Photography

I last updated this page on 02/06/2010 10:31:53 AM

or how to take pictures for those of us who are not professional photographers

As you can see by my site, I have been taking pictures for some time.  I have worn out a number of film cameras and am on my fifth digital camera.  The current model is the Sony MVC CD500 which stores pictures on a mini-CD.  It has a best resolution of 5.1 megapixels, or enough resolution to see the roots of individual hairs.  My backup is a Sony Super Steady Shot DSC-H2 that stores on a small SD chip.  I am still working with this camera to learn how to take the best shots.  It has way too many options as far as types of pictures.  More time...

My advice is simply that, once again only my advice.  Take your time and smile.  Taking a picture without smiling is usually worthless, unless it is for your own photo library as a comparison shot.

Taking pictures is tough enough but for people like me it is very hard to find good lighting and a willing assistant who is able to drop everything at a moment's notice and take pictures of me over and over again.  My willing  assistant happens to be the self-timer built into my camera, or a wired hand controlled release button on the end of a 5 foot cord.

  It may be a step-on bulb-type shutter release or any number of other release mechanisms, but the control is always there.  My digital movie camera has a hand-held remote, very much like my TV remote.  I can start and stop, focus and zoom in or out by the push of a button.  My still camera is not as sophisticated and it relies solely on a built-in self timer that I activate for each shot.  It sounds a count-down series of beeps so that I don't have to hold a smile for the full ten seconds.  It also alerts me when I have no made it to the location I wanted to get to and posed in time.

Many of the pictures that you may take with either a digital or film camera will need to be edited, and no I don't mean to increase your boob size or to erase the smile lines.  I mean to clean up the background or take out the overhang over the head or the lawn sprinkler going in the background.  Many times the photo imaging software will also have red-eye reduction and any number of other cool features that can help out the quality of your pictures.

A very small percentage of my photos end up on my web site, there are simply too many and many of them do not look any different than the previous one.  I take many pictures that simply end up in my storage file (all 200 gig of them).  Pictures can always be deleted or used as reminders of ways not to look.

Try to take a few pictures in natural light.  They can be very revealing of your real look.  Natural light obviously means that you actually look that way when you are out in the public. If you are in a mall it might be all fluorescent  light so you might have to adjust for that.