2010 Senior Portraits San Antonio

You have been snapping digital pictures for years now. Your hard-drive is overflowing with gigabytes of images, pictures of pets, vacations, relatives, birthday parties, and embarrassing moments. Perhaps you should consider rummaging around all those pixels of color and preparing some unique and creative gifts for those around you.

You can always use the standard mug, tee shirt or mouse pad as a gift, but why not consider some of these more unusual digital photo gift ideas.

Cards and gift tags

Don’t send just the standard holiday greeting card. You can add a special photo and message. Christmas, Hanukkah and Valentine’s Day are not the only time to send greeting cards. How about Easter, Thanksgiving and Independence Day? Or, a Just-thinking-of you card. Personalized gift tags and bookmarks make a delightful gift. For a child, consider preparing a simple picture book that is personalized with the childs picture and contains pictures of his favorite things or people.

Household items

An apron for your favorite chef is a great gift; digital photos can be placed on dishes, glasses, coasters and trays. Prepare a private label for home-baked, canned or preserved foods in a decorative container. A 12 or 13-month photo calendar with favorite pictures will be appreciated for the entire year.

Games

Have you considered a private version of “Old Maid”? Picture cards can be prepared in many categories i.e. “My favorite people” “Where I spent my summer vacation?” etc. The nice thing about card games is being able to prepare up to four game sets at the same time since digital prints often are ordered online with four copies. Another card game tests memory. The object of the game is to recall placement of and match pairs of facedown shuffled cards.

Posters and magazine covers

Make stars of your recipients by putting their picture on a movie poster. Software lets you add screen credits, co-stars, and other text to create realism. Similarly, you can make a magazine cover featuring the recipient and appropriate “cover stories”. This could double as a book or magazine cover.

Photo Magnets

Photo magnets are great way for Grandma to display little Johnny’s picture on the refrigerator, and to post important information as well.

You can prepare a collage of favorite photos. Sometimes a grouping of these photos framed and displayed will have more impact than a single picture, and easier to hang one picture than a dozen. You can prepare a visual collage with a photo movie and even add music and sound effects.

Gag gifts

Ever considered giving a friend with political ambitions his very own campaign sign? Or how about helping a friend appears in a favorite product commercial?

Other gifts

Another gift related to digital photos might be to give a prepaid digital print plan. Perhaps a personalized photo album cover would be just the thing. A gift for that very special person is a simple digital camera of their very own, so you can receive photos from them as well. You could present another digital photography aficionado with software to edit, sort or display his online images.

Have you ever imagined to capture all those treasured moments of your wedding ceremony in your own camera, I mean digital camera? Stop imagining, for digital cameras have made way to your wedding party to turn your world around. The quality of photos by digital cameras simply speaks for themselves. And beyond that, with digital wedding photography, couples can save their pockets by doing away with the wedding studio for the wedding proofs.

There was a time when the brides and grooms could do nothing but wait for weeks or even months following the wedding for the films to be developed. But things have changed now as digital wedding photography can bring pictures the very same day without much trouble.

The best part about digital wedding photography is that even amateurs can click photographs without having to compromise on the quality of photos. That reminds of the quality of digital pictures. The pictures are simply as good as it gets. You shouldn’t be surprised, as many professional photographers have taken to digital operations too.

Interestingly, you will come across three types of wedding photography namely photojournalistic wedding photography, traditional wedding photography, and artistic wedding photography. Photojournalistic wedding photography or better known as candid wedding photography is all about documentary style wedding photos. Traditional wedding photography is poised to take only formal photos whereas artistic wedding photographers tend to add a bit of their artistry in their photo shoot.

If you are to venture into digital wedding photography then you must follow some of these winning tips. Always make sure that you hold the background into consideration before taking your photos. It is the most commonly made mistake you definitely want to avoid. What amateur photographers tend to do at times is focus on the subject leaving behind the negative space and the surroundings. The best you can do is finding a place where subjects are free from clutter and obstructive backgrounds.

Mind you, the glares from spectacles can bring about an intense spot in your photo hence ruin it. All you need is a bit of adjustment without having anyone remove his or her glasses.

You can snap some fabulous photos at the reception. This is where the cutting of the cake, the throwing of the wedding bouquet and many other real life moments come into picture. Make sure that all the colorful wedding accents fit into your photos. You should know that digital cameras fabricate colorful photos, so why not chance at the colorful d?cor of the wedding party. Now, if all of this is not enough then there are scores of good books out there that can teach you to film weddings as it should be.

Digital wedding photography with its manifold advantages is all that you need to take you over the edge on your wedding extravaganza.

Have you ever noticed that in digital photography there always seems to be photos of fork lightening that some clever photography enthusiast has mastered? The fact is that digital photography is a challenge and as soon as we develop the interest in digital photography we are challenging ourselves from the start. And a real challenge in digital photography is fast moving subjects. And when it comes to either traditional or digital photography catching electrifying fork lightening just is too much of a enticement to see if we can ?win? the challenge.

So how do we apply our digital photography to sharp, brilliant streaks of colour over our images?

Getting great shots of forked lightening is not as difficult as you would think, or have been led to believe.

As a digital photography teacher I can honestly say that the first thing people do it buy way to much equipment for this exercise. You really just need a few simple things. A camera and a tripod are the main things.

The main challenge in digital photography when taking lightening shots is where to position yourself. I?ve had many a frustrating time, in the early days of my photography, trying to get the best angle, the best position only to find I had the camera pointed at completely the wrong part of the sky. And some of my digital photography lightening exposures were all wrong. I was thinking it was as hard as trying to predict a horse race with a crystal ball until I worked out the logic of it all and it started to become a lot of fun.

The first thing to keep in mind is to make sure your shutter is open. Lightening is sharp, short and sweet. Its important to get the most out of the long, open shutter speed by leaving it open for a long time. You can do this with confidence on a really black night such as being in the country on a dark night without any city lights or too many clouds around for the light to bounce off. In the country you may have the freedom to leave the shutter open for as long as 60 seconds.

However in the city it?s a bit different. What tends to happen is that due to other light in the atmosphere, light from buildings, streets and cars you can see this scene turns out much brighter on a 60 second shutter speed.

A quick way to get great lightening shots is to find a good place to set up where you know lightening is either happening or is about to happen. Take your tripod, camera and shutter release cable. The great thing about a shutter release cable is that once the lightening has struck there is no need to keep the shutter open and you can simply press it the shutter will close.

Try setting your aperture to about an f 8 or so and leaving the shutter open from anywhere between 10 seconds to 60 seconds. (Setting B). Set your IS0 at 100, set the focus to infinity and wait.

Digital Photography Safety

It?s a good idea, any time in digital photography, not to jeopardize your safety. Digital photography is intensely fun and incredibly educational and creative, but it?s not worth risking your life for. As much as it?s a beautiful spectacle, its much more wise to stay well away from lightening. It?s carrying enough energy to give your house power for two months solid, so be careful!