Storage Media cards are an important, but often overlooked part of your camera system. After all, their job is to safely store your images until you can download them. Because of their importance, they should be taken care of them properly. Here are five tips to keep them healthy:

1. Format new cards

Many of the storage media cards today are touted as being “pre-formatted” and “ready to use,” but ready to use in which type camera system? Not all camera systems use the same file system format, so it is always best to format a new card for the camera it will be used in. By formatting the card in  the camera, you’ll ensure the card is in a format your camera recognizes.

2. Never fill your cards completely

Most cameras have some kind of indicator, either on the LCD screen or in a digital display on top of the camera, that tells you how many more photos you can shoot and write to the card before it is full. However, it is not a good idea to fill up a card.  Replace the card when your indicator shows there is space left for one or two more images.  Otherwise, by filling the card up, you may end up with a write error because there wasn’t enough room left to write that last file which can corrupt at least that image and possibly the whole card.

3. Never exhaust your batteries

Another item that can cause a write error is if your camera runs out of battery power mid-way through writing a file to the card. So replace your batteries with a fresh set once they start to get down to the bottom of the scale.

4. Reformat your cards in your camera

Some new photographers prefer to just delete photos from their cards via their computer once the images have downloaded. However, deleting images does not get rid of them. Always reformat your cards in your camera, instead of just deleting or erasing them. This will ensure the card is in fact empty and is in a format the camera expects.

5. Use good quality memory cards

Being you have spent a lot of money on your camera body and lens, don’t skimp when it comes to buying storage media cards. Remember the importance of these cards – storing your images until you can download them. It’s worth spending a few dollars more to buy quality cards thus ensuring your photos arrive safely at your computer. Besides the higher-priced cards usually have faster write speeds – an important consideration if you shoot action scenes and subjects. Three brands that I can personally recommend are SanDisk, Lexar and PNY.

No amount of editing can make a bad photo look good. However, great photo editing is crucial – it can make a good photo great by accentuating its best points and bringing out its full potential. Most world class photographers are also expert photo editors. How do you edit your picture in a way that creates a great photo? Read on.

The Basics

When you’re editing any image, you should do the following basics:

• Adjust the contrast levels. Make sure you have enough contrast. Higher contrast often results in sharper images that really stand out – too high a contrast looks tacky.
• Remove any color cast. If the whole image is “shaded red” for example, you’ll want to change that. White balance is often the easiest method, levels or curves if the image has complex colors schemes.
• Touch up any humans. Depending on what the image will be used for, you may want to remove any blemishes, pimples, discolorations, etc.

After you’ve done the basics, then …

Try Different Crops

Try at least 2-5 different ways to crop any image you’re editing. Does the focus look better in the center? On the left? On the right?

In the past, you had to take the picture perfectly if you wanted to get the focal point right. Today, you can crop your image in different ways after the photo is taken, provided you have a high enough resolution image.

Manual Editing

Often times, you’ll have to do a bit of manual editing to get the picture perfect. It might be something like creating a levels layer just for one part of the image you want higher contrast, but nothing else. It might be cloning out things that somehow managed to get in the picture.

For example, you have a gorgeous picture of a park, but there’s a plastic garbage bag in the corner. In that case, you’ll have to do something like clone the grass over the area to get rid of it.

Or, you have a 4 person picture but one person is too dark, while the other 3 are perfect. In that case, create an adjustment layer and mask out everyone but that one person to get the levels perfect for that one person.

The list of manual editing can go on and on. Use your own artistic eye to see what needs to be done.

Subtle Effects

Often times the use of subtle effects can really help bring out the picture.

Blurring out the background is a common way to add focus to the picture. If one person is standing there with the rest of the background slightly blurred, it adds a very nice feel.

Grayscale or sepia toned images are a great way to add style, depending on the image.

You may one to go for a slightly dreamy tone with something like waterfall pictures. With pictures of animals in the wild, you might want to create an effect that goes with the feel of the image. For example, you might want to motion blur the background of a cheetah so it looks like it’s going extremely fast.

Or, you might want to add a slight red tone to the rest of an image if you’ve got a photograph of a bat. In the end, it really depends on your artistic style.

When you’re beginning to edit an image, first start by doing your basic photo adjustments. Then experiment with different crops and ways to frame and package your image. Then make any manual adjustments and edits you need. Finally, add any subtle effects you want in the image.

In the old days just a few years ago, when faced with a high-contrast setting – one having a large number of stops between the lightest and darkest areas in a scene – you either had to meter for the highlights and loose shadow detail or shoot for the shadows and blow out the highlights.

Some photographers experimented (with mixed results I might add) to combine several images with different exposures using the layers feature found in some of the image-editing software programs. The process was cumbersome, time consuming and it didn’t produce very good results. Then High Dynamic Resolution (HDR) photography entered onto the post-processing scene.

What is HDR Photography?

It starts with the method of taking images and ends up with a compilation of those images using software. In its most basic form, you take three images at three different exposures and combine them into one properly exposed image. In a nutshell, you take the same exact scene or subject at the:

-   metered exposure

-   one stop under metered

-   one stop over metered.

