Tuesday, January 12, 2010

New Contest Win!






Sweeeeeeet! Just found out my image of the baby leopard "Warm" just won Decembers "photo of the day contest". Cool, I won a nice camera. All those contests I enter occasionally pay off. This win was a almost as good as the Dive Trip in the Bahamas that I won with Naui's "Just Dive" photo contest back in 2009. And can you believe I do all this online stuff "DIAL-UP"???? Yes, I said I'm on dial up. No cable, no satellite service
here. Yep, no clear southern exposure. Its a bummer but It's better then nothing. That's the price you pay for living in your own recreational Forrest here in the Santa Cruz Mountains. So, I'm stoked, its nice to get something from all those long hours waiting, waiting, waiting................Now if I could just pay my bills with it......
So my point here is if you don't enter, you can't win. Just be sure to read the FINE PRINT in the rules of any photo contest. They are tricky so you don't want to lose your rights to any
image.
If its good enough to win a contest, then it must be pretty darn good and you may want to sell it in the future. Never give your rights away!

Saturday, January 9, 2010

The 3 C's


Just like a Diamond, photography is composed of the 3 C's. Color, Clarity and Composition. There really is no set rules for taking great photos except for these 3 main components. Color is a big one for me, I like images that have rich, deep, vibrant colors that invoke emotion. Although too much color or saturation can make an image go to the extreme and that may be too much for some. It is really your decision in the end. This is always a tough one to decide for it is a fine line you walk in photoshop deciding just how much is too much.

Next to color is clarity. I prefer my images to be tack sharp, clear and full of rich texture and detail. I use a tripod and cable release whenever possible (long exposures is a must) and the cable release really helps avoid camera shake especially when your shivering from the cold. If the image is slightly blurry you may be able to fix it but usually its a loser. I will typically shoot over 500 images each session and hopefully get a handful that are usable. Make sure if you are going to be shooting these many images that you have a large external hardrive to backup all your images because you may use them at some point in time.

Composition, if you are shooting landscapes you have usually have lots of time to compose an image that is well balanced. Something on the right side and something on the left to offset the other. If you are shooting sunsets, then you still have time but it is limited to the peak time of optimum color lasting maybe 2-3 minutes. That's when the sun has gone below the cloud line and the light casts great color beyond the horizon line and all over the sky. This is my favorite time. Hopefully, I am in the right place but then you get home and find some other image has better composition and you are in the wrong position. That bums me out, but I can usually make something of it.

Oh, and a 4th C that I find to be extremely useful is Crop. Cropping an image can restore all balance to an image that may not be composed as well as you might have thought. When you are shooting as fast and furious as I may be, sometimes the image may be too heavy on one side so cropping may be necessary. I will photograph images from all angles, moving around frequently to see new angles that are different. They may not be what I think are the best at the time but sometimes they turn out to be the best ones with a little cropping to balance them out.

All in all, taking great photos is all up to you. These are just my opinions, I hope that they help you in achieving the the type of images that you desire. Great photos come with a little patience and in my case, what I refer to as "PhotoKarma".