ILLUSIONS

If! you take a look at the following picture , let me tell you ... it is not animated. Your eyes are making it move. To test this, stare at one spot for a couple seconds and everything will stop moving. Or look at the black center of each circle and it will stop moving. But move your eyes to the next black center and the previous will move after you take your eyes away from it.... Weird

Is this Possible?

Other Side of Dubai...

As my observations to all comments I received from all of my visitors regarding the photo's I posted they make a reaction stating "WOW" Dubai is really a beautiful place. Now my reaction to this is Yes, Dubai is beautiful... All their buildings, roads and other new infrastructures. In all of this photo you can find in the World Wide Web did you find photo's of residential area where all expatriates live? A place where ordinary employee lives including myself...

To all who thinks that Dubai is a really good place to go... Here are some shots to show the other side of all this tallest building and photo's of people that you always see in the web... Not to exagerate but this is really Dubai as what I always pass by everyday...

Using Compact Camera at Low Light Situation...

A compact Digital Camera Can Take a Good Photo's at Low Light/Night? My Answer is Yes... To proved this See picture below...

I set Up this Compact Camera and put it into tripod then allow my wife to operate it... This photo was taken during the celebration of New Year 2007 here in Dubai...

Camera Used: Nikon CoolPix L4 4mega pixels

But Before you Begin

Read the manual or look through the menus and find out:

• how your can turn the flash off
• if there is a special long exposure setting
• if your camera has a 'night' scene mode
• how you can set the ISO speed of the camera

Using Flash

The flash built into simple compact cameras is designed to take pictures from around 3 foot to around 10 foot from your camera. Anything too close will almost certainly be far too bright in the picture, and anything further away is too dark.

When taking pictures, try to keep all important subject matter roughly the same distance from the camera. If you have some people much closer than others, they will look wrong, as they will be lighter than the others.

If your camera has a manual mode, you should be able to adjust the exposure.

This is often called 'exposure compensation'. If your pictures are too dark try adding a positive amount of compensation, if too bright, reduce the amount set.

Flash Outside

Outside at night, the flash will only light up anything close to the camera. If you can alter the ISO speed, you will find that increasing it gives more detail in the background. In brightly lit city streets, working at ISO 400 can produce results that give good flash exposure for people around 6 ft from the camera and also a reasonably bright background.

You don't want the background to be too bright, or it won't really look like a night picture. Take your picture at different ISO values and see which works best.

Working Without Flash

If your camera works at ISO 800 or greater, you can take pictures in brightly lit city streets or interiors without flash. Find the camera setting that switches the flash off. Make sure you keep the camera still (it helps to hold it against something solid if you can) and squeeze the button gently to avoid a jerk.

In low light, the anti-vibration systems built into some cameras help you to get sharp pictures, though any moving people or objects will still blur. Take pictures at the zoom setting that gives the widest angle of view. If you zoom out to get greater magnification it also magnifies any shaking.

Small Sensors

The small sensors that simple cameras when used at a wide zoom setting almost guarantee that - so long as you can hold the camera still - everything sharp from foreground to background should be sharp. The small sensor and low magnification make for a great 'depth of field' (the range between closest and furthest objects that are acceptably sharp.)

Street Lighting

Most street lighting has too much orange or too much green in it, and it tends to make people look rather ill. Using flash will often produce a healthier looking result.

Long Exposures

Away from the bright lights, you will need to use long exposures to work without flash. If possible, use the camera on a tripod. You can buy small table tripods such as the that fold and fit into a pocket or small bag if you don't want to carry a tripod, and it is often possible to find a wall, car roof or other piece of street furniture on which to stand one. There are also small camera clamps that will fit on lampposts etc.

If you don't have anything to hold the camera still, you can still get sharp images with exposures of several seconds by holding the camera firmly against a solid surface, such as a post or a wall, or in some places even on the ground, looking up. I've often used mine by turning my back on the subject and holding the camera above my head with its back pressed against a wall and of course the lens facing toward the subject.

Some cameras have a special 'long exposure mode' which may reduce noise in long exposures. A 'night' scene mode will probably also be worth trying if your camera has one. The important thing is to find out how to stop the flash firing.

You may need to experiment with the ISO settings and exposure compensation to find the best result. Usually when using a tripod there is no need for a high ISO setting, so work perhaps at ISO 100 or 200. Took some pictures during night needed to set the ISO to its highest level - ISO 400 - and also to set the maximum possible exposure compensation of +2 stops to get long exposures that worked in really low light.

Raw File Essentials?

Digital SLR camera has raw file capabilities why?
For those new in photography hope this will i think this is a little help.

Why use Raw?

Most of digital photographers come to regard the raw file as being the digital equivalent of a negative.

