101 QUICK AND EASY SECRETS FOR USING YOUR DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHS- P14 potx

❈ Perfect Picture School of Photography. Picture Perfect offers four-, six-, and eight-week classes with such course names as High Energy Fashion Photography, Documentary Photography, and All about Color. They also offer four- and six-week digital darkroom classes that use such programs as Photoshop and Elements, as well as teach how to create HDR (High Dynamic Range) photos. Many of these classes have the instructors critique the photos you take or edit. For more about photo critiquing, see the sidebar below. Sharing Your Photos with Family and Friends ■ 51 Figure 3.4 A BetterPhoto gallery. CRITIQUING A PHOTOGRAPH If you’ve ever had someone tell you something you could do better in a photograph and you didn’t exactly like it, take heart.Welcome to the wonderful world of photo critiquing. If you’re going to take an online photography class, you’ll get a slew of your photos critiqued by profes- sionals. Sound intimidating? It’s not, really. Having your photos critiqued can be really helpful. 52 ■ Sharing Your Photos with Family and Friends There are four things you can do with a photo after it has been critiqued. If some minor corrections are warranted, you can make the changes you need in Photoshop. If the photo is just bad both compositionally and technically, you can toss it. But I know that can be really hard if you like the subject matter. For example, I have a photograph of women in the Caribbean walking with bags on top of their heads with no hands holding them up. It’s a lousy photo— too soft and with too many harsh shadows and subjects that were just too far away from the lens to come out well. I haven’t tossed that photo.What I did was crop it tightly, shrink it down, and put it on my blog on the Internet.The last thing you can do with a photo after it has been critiqued and evaluated poorly is to go out and reshoot. While these are all possibilities for what you can do with critiqued photos, the most important part of being critiqued is to learn for the next time. Consider critiquing the photo in Figure 3.5.You can evaluate it by its composition—meaning whether the photo invokes strong feelings—its technicalities, and, finally, things you like and don’t like about the photo. Figure 3.5 What’s wrong with this photo? Becoming a Member of the CityDailyPhoto.com Blog Group If you’re one to have an outing with your camera on a daily basis, then City Daily Photo could be the place for you. CityDailyPhoto.com is a place to register a blog that features a photo a day from any city around the world. There are just a couple of rules you have to abide by to register. ❈ You can only post one photo a day. ❈ The blog can be about only one city. ❈ The title of your blog has to include the city’s name. ❈ All photo captions need to include English text. There’s a great benefit to signing up with the CityDailyPhoto.com website—your blog will instantly receive many more hits. (For blogs and hits, see Chapter 6, “Photo Blog Heaven.”) Every day you post a picture, it’s put up on the front page of the CityDailyPhoto.com website with a link to your blog. If you have an eye-catching picture, many people who are visiting the CityDailyPhoto.com website will click on the link to your blog. It didn’t take me long to get more than 200 hits a day when I put up Palm Springs Daily Photo (see Figure 3.6). Since you make a commitment to providing one photo a day from your city, you’ll become an active photographer. You’ll get in the habit of bringing your camera with you wherever you go and experimenting with different shooting techniques on a daily basis. You’ll also have to get into the habit of downloading the photo onto your computer and then posting to your blog. Sharing Your Photos with Family and Friends ■ 53 Okay, I’ll go ahead and critique it. Some might think that the muddy water takes away from the photo. It can be cleaned up by cropping out some of it. If you did that, you’d lose the grass, which adds to the image both by adding a contrasting color to the frame and in the interaction between the turtle and the blade of grass.That blade of grass looks as if it’s in danger of being bitten, which is good thing.You wonder if the turtle will end up eating it.Technically, the photo needs some work.There are a few blown highlights (the sunspots on the water); some would say they like it, and others not. I like that the eyes of the animal are sharp. If you want one thing sharp in your subjects, it is best if it’s the eyes. Finally, I don’t like, again, the dirty look to the photo. I might want to clean it up a little in Photoshop by changing the color tones a bit. Making a Family Tree Website with Photos TribalPages.com lets you build an incredible family tree website for free. All you do is sign up (no email confirmation required) and get started building your website right away. The sites are quite nice, too, with drop-down menu bars and a pleasant color scheme. In fact, the site’s so good that I had to ask myself whether it will be around in the not-too-distant future. The answer to my question (an indirect answer) is on their first page. The site has more than 300,000 members, some of whom pay for premium status (which runs from $2 to $4/month), which I believe is a good omen for their future. When you sign up for TribalPages.com, the site assigns you a URL on the order of yourname.tribalpages.com. My URL is bamberg.tribalpages.com. 54 ■ Sharing Your Photos with Family and Friends Figure 3.6 An example of a Daily Photo blog. To make the website (see Figure 3.7 for an example) or add to it, you log in and click Edit. In the next window, click on List of Names in the My Website category. From there, input your name first. After you’re finished, you’ll see the beginning of your family tree, with your name in the middle. To add photos, click on the camera next to your name and then click on Upload Photos. Click on Browse in the next window, navigate to the photo you want posted on the website, and then click on Upload. In the next window, click Done. When you’ve finished inputting a few names and images and you go to the URL of your web- page, you’ll be pleasantly surprised to find the images in a slideshow on your site’s homepage. Sharing Your Photos with Family and Friends ■ 55 Figure 3.7 You can make your own family tree website at TribalPages.com. NOTE When you click on the name of person, he or she will appear first on the family tree. . habit of downloading the photo onto your computer and then posting to your blog. Sharing Your Photos with Family and Friends ■ 53 Okay, I’ll go ahead and critique it. Some might think that the muddy. there, input your name first. After you’re finished, you’ll see the beginning of your family tree, with your name in the middle. To add photos, click on the camera next to your name and then click. it down, and put it on my blog on the Internet.The last thing you can do with a photo after it has been critiqued and evaluated poorly is to go out and reshoot. While these are all possibilities for