in 1 or 1.5 stops should get your snow scene bright once more!

Eric Hartwell is an enthusiastic photographer. He owns and runs the photography resource site http://www.theshutter.co.uk and the associated discussion forums http://www.theshutter.co.uk/forums as well as the regular weblog at http://thephotographysite.blogspot.com. Anyone interested in getting involved contact him at shutter@theshutter.co.uk

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Advanced photographers can tell you, a quality camera bag is imperative to good photography. There are several brands available on the market, but one is a step above the rest. Thinking of all the details and including the best components, M-Rock camera bag company has developed world-class camera bags that have photographers around the world pointing and shooting away.

M-Rock has been making their unique camera bag line for over 10 years. The line consists of 15 modular camera bags that can be used alone or in conjunction with other M-Rock camera bags. The products range in size from small to large, so they can be used for active photography or long photography expeditions. No matter what type of adventure you have planned, MRock has the right camera bag.

What sets M-Rock camera bags apart from the competitors is the attention to details. M-Rock has very little space restrictions with their products so they can be manipulated to fit almost any camera. Competitors use Velcro strips and don’t allow much room for manipulation. M-Rock also uses the finest quality components, consisting of ultra-soft felt, scratch resistant material on the inside, and ultra-tough, weather resistant material on the outside. The result is a camera bag that efficiently protects all types of cameras, and a durability that is unsurpassed, even in the most extreme conditions.

M-Rock has developed a great reputation for their customer service. Founder, Michael Rockwell, wanted to create a line of great quality camera bags that were user friendly and had all the right features. After creating this great product, M-Rock keeps up their name by impeccable great customer service. The founder himself helps buyers to find the right camera bag for their needs.

M-Rock camera bags are the right camera bags for any level of photographer. The quality and the price of M-Rock camera bags beat out the competitors by a long shot. What sets a company apart is experience and commitment to excellence, and M-Rock leads the way in high standards. Visit M-Rock today and give them a try. You and your camera will be happy you did.

Angela Oliver is an author for www.M-Rock.com, maker of the most functional and user-friendly camera bags. Visit M-Rock today to see why photographers everywhere are switching to MRock camera bags.

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When traveling to a distant place it is almost second nature to want to bring a camera and for a good reason. Most people are looking to make a travel journal to keep the memory of their trip alive and in vivid color and be able to show it off to their family and friends. The most important thing to know even before you start your journey is the research. Taking time to study a place that you are planning to visit and plan a shooting itinerary will help enhance the quality and number of photo opportunities you can encounter along the way.

When it comes to travel photography, the man made world has so much to offer. When you first walk out of the hotel, you will see the city streets that stretch for miles in each direction. During sun rise or sun set this can be the perfect time to take a few select pictures. City vista photos are shot to show a softer and more elegant side to a city or town with a skyline in the background. Stained glass windows can make a wonderful and beautiful picture. The simplicity to taking a picture with this type of subject is that the artists already has done all of the creative work for you.

We cannot forget the people that you will encounter during your trip to a far off land. The beauty of pictures of people is that it shows one side of a life filled with charm and wonder that we do not get to see in our everyday lives. Strangers faces make any travelers photo journey complete. The best way to encounter a subject for this type of picture would be to look where people may gather, fairs, a market place or a city park are the best places to start.

Author Info:

Albreht Moy has travel posters for sale at his site.

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I’ll wager that most of you have, at some time, got into the situation where your memory card is full. This usually manifests itself when you are about to take (an important) image. It’s frustrating and highly annoying.

The next step is to run through the images on your card in order to find the best ones to delete. As you peer at the LCD screen you attempt to decide which images are right for removal to the trash - blurred images, red eyes, poor composition.

But it can be difficult. If you are like me, you never really want to get rid of anything, at least not until you have had a good look at it. But if you don’t, you will miss the next important image, and the next ….

The answer is cheap and simple: buy extra cards. Digital memory cards represent good value for money and by shopping around you can get them even cheaper than in the main shops. They can hold hundreds of images and smaller ones (128 or 256Mb size) are so cheap that it’s worth having a few handy in your bag for emergencies.

If any of you have used film, you will know how expensive it can be to keep replacing film in the camera and only being able to take,A at most, 36 images. With memory cards, you can hold 80, 160 or 300+ images depending on the size of your card.

Get an extra card (or two) today.

Eric Hartwell runs the photography resource site http://www.theshutter.co.uk and the associated discussion forums as well as the regular weblog at http://thephotographysite.blogspot.com.

