101 QUICK AND EASY SECRETS FOR USING YOUR DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHS- P24 pdf

Choosing Photos That Tell a Story for Your Blog When you look at the picture of the Elvis impersonator in Figure 6.6, an immediate story comes to your mind. It’s the story of an iconic musician who died tragically and has been brought back to life time and time again through the impersonators who mimic his every move. My point here is that if you catch an image of something like an Elvis impersonator, you have myriad story opportunities to tell in a blog post. Most people know the Elvis story, and most don’t mind reading about it again, especially if you tell little tidbits about the man from things you know or have read on the Internet. For example, just by typing “Elvis facts” into Google, I found out that Elvis was a black belt in karate, made 31 movies, and won three Grammys for his gospel recordings. You can stretch the Elvis story like a Gumby doll, adding your own feelings about the musician, panning him, worshipping him, and/or parodying him. The sky’s the limit with this guy. You can even critique the impersonator you have photographed. Of course, Elvis is just one example. There are other stories that can be caught in a shot or two. When you associate a photo with a story, you’re within the realm of photojournalism. You can find and save photos to tell stories by attending concerts, public meetings, demonstrations, community events, fairs, carnivals, fiestas, holiday celebrations, marathons, and/or baseball and football games. When you’re at these events, look for the photo ops that will capture people’s eyes and that will help describe a story about the event. Another way you can tell a story is to have your camera with you at all times and catch news as it happens. For example, if you see something on fire, photo- graph it. Once you collect these photographs, make a folder called BlogPostPhotos. Put the photos that tell stories in this folder for blog posts you can use in the future. That way, when you come up short on an idea for your blog, you can look through your BlogPostPhotos folder and use a photo from there to write your post. Photo Blog Heaven ■ 101 Figure 6.6 Everyone loves Elvis. Discussing Camera Settings for Your Photos on Your Blog Experiment with different camera settings and tell the world about it. There aren’t very many photographers who don’t take an interest in what settings were used to shoot a compelling shot. Today, finding out what settings you used for each shot has never been easier—not only with dSLR cameras, but with point-and-shoot models, too. Figures 6.7 through 6.10 show four different pictures under a variety of circumstances, each requiring skill and knowledge of camera settings. In a blog post, you can write about any picture, focusing on the settings and making a caption for the photo you are writing about that states the camera settings used to take the picture. You can write about what mode you like to shoot in. (I prefer aperture priority mode.) You can also bring up what ISO speeds are best for different kinds of light. For more about aperture, ISO speeds, and other camera settings, see the “Camera Settings in a Snap” sidebar. 102 ■ Photo Blog Heaven Figure 6.7 0.4 sec at f/2.8; ISO 100; focal length 36mm. Figure 6.8 1/400 sec at f/11; ISO 400; focal length 110mm. Photo Blog Heaven ■ 103 Figure 6.9 1/6 sec at f/4.5; ISO 200; focal length 60mm. CAMERA SETTINGS IN A SNAP Here’s the skinny about the camera settings you need to know about in order to understand what your camera has done to take a picture. ❈ Shutter speed. Fast shutter speeds (1/1000 second) freeze action. Slower shutter speeds will blur action (see Figure 6.7). ❈ Aperture. You can control in front of and behind your subject by setting the aperture (the diameter of the lens opening). If you set the aperture wide (f/2.8–f/4), you’ll get a soft background behind your subject. If you set it narrow (f/11–f/22), the entire frame will be sharp, as shown in Figure 6.8. ❈ ISO speed. This setting is a measure of how sensitive your sensor is to light. Most of the time, you set your camera to a high ISO speed (ISO 1000 and above, making the sensor very sensitive to light) when you’re shooting at night without a tripod. Figure 6.10 shows a shot taken when the camera was set to a high ISO speed. Figure 6.10 1/13 sec at f/4.5; ISO 1600; focal length 32mm. Posting Retro Family Photos on Your Blog Rolling back the clock is easy when you have a blog. You can post photos and write about any time period you