Instead of going over and under one stop, you can use two stops. Or you could take both one and two stop exposures and combine five images instead of three. The process works great on most subjects, but it works extremely well on landscape subjects.

What are the benefits?

HDR photography has several benefits, such as:

• Shooting most of your images using existing ambient light;
• Great photos with detail in both the light and dark areas;
• Less time spent editing images;
• Well-exposed images.

What do I need?

You probably already have most of what you need, including a:

• computer;
• digital camera with at least manual exposure compensation, however Automatic Exposure Bracketing (AEB) is quicker to use;
• tripod;

While there are many different HDR software choices, I recommend and use Photomatix Pro. It is not real expensive to buy, easy to use and is the choice of many professional photographers.

Computer

Photomatix Pro works equally well on Macintosh and PC platforms. For the software to run properly, your computer should have at least:

• 1 GB of RAM – more is better;
• 500 MB of free hard drive space – again, more is better;
• a monitor resolution of 1,024×768;
• 16-bit color video card.

Digital Camera

When combining images using HDR software, it works best to shoot the images with your camera set to aperture priority and use the Automatic Exposure Bracketing (AEB) feature of your camera, if you have the AEB feature. With AEB set to one-stop, when you press the shutter button the first time, your camera will take one image at 0EV, a second one at -1stop and third one at +1 stop. The -1 and +1 will be at different shutter speeds. By holding all three images at the same aperture, it eliminates any issues with different depth-of-field among the three images. As I said earlier, you can also shoot at a -2 and +2 and then combine all 5 images, but it takes at least three images to make a good HDR image.

Tripod

A good tripod makes getting the exact same scene in all images easier. By doing so, problems of trying to get the same element in all images to line up correctly are greatly reduced when merging.

Photomatix Pro Software

I want to be clear, that I have no connection to this software; the only reason I’m using it is because it is the best HDR software for less than $100 in my estimation and the one many professional photographers use.

How do I use it?

First, it will run on a MAX OS X with 10.3.9 or higher, or on Windows 98 up through the new Windows 7, so you don’t have to worry about platform compatibility issues. Second, it is very user-friendly to both learn and use.

Once you start the program:

• click on the GENERATE HDR IMAGE button.
• Using the BROWSE button select the images you want to combine.
• Click the OK button
• Click all the boxes on the next screen and then click on the OK button
• The software combines the images – Don’t be alarmed at the image you see. At this point it will look really bad.
• Click on the TONE MAPPING button
• You have a choice of two editing tabs – DETAILS ENHANCER and TONE COMPRESSOR. Tone Compressor will give you realistic results in less time.
• Once you have set the sliders where you want them, click on the PROCESS button

  The DETAILS ENHANCER tab does essentially the same thing only it has more sliders, which gives you even more control over the final image. Once you have the image the way you want it, you can save it either as a TIFF or JPEG. 

My intent was not to bore you with all the details, but to show you how easy the software is to use – eight steps and you have created an image that you otherwise would not have been easily able to create.  And like anything else, the more you use it, the better you will get at it. With Photomatix Pro, you can work smarter, instead of harder.  

 

If you shoot sports as one of your micro-stock categories, sometimes due to the action you don’t have time to properly compose an image at the time you push the shutter button. During post processing of this image, I needed to remove the little boy on the top left side.

Cropping
With the image open in Elements, click with the left mouse button on Image from the top-line menu. From the Image drop-down menu, click on Crop.
A movable box will appear on screen.
• Position your cursor on the small square (called a handle) on the right side of the box.
• Using your left mouse button, click, hold and drag the handle to the edge of the image.
• Move the left handle left until it is positioned to just before the boy we are trying to remove.
Position the top and bottom handles as we have done here.
Once you have the handles in place, use the left mouse button and click on the green checkmark underneath the image. Now you have a properly cropped image with a neutral space at the bottom an editor could use for text.

Resizing
Now let’s move on to resizing this image. From the top line menu, click on Image, Resize and Image Size. In the Image Size box, ensure the
• Scale Styles
• Constrain Proportions
• Resample Image boxes are checked.

Now check to:
• ensure Bicubic is selected from the Resample Image drop-down menu.
• ensure the Width and Height boxes are set to inch for unit of measurement
• Resolution box is set to pixels/inch.

Change the Width value to something, such as 4. Delete the rest of the information in that box. The value in the Height box will change to a value to retain the correct proportion and to prevent distortion. Change the Resolution to 300 deleting the value in that was in the box. Click on the OK button.

Saving
Now we are going to save the image. From the top-line menu, use the left mouse button and click on File and Save As. In the File Name box, type in an appropriate name; I used T-Ball Grounder Catch. From the Format Drop-Down Menu, select the appropriate file name extension. I’m leaving it at JPEG.

At the top, make sure you are saving the image to the correct folder. If the correct folder is not showing, click on the triangle to the right of the Save In box and with the left mouse button, select the correct drive/folder. Click the Save button.

Using the slider in the Image Option box, move it to the correct value, depending on how large a file you wish to create. In the Format Options box, click, on the Baseline Optimized button. Click the OK Button.

