There are a number of reasons for which you may want to outsource printing your images to a lab or online printing service. It is relatively cheaper and also hassle-free to not print at home. To start off you wouldn’t need to maintain a printer. Photo printers can cost a lot of money and if your requirements isn’t large then it certainly does not make sense to invest in one. Read more...
A question often asked by entry level protogs is how much to charge for their services. Many find it difficult to assess their own value, a major constraint in the path of a promising career. The problem is more often than not beginner professional photographers don’t know how much is an accurate estimation of the value that they bring on to the table. Read more...
Often photographers are approached with a request to work for free. The request can come from anybody, a prospective client, a celebrity who you have been trying to work with, a relative who knows that you are a photographer and wants to use your skills for free because you are family! Regardless of who makes a request like this, or where, the question is how would you react to something like that?Would you say yes, gladly? Or would you say no? Or would carefully weigh the situations and then decide whether to say yes or no? I bet most of us would take the middle path. Read more...
People more or less start the same way. Someone somewhere loves us dearly enough so as to send us a camera for Christmas gift. Some of us may have even inherited it from their granddad or maternal uncle. Regardless, of the origin a camera arrives in our lives. That’s the ‘Allspark’ that we needed. Life never remains the same after that seemingly inert incident. We end up getting hooked to our camera and to photography for the rest of our best days. Read more...
Ethical post processing is a fine line that every photographer has to keep in mind when working on their imagery. With so much Photoshop being used it is difficult to come across an image that has not been digitally altered somehow. Having said that, a degree of post-processing is inevitable because images are not always meant to be printed and nailed to a wall. Even then a bit of post-processing would ensure that the images are close to what the photographer envisioned at the time of pressing the shutter release. Read more...
Growing up you would no doubt be advised that the best way to shoot portrait images is to place your subject facing the sun. While that approach does have some merits, because it tends to properly illuminate your subject, it has some serious downsides as well. For starters direct light can be unflattering. Plus, if you have carefully inspected your images half the time your subjects are squinting which is not a good thing for portrait photography.
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A technical term that you are likely to hear a lot is lens vignetting. Lens vignetting (sometimes also referred to as light fall-off) is a phenomenon that causes light to not reach the entire sensor after travelling through the lens aperture. A number of reasons are attributed to the phenomenon of lens vignetting. They are mainly segregated into two – mechanical and optical. The result however is the same, dark shadows in the shape of a circle at the corner of the image. Read more...
We all love the beach (ok at least most of us do). I love the concept of splashing around, making sand castles with my daughter, ice-creams and burying ourselves in the sand so that only our heads stick out. I love the whole thing. In the part of the world that I am from it is peak summer, all the more reason to hit the cold waters of the beach. Each year even it is for just once we make it a point to hit the beach. Read more...
One of the least used perspectives in photography is the low angle. I bet every photographer thinks why get my camera dirty when my tripod can stoop down to inches from the ground? Well, can your tripod set the camera actually on the ground? I don’t think so. Because that is one of the camera positions that I am referring to when I say low-angle. About a foot and a half from the ground is no good when you want to capture something that is crawling on the ground or you want to capture something so unique which nobody else thinks of. You have to set your camera on the ground. Read more...
We often read about the creative uses of lines in photography. The horizon line is one such oft used line in compositions that separates the point where the earth and the sky meets. As a beginner photographer you may have been told never to place the horizon line bang in the middle of a composition. The reason is this results in a composition that is anything but interesting. Raising the horizon line and placing it roundabout 2/3rds the way down or 2/3rds the way up results in a much better composition. E.g., the image below. Read more...
There are a number of reasons for which you may want to outsource printing your images to a lab or online printing service. It is relatively cheaper and also hassle-free to not print at home. To start off you wouldn’t need to maintain a printer. Photo printers can cost a lot of money and if your requirements isn’t large then it certainly does not make sense to invest in one. Read more... 