want. Images of the 20th century almost always please. There’s one blog—Old Picture of the Day at old-photos.blogspot.com—where all they post are old photos. If you have hundreds of old photos, you don’t want to pick just any photo or even a photo that’s a family portrait (unless it was taken near the turn of the last century—a time when the people would be posing outside in their Sunday best). You want to go for retro. Study your photos for: ❈ Style. When sorting through your photo collection, look for people in swimsuits by the pool (I’ve seen random pictures of these sell for big bucks), people posing in stylized clothing (for the 1960s, bell-bottom slacks and wide headbands, for example), and/or people engaged in an activity (such as talking on a Princess phone). For street scenes, look for what are now vintage autos in traffic and neon signs, as well as flamboyant architecture (think Tomorrowland). ❈ Film type. Some of the best shots you’ll find in your photo collection are sepia-toned and black-and-white photos. Don’t forget the cardboard ones from the turn of the last century. You’ll also have fun posting the exaggerated colors of Kodak’s Kodachrome prints. The pictures that popped out of Polaroid Instamatic cameras are fun to post, too! Of course, when you post an old photo (family or otherwise), you’re going to want to write about when and where it was shot. In Figure 6.11, a picture of my mother, I know from my family’s history that the photo was taken in Miami Beach. (Perhaps the diving board is a giveaway.) My guess of the time period can be calculated by approx- imating how old she was in that shot (say, 20 to 30) and adding that to her birth year, which was 1926. That would make it a picture taken between 1946 and 1956. 104 ■ Photo Blog Heaven Figure 6.11 Images from the middle of the last century are great for blog posts. Posting Your Photos While You Are on a Trip When you commit to making a blog, it’s best to make it an everyday thing. The more you post, the more hits you’ll get. When it’s time for vacation or travel, that’s not the time to stop posting on your blog. As a matter of fact, it’s one of the best times to post, because you can get new and different pictures to illustrate what it’s like to be where you’re at (see Figure 6.12). I’ve blogged from everywhere. I’ve blogged from the big cites of Paris, Shanghai, Quito, and New York to the small towns in the far reaches of Montana and New Mexico. When I blog, I carry good equipment—my laptop, Canon 5D camera, and connections. You can get access to the Internet via your laptop almost anywhere in the world. From there, you can access Blogger and post your pictures just as you would at home. It doesn’t have to be this cumbersome, though. You can moblog (mobile blog), which is described in the next section. Photo Blog Heaven ■ 105 SCANNERS: WHAT TYPE SHOULD I USE? Since you are going to resize your photo for the Internet, you don’t need a high-end scanner. You can get a good scanner, such as the Canon CanoScan 8800F (often rated #1 for scanners at amazon.com), for about $200.The nice thing about scanners is that you can set them to scan at 72 dpi, the optimal resolution for photos uploaded to the Internet. (If you plan to edit your photos, though, don’t scan at 72 dpi, but at 300 dpi.Then fix the photos, then resize in Photoshop/Elements at 72 dpi.To save, navigate to File > Save for Web and Devices.) Most scanners will scan negatives and positives (slides), too.While today’s scanner does a great job of scanning, the differences in price are determined by how fast the scanner is. Sometimes the cheap scanners are very slow. If you want to archive your prints and negatives on your computer, you should scan at a higher resolution (300 dpi), so in case you do want to print them, you can. After you scan at a high resolution, you can resize in an image processing program to upload to the Internet. (See the “Resizing Your Photos for Different Uses” section in Chapter 1.) . want to go for retro. Study your photos for: ❈ Style. When sorting through your photo collection, look for people in swimsuits by the pool (I’ve seen random pictures of these sell for big bucks),. clothing (for the 1960s, bell-bottom slacks and wide headbands, for example), and/ or people engaged in an activity (such as talking on a Princess phone). For street scenes, look for what are. when you come up short on an idea for your blog, you can look through your BlogPostPhotos folder and use a photo from there to write your post. Photo Blog Heaven ■ 101 Figure 6.6 Everyone loves