A Digital Photography Tip or Two to Help You Edit Intruders Out of your Pictures

Yes, there can be intruders in your pictures. At crowded tourist destinations - the Eiffel Tower, the Niagara, important museum exhibits - it can be really hard to click a picture without strangers filling out the edges. What do you do if you just want a perfectly clean unencumbered shot of a scene with no people milling about? Well, there happen to be quite a few software packages that help you accomplish this. And you don't need to make yourself unpopular by making furious waving gestures to drive everyone out of your shot either. Let's go into it with a digital photography tip or two.

Two picturesquely-named photo editing tools, one free and one paid, allow you to digitally alter your photos to make intruders disappear. The GNU Image Manipulation Program or GIMP is the free-to-use software package; and the picturesquely-named SnapMania Tourist Remover is the paid one.

Both software packages work on the same theory - if you have a few pictures of the same scene, each one having intruders standing in different places blocking your view, these programs are able to take parts of the scene you want behind the gawking tourists in each shot from other shots, and stitch them together to make a seamless whole.

So how exactly does the whole process work? Either one of these two programs needs at least three shots of any given scene to work with. Each one of these shots needs to be taken out of the exact same position with no moving (preferably shot with a tripod). And each shot needs to have a different part covered or exposed. That's all the fodder that these programs need. With SnapMania, you load the pictures into the program and in a couple of minutes, it's managed to locate parts in each picture that are covered by passing people or cars and to fill them in with a section of the covered part taken from another picture. The effects can be magical. This can be a great digital photography tip. But sometimes, the effects can be comical.

Sometimes, the software doesn't manage to remove every vestige of every passing tourist. Sometimes you'll find just a disembodied head or just a disembodied foot still around in your picture. When that happens, you'll probably need to take more pictures of the scene to supply the software with. An easier option would be to get the program to process your pictures at a higher level of quality.

GIMP happens to be a kind of freeware version of Photoshop. It doesn't do anything automatically; it allows you to place your different photo versions one of top of the other and erase manually whatever offends you. The great thing about these software tools is that not only do they allow you to get the pictures you want, they allow you to regale your friends with a digital photography tip or two that will really impress them.

Tips for Flattering Black and White Photography Effects

When monochrome was all there was, people couldn't wait for the time that color photography would be invented and made affordable. Now that color is almost all we have, inexplicably, the effect that black and white photography has on us is inexplicable and powerful. There is a way that limited color has of making the emotional content of a subject more accessible. When there is no color, a picture is easily more timeless, more touching. Consider these tips that follow to be black and white photography essentials.

Today's digital cameras don't give you WYSIWYG pictures. What that means is, that whatever images their sensors capture, the cameras don't let you have the full thing. They only give you a processed version of it that's kind of compressed. Some cameras allow you to access the direct uncompressed image as the sensor sees it - something they call a raw image file or a digital negative. They call these raw pictures because there's no way to print them or edit them with a graphics editor. If you have a camera that allows you to store the pictures you take as a raw image files, this works spectacularly well for black and white photography. You get such depth and completeness in your pictures. You take those pictures, open them in Photoshop or another such program, and you'll find that you don’t even want to tamper with them.

You want to approach black-and-white photography rather differently than you would approach color photography. Let's say that you are taking a close-up picture of a person’s face. With no flesh colors to even out skin texture, skin is going to really show every crease, bump, spot of unevenness and wrinkle. This can make a picture look particularly beautiful and vulnerable. With black-and-white photography, you get to see texture, pattern and contrast in particularly touching ways. Where you can, you want to frame your subjects so that these characteristics really show up. You could for instance frame the subject against a light source for dramatic rear-lighting contrast effects. Lighting the subject up so that shadows really show up sharply can be a great idea too.

With digital cameras, ISO adjustments tell the camera to make the sensor more or less sensitive to light. And this would be something you could change from one picture to the next. For black and white photography with a digital camera, the lowest possible ISO - which would mean the least sensitive setting - would be best. Ratchet it up any higher, and it would make your pictures quite grainy.