From the top-line menu, click on File and Close. You’re done! You could also create the same image and leave more space at the top and less at the bottom. If you do, then you have two great images you can upload to your micro stock agencies.

Digital photography can start out as a great hobby and end up as a lucrative profession. Some people take pictures mainly to capture memories of family and friends while others are avid shooters of sunsets, landscapes and animals. Whatever your reasons for taking pictures, knowing a little bit about digital photography can make a huge difference in the quality of your photos.

Read the Manual

Let’s face it – digital camera manuals are boring. No one likes reading though a long manual containing unfamiliar terms to learn how to use their digital camera. Instead people often just attempt to learn how to use their digital camera through trial and error by practicing and trying to figure things out on their own.

However, by trying to learn how to use your digital camera that way, you could be overlooking a lot of your camera’s features. By knowing how to use some of these settings, it would make quite a difference in how your pictures turn out. You don’t need to know how to adjust every setting manually, but under certain conditions, such as extreme lighting conditions or unusual weather, it can be handy to know which settings will correct the uniqueness of the environment.

Experiment and Try New Things

A lot of new digital camera users are afraid to change any settings on their camera for fear that they won’t be able to change things back. You can’t hurt or break anything. Almost all digital cameras have a Restore Defaults setting that will change all the settings back to the way they were when your camera came from the manufacturer. How to do restore settings is contained in your user manual.

When a photo doesn’t look exactly how you’d like it to, take the same picture over and over using different shutter speed and aperture settings. With time,practice and time spent evaluating your photos, soon you’ll know what each setting can do and you’ll know which combination of settings to use under most of the common shooting situations.

Different lighting, angles and composition, along with aperture and shutter speeds, can have quite an effect on your photo’s outcome. Trying different things with backlighting and subject placement could turn your plain old photo into something incredibly pleasing to the eye with highlighting and shadowing you wouldn’t have expected.

Editing Images

Your digital photography self-education shouldn’t stop at your camera. Once you get your photos uploaded to your computer, use an image-editing software to fix any little flaws, color issues, or unwanted noise. Experimenting with these settings will introduce you to new effects and editing techniques you may have never thought of trying before.

Digital photography has a unique advantage of allowing you to view your photo immediately and delete what you don’t like. This makes experimenting with settings and lighting much easier because you can see right away what kind of effect you’ll be getting. With time, practice and familiarity with your camera, deciding which settings or angle to use will become more and more natural and soon you’re learned skills will be reflected in your work.

When it comes to digital photography, darkrooms are a thing of the past. Now, you can print your own digital images professionally on your own printer from the comfort of your chair. Transferring images to your PC, editing them using your favorite image-editing program and printing them using your own photo-quality printer has become commonplace.

If you don’t have a photo printer yet, but are considering buying your own photo printer, look at your printing needs first. Think about how big you will normally print photos. If 8″ x 10″ and smaller will be your norm, you have many more options at reasonable prices.

If you need a photo now and then at 11″ x 14″ or larger, it is cheaper in the long run to get it custom printed by a photo lab. Once you get over the 8″ X 10″ size, printers capable of making lab-quality prints get expensive as does the larger-sized paper. Larger prints use more ink, so ink costs are higher also. If the largest size you will print will be 4″ x 6″, there are some reasonably priced options also.

Lab Quality

While you don’t need to spend a fortune to print your digital photos from home, choosing the lowest quality printer, ink, and paper will leave you with prints that look like came from a low quality printer. Spending a little extra for a printer capable of providing you with rich colors and textures will pay for itself by providing you with lab-quality photos – ones you can’t tell from professionally printed prints.

Look for a printer with the word “photo” in the printer name. Generally six-ink printers matched with the same ink and paper as the printer manufacturer will give you the best results. For example, if you buy a Canon Printer, use Canon ink and Canon paper.

Resolution

Higher resolution and DPI (dots per inch), will allow you to print higher quality photos. Keep in mind however, high resolution printers take longer to print and use more ink, but if bright beautiful photos are important to you, high resolution is necessary.

Ink and Paper

In the end, it won’t be the printer alone that determines how your photos turn out. Using high quality ink and paper that’s compatible with your printer model will play a huge part in your photo results. Before purchasing any specific printer model, look into the paper and ink brands that will work with that printer and determine how much it will cost to restock with the appropriate supplies. Some good printers are reasonable to buy, but the ink and paper for them are more expensive.

While some printers use two tricolor ink cartridges, I prefer a printer with six individual ink tanks. With tricolor cartridges, if you end up printing a lot of one or two colors, you usually end up throwing away the third color left in the cartridge. With individual cartidges, you only replace one cartridge at a time as it is used up.

Don’t let a salesman talk you into buying a printer with a lot of features you will never use. Instead, look at product reviews and price ranges before you go shopping, so you have an idea of what you want before you get to the store. Also, too many features could make the printer hard to use, while too few features may not fulfill your needs. Know what you expect your printer to do on a regular basis before choosing one.

Doing your homework beforehand will make your shopping experience go smoother and get you a printer you will be happy with and within your budget.