Photography Tips and Tricks

You may have seen expansive panorama photos of a city’s skyline and wondered, “How did the photographer do that?” Well, it is pretty simple, actually, and you don’t need any special lens to do it. All you need is your digital camera and a photo editing software such as Photoshop or Photo Suite.

What is Stitching?

Stitching is taking multiple images and turning them into one long image that looks like a panorama. Basically, you’re taking the images and digitally stitching them together to make a whole image. Mirror panoramas are two photos of the exact same landscape flipped and stitched together to make one panoramic image.

Take the Pictures

First, you need pictures. Start by choosing your location. The perfect location is an unobstructed view of a landscape.

Stand facing the landscape and rotate your waist to the left so that your digital camera’s viewfinder is capturing the left edge of the landscape. After you take that photo, rotate your waist a little to the right so that your viewfinder still has a little of the scenery you just photographed, but also has new scenery. Keep doing this until you have taken photos of all of the scenery in the landscape.

Make sure that you do this quickly enough that the light does not change or the images won’t match.

Stitch the Photos

When you get home, upload all of your photographs to your computer and open your photo editing software. Create a blank project that is the number of photos you have wider than it is tall. For example, if you have five photos that you want to stitch, then you will need to make your project five time wider than it is tall. So, if you want the panorama to be 4 inches tall, then your width would need to be 20 inches if you have five photos.

Now, you can manually stitch the images together. Add your photos to the project one-at-a-time. Drag one photo so that the edges overlaps with the one before it so that the two photos match up like a jigsaw puzzle. Do this with all of the photos until you have a line of photos that look like one image. You may have to crop the edges of the project so that they are an even line.

There you have it! Now you know how to make your own panoramic images with stitching.

If you want to sell your photos on stock photography sites, you need to know what the sites are looking for. Here are some tips to getting your photography sold with ease.

Fresh Content

Much of the stock photos that sites get are the same old pictures of flowers and rainbows. Content sites are desperate for fresh content that contains the unusual.

The number one need of most content sites is photos of multicultural (non-white and non-black) children. These photos should be of these types of children doing everyday things such as brushing their teeth, playing outside, and going to school in modern settings.

Pictures of seniors, healthcare, and modern technology is also greatly needed. Studies by Photoshelter.com noted that these were one of the greatest needs in stock photography.

Legalities

If you are shooting people, you always need to get a signed model release. Stock photography companies will not take on your photos unless you have a model release. You can read more about model releases here.

File Size

File size is very important to stock sites because they want high quality images that clients can enlarge. Files should be around 11MB up to 125MB uncompressed (common sizes for a 4-megapixel camera) in JPG, JPEG, TIFF, and TIF formats.

Lighting

Good lighting is very important in stock. To get the best light when shooting outside, avoid the harsh light during the hours between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. Indoors, you will need to bounce light to avoid shadows. To learn more about bouncing light see this blog.

Photo Editing

It may be tempting to “fix” your photo by sharpening it, adding contrast, upping the color saturation, etc., but that is a quick way to ruin your photo for stock usage. For example, sharpening is done by the in-house art department of magazines and ad companies because they have different sharpness needs. If the photographer does this before the sale, the image may have the wrong type of sharpness for the company that wants to buy the image. The best stock images are great without having to do anything to them.