The results that you get with black-and-white photography are often directly dependent on the kind of subjects you choose to pursue. Pick your subjects correctly, and you’ll have some stunning results. For instance, portraits are especially moving when they are shot in black and white. If you're taking a close-up of your girlfriend for instance, do it in black and white for the most stunning results. With color, you can pretty much shoot anything; it's easy to tell the difference between every single shade on a color picture. On a black-and-white photo, since everything's gray, it can be rather difficult to tell the difference between one thing and the next unless you take care to pick a subject where there is lots of contrast. You need to learn to see the world in black and white.

A Digital Video Camera is a Must on Vacation

My brother convinced me to buy a digital video camera a few years ago to take with me on vacation. I had always taken my regular digital camera along with me, but had wondered about capturing some of the moments live so that we could watch them as a family for years to come. Now that I have done it, I will never go on vacation without one again.

The first place we took the digital video camera to was New York City. We have family up there, and I wanted to show my family back home all of the sights and sounds of The Big Apple. Sure enough, we captured things on tape that would just not have been the same with a camera, such as my daughter looking at the Statue of Liberty for about three minutes. She just kept looking up at the monument and would not divert her gaze, because she was so impressed. It was the cutest thing ever.

The next year, we went down to New Orleans, and sure enough, we got a number of memorable moments on the digital video camera that we still watch. My son rode on a carriage ride and asked to get off to stand next to a man dressed up like Uncle Sam, who was just standing in one spot, not moving, looking like he was frozen in time. It does not sound very remarkable, but if you were there, you would have appreciated it. I also got to film both of my children trying crawfish for the first time. They both were hesitant at first, but gave it a shot and really ended up liking it.

We ended up going to a family reunion the next year in Maryland. We knew that we had to take the digital video camera on that trip because there would be so many opportunities to film. I got to watch my daughter swim around with little floats at the beach. I filmed my son jumping off a diving platform into the Chesapeake Bay, much to my wife's horror, and I got to film my wife dance with her father. It still brings a tear to her eye when she watches it.

The digital video camera has proven to be a must on any family vacation and something that I really wish I had bought a long time ago. It brings the memories that you have of a place to life and provides a visual account of the time you spent at each destination. I will always have one with me whenever I travel from now on, and guard the videos with my life!

The Latest Sony Digital Camera thinks it's an SLR

We have been living with and expecting a lot out of our digital cameras for more than two decades now. And honestly, it's only over the past year that we've finally begun to get what we've always really wanted -- mind blowing pictures of the kind you would associate with a big black heavy SLR, in a package that would slip into your shirt pocket without too much trouble. The latest Sony digital camera certainly takes a bold step in this direction. But to do this, it uses technology that doesn't even seem to have a complex sounding consumer buzzword attached to it.

It's a curious kind of camera, actually, this latest Sony digital camera is. The NEX-C3, tries to look pretty with a beautiful tiny magenta body. But to give you SLR-quality pictures, they did need to endow it with a super great lens. The massive lens attaches to the petite camera body and looks kind of out of place there. But I try to make as pretty and as consumer-ey as possible, giving it a beautiful polished silver look. But the real news has to do with what the camera does.

Certainly, the NEX-C3 takes spectacular pictures. It is able to do that because of that massive lens, of course; but the massive sensor that's a transplant from a high-end SLR has a lot to do with it too. If you like taking pictures in low light, you'll be delighted with what having a large lens and sensor can do for you. And it can do this taking five pictures a second.

Certainly, you'll find a few reproachful things to say about how this latest Sony digital camera is capable of only 720p high definition. For most purposes though, that's a rarity; and not having the extra burden of full high definition to carry around makes the camera super responsive. It's a camera that's completely capable of behaving like a regular camcorder, allowing you to zoom any which way you wish right in the middle of shooting video. You can even make changes to things like the camera's exposure setting in the middle of shooting video.

If you're trying to really, really pretend you have an SLR with this $600 beauty, you'll get along fine for the most part; you may notice though that having only four lenses to choose from is a bit of a problem. Of course, the line of cameras that this model comes from has a particularly hard time ways to user-friendly. But if you could overlook these, you have a winner on your hands here.

