Browsing all posts in DIY.

Rescuing Grainy Film Photos

I made the complete switch from film photography to digital photography somewhere around 2003 or 2004. So you can imagine my surprise when, while recently digging through some old bags I had stuffed in the back of my closet, I came across several rolls of undeveloped film. I took them to my local one-hour developer [...]

Tips for Focusing in the Dark

Taking a long exposure picture in dark conditions can be a challenge, because the camera’s auto-focus capabilities find it difficult to “see” a point of focus. Manual focus can be hard, too, because you can’t see what you’re trying to focus on through the viewfinder! In keeping with this month’s “long exposure” challenge, here are [...]

Photoshop Framing Made Easy

Adding a matted “frame” to your on-line photographs creates a touch of professionalism and showcases your work in a way that draws the viewer’s attention. It’s a very quick and simple process to add a frame in Photoshop. For the purposes of this demonstration, I’ll use a photo that I took in Scottsdale, Arizona, late [...]

Developing Custom Metadata in Adobe Bridge

Last week, in my post about establishing a post-processing routine, I mentioned that I would write some instructions on creating custom metadata to append to your photographs. Custom metadata is useful for a variety of reasons – to help categorize your photographs, to assign keywords and searchable tags, and to establish copyright and photo ownership. [...]

Portfolio Tips

The possession of a portfolio is an integral part of selling your photographs – whether you are selling your own prints, or selling your skills as a photographer. Creating a collection of the work that you are the most proud of establishes your skills in a visual way that will draw potential clients and customers. [...]

Creating a Photo Montage

Recently I was invited to join the F.O.A.M. group on Flickr. F.O.A.M. stands for: Food Outside Abstract Myself Participants in the group take daily photos of food, outside, an abstract shot, and a shot of themselves, then arrange the shots into a montage (a term often used interchangeably with “collage” and “mosaic”, but they’re really all [...]

Creating Textures

Following up on my previous entry about textures, creating textures of your own is a pretty easy process. Everything has texture, some subtle, some overt. In creating your own texture to apply to photographs, the easiest way is to simply take a photograph of something that has texture, itself. Items with repeating patterns work well, [...]

Playing With Textures

Adding textures to photographs seems to be all the rage lately, doesn’t it? No fewer than five different photography sites that I’ve perused this week have featured themes relating to textures. Being the joiner that I am, I thought I’d play around with some textures, myself. I’ve never worked with them before this, so I [...]

Photoshop CS3 – Create a Black and White Image

More often than not, instead of shooting a picture using my camera’s black and white (or “grayscale”) setting, I prefer to take color photographs and convert them to black and white. Rather than going to Image/Mode/Grayscale in Photoshop CS3 to turn a color photo into black and white, here is a new technique that I [...]

Four Things Photography Has Taught Me

1. Patience.  It has never been my strong suit. Yet it is absolutely required to first learn photography, then to exercise what you’ve learned. I used to get frustrated because I couldn’t make the shot happen – the one that I envisioned within my mind’s eye. Now, I try more often (it’s still a work [...]