Thursday, January 29, 2009

Don't Forget To Make Prints

I know we are all suffering from the current recession but don't do things that you will regret later. Make sure that you are continually make prints of your images to have a hard copy of the important things in life. After we get through these tough times and things get back to normal, you don't want to have a span of time where you have no pictures.

You can cut costs by being a little bit more selective in what prints you choose to make but don't give up. Prints are relatively inexpensive and represent memories that can last a lifetime. When you look at a print it can take you right back to that special occasion and make you feel like you are there again. Make prints and relive the fun.

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Shooting Hockey

Shooting hockey can be very difficult. Because of the brightness of the ice and boards, your pictures have a tendancy to be dark and the action blurred. Hopefully this will help you get better photos of your kids.

Set ISO to 800

Set your camera to TV or shutter priority depending on brand.

Set the shutter speed to 250

Take a meter reading of just the ice, and note what F-Stop the camera reads.

Set you camera to MANUAL, and set the shutter speed at 250, and the F-Stop to what the camera told you when reading the ice. ( If you are shooting little kids that don't skate fast, you can set shutter speed to 125)

Turn the F-Stop down(open wider) 2 F-Stops. Example, if F-Stop reads 11, open up to 5.6. Most zoom lenses will only open to a maximum of 5.6 when fully zoomed, so you must be aware that you CANNOT open (set) any wider than 5.6

If when you meter the ice, the camera does not read an F-Stop above 8, set your ISO to 1600 instead of 800. This will make it harder to do big enlargements, but will do a pretty good 5x7.

ALL OF THIS DEPENDS ON WHICH ARENA YOU SHOOT IN, AS SOME ARE DARKER THAN OTHERS. DARKER ARENAS NEED ISO1600.

You are trying to photograph one of the most difficult things, so it WILL be a learning experience. BE PATIENT.

If you have any questions, stop in at First Photo.

Monday, January 12, 2009

Ideas For Discussion

We would love to receive some ideas for topics that you would like us to talk about. We have created this blog to help people better understand Digital Photography and to put some fun back into shooting. Please let us know what you want to do with this site.

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Save It Then Back It Up

If you are like many of us in the photographic world you have made the leap into "Digital Photography". You have your camera and you are learning the basics of shooting and dealing with digital images. We are finding that there is one common issue with all of our customers. How do you organize and store your files?

We recommend that you keep it simple. Most of the digital cameras come with software that lets you move the images from your camera to your computer. There is usually also a program that will let you organize these images into groups and sub-groups. Adobe makes a good image editing program called "Photoshop". The full blown version is expensive and has many features that the average person would never use but the "Baby Brother" version called "Photoshop Elements" sells for under $100 and has great editing capabilities and a very good structure for organizing your images.

Once you have things organized the thing we find that most people fail to do is back-up their images. If you are just keeping the pictures on your camera memory card or if you just load them into your computer, you are running the risk of loosing these files if the card or computer hard drive fails.

We have all heard horror stories of hard drives crashing. If the drive in your computer stops working you will loose all of the images you have stored there. Devise a back-up strategy to make sure that you have your pictures stored in more than one place. You might want to put a second hard drive into your computer and copy all the files from one hard drive to the other so that you have a second copy on the other hard drive. Or you may want to use an external hard drive that would let you back-up the images but move the drive from PC to PC. Or maybe it is easier for you to just make a copy of all of the files on a number of CD's or DVD's. A data CD usually store about 700 megs of information and a data DVD stores about 4.7 gigs.

The point is to make sure that you have at least two copies of every digital image that you want to save. Taking a little bit of time now to figure out a storage and back-up plan will pay off big dividends if your system ever crashes and you loose your primary source of storage.

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Introducing Us

Hello - We decided to start this blog so that we could share our love of photography with our fellow photographers, customers and friends. We hope people will find the things we write about to be useful in their pursuit of creating better images. We do not claim to know all there is to know about photography but we have learned a lot over our years in the photo business. We feel that no mater what your level of photography, we can still all learn from each other.


We will try to post useful articles and information as least once a week and we welcome your suggestions for topics. Let's learn from each other and share the beauty and enjoyment of photography.