Most cameras operate in 12 bit mode on each sensor, producing a range of 4096 levels of either red, green or blue. If you choose jpeg output (or if your camera gives you no choice) then these values are used to calculate 8 bit per channel pixels, each with only 256 levels of each color. How that calculation is performed depends on the settings for contrast, white balance and other variables that you have made on the camera or the manufacturer has programmed into the firmware.
In general it gives good results, but is only one of an infinite number of ways of handling the image data. Shooting raw enables you to take your own decisions with the help of software for handling these images. The kind of corrections to be in the raw images for the test described above would not be possible with jpegs - you need to get it very nearly spot on camera for good results.
Even with 8 bit images, you can of course continue to process them in Photoshop or comparable software.
However, you are coming from a different starting point, and the result of altering contrast or other parameters will always be to cut down the number of possible levels in the file. If you make too great adjustments, this reduction may even become visible as distinct steps in tone where there should be smooth gradients.


Digital negatives

Most digital photographers come to regard the raw file as being the digital equivalent of a negative. You can alter the exposure - as when making a print - and also change the contrast, color balance and the shape of the tone response curve. Software such as [b}Bibble, Photoshop CS/CS2/CS3, Nikon Capture, Aperture and Nikon View gives you really powerful control over the appearance of your images.
This doesn't mean you can be slack about getting it right in camera, but it does widen the possibilities available to you. My choice of software was Nikon Capture, you can carry out a very considerable amount of alteration of contrast and curve shape solving almost all the problems of shadow and highlight separation and producing high quality output. Similar facilities are available in the other software. Should you need to do further manipulation in Photoshop CS/CS2/CS3, then you can output from these programs as 16 bit per channel (48 bit) TIFF files to avoid any quality loss.

Disadvantages of Raw

So exposures made on the DSLR have been in raw format. Raw files are larger than jpegs and so your CF card will fill up quicker. With a 1Gb CF card get between 103 and 107 raw files, but could store roughly three times as many fine quality full size jpegs. However the cost of CF cards is low enough for this seldom to be an important factor, and with a 40Mb 'image tank' to hand I'm unlikely ever to run out of storage space while shooting. For longer-term storage, large hard disks are now relatively cheap, and a DVD will hold well over 400 raw images.
Larger files do mean longer write times. For most purposes the burst of 4 frames to the buffer to be enough, although the wait of around ten seconds for the next frame after this can sometimes seem a very long time. In very fast-moving situations I change to jpeg - it only takes a second or so on the DSLR - select the quality setting on the dial then change quality using the wheel at the front right.
Unfortunately the compressed raw mode offered by Nikon is totally impracticable, putting the camera out of action for around 4-5 times as long. It's a problem they have not yet been able to address with a firmware update.

Reducing Photo Size for web Use?

Last July 21 2007 from my post “Composition is Essential in Photography” I received a comment asking for a little help. How to reduce the size of photo to be uploaded into the web? And I decided not to answer it because, it is better for me to make a post on it so that it will be beneficial to all my visitor who will read this post with having the same problem.

Now here’s the comment

He said...

Hi! Can I ask you something? How can I reduce the size of my photographs? I wanted to upload one as my blog header, but it turns out to be very big! The same concern arose when I tried uploading pics at Friendster. It always says my files are too large. Help! Thanks.

The standard size of photo technically and as what I read it is maximum of 600 x 800 pixels, of 250 kb. In this size you can easily upload, view and download any picture from the web. There are many software available from the internet for you to download and use it. Like Photo Resize Magic, Adobe Photo Album, ACDSee, "SmartSaver" by www.ulead.com etc…

But I often use Adobe Photoshop to edit, resized, photo enhanced etc… But it is a little bit complicated if you are new in photography.

A simple way of doing this is to use the Microsoft Office Picture Manager which available if you are having it installed the MS Office 2003.

Assuming all the images are in one folder, the following works very well for quick image optimizations for web viewing.

• Open the folder containing the images
• Right Click on an image, click on 'Open With', select 'Microsoft Office Picture Manager'
• In Picture Manage, select 'Thumbnail View'
• Use Ctrl+A on the keyboard, or in the top toolbar go to >Edit >Select All
• Click on Edit Pictures
• In the edit task pane, select 'Compress Pictures'
• In the compress task pane, select 'Web pages'
• Click on OK

This compresses every image selected for web viewing. When you leave Picture Manager you will be prompted to save the images. Generally a 3mb image reduces to around 85 kb and is resized to 448 x 336 pixels.
It does not suit everything, but is good getting WIP images etc up in a hurry

Note: If the images need to be available in the original size for printing etc, copy them into a new folder for the web and compress the copies.
Tutorial on Picture Manager