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How many countless photos have you taken at birthday parties, weddings, or bar mitzvahs that came back from your film developer with annoying red eye? The same thing can happen with animals, however, the result is usually a greenish or silvery glow. One of the most common problems novice photographers encounter when photographing people or animals is red eye. The problem is caused by the flash of the camera illuminating the rentina of the eye. With people the retina is made up of hundreds of tiny blood vessels. When lit by the camera’s flash it reflects the red color of these vessels.

Today many point and shoot cameras offer a red eye reduction feature. A tiny strobe light will pulse from the camera prior to the camera shutter opening and closing. The theory is that the iris of the eye will narrow when exposed to the bright light. This offers a smaller area of the retina, containing the tiny blood vessels, to be exposed while the photo is taken. However, this doesn’t always eliminate the problem. The reason is the proximity of the flash to the camera lens, it’s just too close.

I have a friend who is now on his fourth camera within the past five years due to photos coming back from the lab with red eye. The red eye reduction feature on these cameras has never been consistent and still continues to result in red eye more often than not.

One of the ways to eliminate red eye if you own a point and shoot that doesn’t allow for an attached accessory flash, is to either photograph the subject in the brightest ambient light possible or make sure the subject is not standing directly in front of you. Bright ambient light gives you, the photographer, the advantage of narrowing down the iris naturally before the strobe goes to work. The other option is to photograph the subject at an angle, so the lens will not have a direct line to the back of the eye’s retina. This decreases the chance for the film to see the red retina.

Now, if you own or use a higher end camera, you most likely have the opportunity to utilize an external or accessory flash. These are usually mounted on a bracket off to the side of the camera. The advantage here is that the camera and the flash have some distance between them. We want to create as much distance between the flash and the lens of the camera as possible, this way the lens won’t see the light bounce directly off the retina. The result is little to no red eye.

My biggest breakthrough in regard to reduction of red eye came when I was introduced to a diffuser that mounts to the top of the flash unit over the light. I use what’s called a 80/20 (80% / 20%) diffuser. When photographing people or animals, I use it in the following manner. I aim my flash at a 90 degree angle up from my subject, basically into the sky. Because I am utilizing the 80/20 diffuser, 20% of that light is directed, in a diffuse fashion, back down at my subject. The results are fantastic! I eliminate red eye and create a softer more natural looking light for my subject. Not only does this reduce red eye but produces a softer light for the subject without harsh or annoying shadows behind them.

A couple of last things to consider would be the difference between photographing children and adults as well as complexion. A rule of thumb is that the younger the subject the wider the retina and the greater opportunity for red eye. The other point is that fairer skinned persons and people with blue eyes have a tendency to produce the red eye effect more than their counterparts. Consider these and the other suggestions the next time you photograph people and animals and you should have better results when you pick up your prints.

Details of this article can be viewed at http://www.sitecritic.net/projectDetail.php?id=25

View Sitecritic.net Photography project ideas for more inspiration

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As a photographer, you are up against stiff competition when it comes to getting gigs or jobs. Newspapers, magazines, weddings, family and student photos - how do you reach the multitude of people who may be interested in hiring you? Portfolios are expensive and targeting the many different segments of the population who would benefit from your services is no simple marketing feat.

By building your own photography website to showcase your work and your services, you handle all these problems in one fell swoop.

Digital photography offers you the ability to share your work with the world. Many magazines and newspapers will only take submissions in .jpeg or .gif formats. The days of negatives, proof sheets, and slides are over. Though you may still choose to offer 35 millimeter prints or other specialty photo services, digital photography is where the money is in the industry.

Lucky for you! Digital photographs take less than a minute to upload to your web host. At variable qualities, you can showcase the different styles of photography at which you are proficient. Other things you can do with your photography site include:

• List hours and services and prices. If you are only available to work at night and on weekends, list this on your site. Also, list different services that you provide including wedding photography, baby and pregnancy pictures, family portraits, student photos, pet photography, and more. Listing prices is not a requirement, but something that is highly recommended. Offering a variety of packages with the option to customize will help potential customers know right away whether or not they can afford your services.
• Special deals or discounts. Monthly discounts or special deals for first time customers, discounts for repeat customers or multiple packages can also be displayed on your photography website. They may also be a good ‘time clock’ incentive if they are updated frequently and set to change within a week or less.
• Offer a subscription service. Another option you may consider is offering a subscription service for your photography through your site. Many need stock photography for their websites, brochures, flyers, et cetera. Some may even need these on a regular basis. Offering one time downloads and a subscription service with a wide net of types of photography may be one way to increase your sales revenue while shooting whatever you like and increasing your portfolio.
• Order prints. Opt for a shopping cart on your site and allow those who may have just stopped by to check you out to purchase a print for download instantly.
• Commission order forms. For customized orders or packages or to set up special shoots, you can design an order form for your photography website that will allow them to be as specific as they like about what exactly it is that they’re looking for.
• Offer photographic services. List and define your services in detail. Some may not even realize that they are looking for the exact photographic service that only you can provide.
• Contact info. Include everything that a potential customer may need: email address, land line, cell phone, studio address.
• Part of the community. Connect to the rest of the photography community by offering a link page: photo supply sites, framers, videographers, et cetera.
• Be creative. Show your diversity, talent, and imagination. Inspire your clients to inspire you.