Three Little Useful Digital Photography Tips

Have you noticed that photographers obsess over the light around each scene? Most naturally shot pictures don't have uniform light distribution. Usually, there is some degree of wrap involved - that's the technical term photographers use for the way the light hits a subject you are interested in on one side and then falls off gradually towards the other side. Shoot someone in direct sunlight, and the wrap is going to be pretty high. On the one side of their face, the sunlight is going to be direct and full on; the other side of their face is going to be in the shade. That would be the greatest amount of wrap possible. As you can see, wrap, for the most part, isn't a completely desirable phenomenon. You want as much uniform lighting is possible. But of course, most people understand this intuitively. What they want are some digital photography tips on what to do when there is too much wrap.

What do you do when one side of the face is visible and the other is in the dark? Of course, you could hold up a reflector. But if you aren't one of those photographers who have an entourage to do this kind of thing for you, merely having someone stand just outside of your frame wearing a white shirt could do. Someone holding a white sheet could do as a reflector as well.

One of the most important digital photography tips you can have has to do with understanding how pictures taken by digital camera translate between the screen and print. If you have never noticed this before, digital photos look a lot better on a physical print that they do on a computer screen. Part of the reason this is so is that computer screens happen to be a lot bigger than photo prints, and they are lit up. This makes all kinds of digital noise and grain quite apparent on a computer screen that never would be apparent on a print. For this reason, you need to cut yourself a little slack when you try to compare your photos with those in print. Things work out differently in print.

Okay, here's the mother of all digital photography tips if you are looking to photograph your wife or girlfriend to really flatter them. Not that they have any wrinkles, but overexposing your shot by tiny bit (assuming your camera has the manual controls it needs that will allow you to do this) hides wrinkles and brightens a picture up enormously. You could always darken up the places that you wanted on Photoshop. Elsewhere, overexposure really flatters the subject of your picture.

The End of the Road for Compact Digital Cameras?

As impossible to believe as it would appear, compact digital cameras of the point-and-shoot variety are on the wane. They no longer head the sales figures for the makers of cameras. That distinction belongs to SLR cameras and high-end cameras with mega zooms. Why is this? Are Americans so well-off now that they can no longer  bother with little point-and-shoot compact digital cameras? Perhaps there is a different way to look at this.

One of every two people in America has a smart phone. A very large proportion of those happens to be either a Blackberry or an iPhone. The iPhone of course comes with a five megapixel still camera and a 30 FPS 720p HD video camera. Some Blackberries come with eight megapixel cameras. These are devices that people have with them in their pockets at all times. Suddenly, even really slim compact digital cameras seem entirely too bulky and just of no real purpose. For most kinds of photography and video shooting, the camera on a  smart phone can be completely adequate. Not to mention, when you have your pictures and videos on a device like a smart phone that's already connected to the Internet, it becomes far easier to just put them on Facebook or share them with your friends in other ways. With a regular camera, you have to first upload your photos to the computer before you're able to share them with anyone. In a world where people seem to live on their social networks more than they do in the real world, makers of compact digital cameras had better build Internet connectivity into their cameras or get left behind.

Only a few years ago, it seemed like compact digital cameras had it made. People loved how convenient they were with no film to mess with. People pitied anyone with a film camera and marvelled at how with-it they were to have gone digital. And now, the digital camera is already being over the hill in many ways. Pretty soon, the only kind they will ever make will be built into another device (one that's already swallowed an iPod and a DVD player and a TV, by the way). People no longer need single-use purpose-built devices anymore unless they want to go for very high quality. The all-in-one smart phone will be all we have in the future - even if four out of five homes in America at this point owns a point-and-shoot.

Certainly, a dedicated point-and-shoot camera has a few advantages over a smart phone camera. It has a better lens, a better sensor, it has image stabilization, better zoom. But then, a smart phone has apps to help you edit photos right there. You can have five dozen photo apps on your iPhone and it's like having as many different cameras for the kind of functionality they lend your iPhone camera.

What is it that people do with their point-and-shoot cameras? They put  those pictures on Facebook. There are 50 billion pictures on Facebook already. It is the same story on Flickr. They find on these websites that of all the people who submit photos there, not one of the top ten devices used is a real camera. Case closed.