Janet Schlarbaum Fine Art Photo

Posted by: Janet Schlarbaum
Author: Dane Stanton
Photography is the art of light and shade. A photo is basically a record of the light conditions at a certain period in time and space. That is why the lighting plays a very important role there. You could have a hi-end digital camera but still get worse shoots until you are not aware of the secrets of proper lighting. This articles teaches you about the basics of digital photography lighting.

The Light Sources

The good light sources are natural light sources. The sun and the moon are considered to be the best ones. The artificial light sources include the photoflash, the bulb, the halogen lamp as well as some other sources. Special photography studios contain more advanced lights, but they are not necessary unless you are a hi-level professional.

There are various types of digital photography lighting, but the most common are diffused lighting and directional lighting. Diffused light coming from the sides is produced by the sun in the early morning and the late afternoon. Alternatively, it can be simulated by using an umbrella reflector. Direct light can be produced by flash or tungsten.

Light can come from the top, front, back or side. Front lighting is commonly used by photographers, but it often results in unexciting and flat photos. Back and side lighting produce a better effect, especially being combined with each other. The strength of light is also an important thing.

Digital Photography Lighting Specificity

As a rule, digital cameras have a wide set of lighting presets, which can help the photographer to take quality shots in different lighting conditions. Most digital cameras also provide automatic settings for white balancing. There could be various options like daylight, cloudy, tungsten and more. These adjustments can be set to compensate for any given light source so that white objects appear true white in the photo.

Overall, the digital cameras provide us with powerful tool of lighting adjustment. However, making an excellent lighted shoot is always a challenge.

How to Manage Lighting

Photographer can employ and combine different kind of light sources and digital photography lighting presets. There’re some common rules on how to manage lighting. For example, it is well known that portraits look best when taken in diffused lighting, whereas top lighting results in sharp contrast of light and shadows. Landscapes look good in soft light, whereas it is better to use bright light when captivating the wildlife.

One of the main advantages of digital photography is that you can experiment with the picture without any additional expenses on film and processing. Following the trial and error method, just try playing with your camera and make the best of it.

Author: Low Jeremy
Posted by: Janet Schlarabum
In this transition phase of analog to digital photography, everyone knows the difference on how each images is processed into a nice print. For analog photography, the negative (film) is developed into photos in small shops called developing studios, low-end or high end, available some walks away from a nearby establishment.

They come in cheap price for every piece of shot but they come expensive in rolls. This is the conventional way of accomplishing photography. Nowadays there is digital camera mania everywhere! Who would not want private photograph shots from a handy dandy digital camera, where printing is done at home at one’s convenience?

Convenience and privacy are the perfect words for digital photography. The question is how convenient is it to produce a copy? About privacy, there is no doubt, when you take a shot with a digital camera, it does not have to go out of the house.

All you need is a printer. When you need a printer, the array of other needs will start to fall in line one by one because it takes the following to create you own printing of digital photography. For a good digital photography printing, you will the following:

- A high-resolution digital camera with at least 2 mega-pixel resolution
- A stand-alone digital printer (no need for a computer)
- Fully loaded personal computer

It goes to show, processing digital printing at home is not cheap. The mania is only applicable to those who have PCs at home. Let’s say you have all the equipments for digital photography printing, the next requirements are quite complex than it seems.

Digital cameras are capable of deleting undesirable shots at once. There is no more worry for wasted film for bad shots. Now it is time to transfer or load your images to your PC.

At a subdirectory you will see the photos transferred into digital files commonly in JPEG or RAW format. In the future, this will change. The setting and configuration of your digital camera will greatly affect the output you expect.

The very important aspect to be understood when doing digital photography printing is having knowledge about RESOLUTION. What you see in the computer monitor is not what you will see in the printer. This is overwhelming for beginners. Dot representation or pixels comprise an image.

At minimal requirement, a setting of 300 dpi (dots per inch) will already make a good print. For better prints, resolution must be higher. Expect the computer to slow down, assign a realistic values.