Madison Lockwood is a customer relations associate for ApolloHosting.com. She brings years of experience as a small business consultant to helping prospective clients understand the ways in which a website may benefit them both personally and professionally. Apollo Hosting provides website hosting, ecommerce hosting, vps hosting, and web design services to a wide range of customers. Established in 1999, Apollo prides itself on the highest levels of customer support.

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Your Monitor Lies!!!!

Don’t be offended. It’s nothing personal. Mine lies and so does
everyone else’s. “Fine,” you may be saying, “But what the heck does this have to do with me and my digital photography?”

A lot because what this means is that the image that you see on
your monitor may very well not be the exact same image you see when you print it out. I’m not going to get into the technical reasons of why this happens, but will focus only on what this means for us and our efforts to get dazzling digital photographs.

Let’s start from the beginning. You are looking at a picture on
your computer monitor and it looks a little too dark. So you use
some digital-editing software or the tools provided on the online
photo sites to lighten the image up a bit. You do a couple of
things, and voila, it the picture looks perfect and
magnificent….Well, it does on your monitor, but would it look as good on another monitor, or even more importantly, in a printed picture.

Monitors are by nature unstable. The same image viewed on two
different monitors may appear very different, though in print, the image would be the same.

So that means that the picture that appeared a little dark may have been, in reality, find and that by lightening it up, you actually made the picture worse. You see what I’m saying here?

You can really see this you see by taking a regular print picture, scanning it and comparing the print picture with what you see on the monitor. You can then take it the final step by printing the digital picture, and then comparing all three–the two pictures and the digital image on the monitor. Side-by-side, you’ll definitely see some differences.

I know this is crazy, and it is without a doubt one of the Most
Maddening aspects of working with digital photographs.

Now don’t get me wrong, in many cases the differences are slight
(though in others they may be more pronounced.) But a real problem is seeing a problem with an image on your monitor that doesn’t actually exist, correcting it, and then discovering that the correction actually worsened the picture.

Professional graphic artists often spend thousands of dollars on
software to calibrate their monitors–making sure that what they see on the computer is what they’ll get when they print. Even then, they will always get a printed sample just to make sure that the colors are right.

Fortunately, you don’t have to spend thousands or hundreds of
dollars to calibrate your monitor to a level more than suitable for our purposes. What I use and recommend is a small program available with Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0. If anyone is not familiar with this software or company, they are both great. Adobe is the premier graphics and photo editing software company. In fact, Adobe’s Photoshop is the premier software package. Elements is the company’s slightly less professional version, and the one that I use. There is more packed into it then you’ll ever need.

One of the nice things they include is a calibrating wizard called “Adobe Gamma,” which, after installing the program, is available through your control panels. After the wizard walks you through the process, the program allows you to see what your monitor looked like before and after the calibration. Even though the change may be slight, you’ll be surprised by the difference.

I strongly recommend this software. Besides Gamma, it allows you to do so many other great and easy things to dramatically improve your photos. (We will discuss some of those methods in future
articles.) You can buy a copy of Elements here.

There are, of course, other calibration options available and you
can search for them in Google under “monitor calibration.”

The main thing is just to recognize that your monitor lies and just to be sure that any changes you make to your images are ones that improve.

Andrew is a former journalist and like many others in their mid-thirties still trying to figure out what he wants to do when he grows up. At the same time, he loves to capture “moments” and tell stories through photos. He is the creator of http://www.DazzlingDigitalPrints.com - a web site packed with tips, reviews, advice and newsletter all to help you get best digital prints possible.

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Photography 101

If you have some specific questions please visit my Photography Forum at: http://kellypaalphotography.com/v-web/bulletin/bb/index.php

Copyright 2004 Kelly Paal

Kelly Paal is a Freelance Nature and Landscape Photographer, exhibiting nationally and internationally. Recently she started her own business Kelly Paal Photography (www.kellypaalphotography.com). She has an educational background in photography, business, and commercial art. She enjoys applying graphic design and photography principles to her web design.

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