Photography Tips and Tricks

Taking pictures outside can be fun. It can also be a hassle if you aren’t prepared. Here are ten things to make sure you have with you before taking photos in the great outdoors.

1. Combating Rain

You never know when you may get caught in rain when working al fresco. Make sure to keep a plastic baggy handy to use as a raincoat for your camera. Not only will your camera stay dry, but you can also keep taking pictures through the clear plastic.

2. Fighting Shadows

Take a piece of white cardboard with you. You can use it as a makeshift reflector when trying to rid of shadows on small objects. This is very handy when you are taking macro pictures. Simply take the cardboard and angle it so that the natural sunlight is bouncing off of the cardboard and onto your subject.

3. Blocking Sunlight

The piece of white cardboard can also be used as a shade to rid yourself of glare. Tilt the cardboard between your lens and the light.

4. Tripod

Always carry along a tripod when doing outdoor photography. You will need it to take shots in low light to avoid camera shake. You can buy tripods that fold down to a very manageable size that will fit in most backpacks.

5. Cooling Down

If you are using a film camera, you will want to be careful on warm days. Heat can ruin film. To keep your film perfect, even on the hottest days, pack your camera bag with an ice pack. Choose an ice pack that can be frozen a refrigerator freezer to use for your ice pack. Regular ice will melt and create water, which can damage your equipment. Put the ice pack in a waterproof baggie and tuck it into one of the pockets of your camera bag.

6. Hang On

Your camera’s strap isn’t just for draping over your shoulder. It also acts as a security measure. Make sure that your camera’s strap is around your neck when you are photographing around water. If you drop your camera, the strap will save it from a watery grave.

Sometimes you just want to do something special with a photo. Combining Photoshop skills and digital photography skills can produce a really nice piece of art that you can share with family and friends. Here is how to create your own amazing piece of art.

Photo Rights

Because of copyright issues, never use other people’s photos for your art. It violates the photo owner’s copyright. Plus, you would also be using something that you didn’t create. Your art wouldn’t be totally yours if you used someone else’s work, and you wouldn’t have bragging rights. You want to be able to brag that the art’s 100% yours, right?

Getting Started

Let’s get started creating your photo collage with Photoshop.

First, open a new workspace. Make the workspace the dimensions of the size of the artwork you want to create.

Next, pick a picture. For our example collage, I picked a picture of my oldest daughter. It isn’t a very good photo, but it has possibilities. To pick your picture, imagine what it might look like if you put it in a different setting and combined it with other pictures and objects.

After choosing your photo, you want to get rid of extras. As you can see here, I faded the edges of the cropped image. The lasso tool can be a big help in isolating certain things in a photo that you would like to work with.

Then, I made the photo somewhat opaque with my photo editor. This made to work better with the other objects and the overall look.

Adding Detail

Here, you see that I basically laid in some colors around the photo. Use your imagination! Add colors, combine photos, or change the colors of the photo. As you can see here, I started painting over the picture. Then, I started adding details to the painting around it. I added deep shadows to the chin area, added more color and shadow to the hair, etc. Each step is a different layer, that way if I don’t like something I can go back and change it or delete it.

This step looks very different from the original photo. There’s a lot more detail to the background and the reflection in the water was added since the last step. I added the reflection by using the cloning tool and a very wide brush.

This is my finished collage. By now the photo should look less like a photo stuck on a canvas and more like piece of art.

Here is another example of a photo collage that was done by my good friend Gary Edgemon.

So, go sort through your photos and turn them into something you can be proud of!