PictureCorrect.com: Tips for Taking Better Baby Photos

Ask everyone that’s ever tried to take photos of their baby, it’s hard work. No matter how good they look on camera, simply trying to point the camera at a baby and take a picture is going to yield some very… unflattering results. Thankfully, in the video below Michael Kormos gives us some much needed tips on baby pictures:

So, as it’s the case with most types of photos, if you take a closer look at the problems you face with the conditions you take photos in, the subject and your equipment it’s suddenly a lot easier to improve. In our particular case, here’s how you can take better baby photos:

Taking photos of a baby is more fun than work, when done right.

Taking better baby photos

1. Use a DSLR camera. Taking photos with your phone works, but the results are pretty much what you would expect. A professional DSLR camera, even an entry level one, will improve your photos dramatically.
2. Use a prime lens. I personally found the difference between kit lenses and prime lenses astounding, especially for portraits.
3. Think about lighting. Use a lot of light for your photos – natural light is best, but you might want to diffuse it with a bed sheet.
4. Make the baby happy! You get the best baby photos when they’re rested and well fed – happiness shows!
5. Get on the baby’s level. There’s an obvious height difference between you and the baby, but the greatest results come when you are both on the same level, so place the baby on a bed and get right at his or her level.
6. Get the baby’s attention. I find that making goofy faces and sounds grabs their attention and puts a huge smile on their faces.
7. Pose the baby head-on. As Michael shows in the video above, this is the classic baby pose.

And voila! These tips will help you get better baby photos in no time!

And that’s just about it – with just a couple of simple steps you can have a perfect baby photo, ready to place on your fireplace.

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PictureCorrect.com: Interesting Photo of the Day: Ocean Wave Sculpture

Ocean waves are more than the natural phenomenon of wind and tides. They are a vessel of powerful kinetic energy and a liquefied prism—a true source of inspiration for French photographer Pierre Carreau. The suspended motion creates a sculptural quality allowing the viewer to appreciate every curve and every ripple of a rolling wave:

An image from the AquaViva series by Pierre Carreau. (Via Imgur. Click to see full size.)

Growing up in a family of talented artists, Carreau eventually left a career in IT to explore his own artistic yearnings. Photographing many water sports and a new home in St. Barthélemy led to Carreau’s profound fascination and appreciation for water and waves. In an artist statement, he says:

“Water is amazing. Basically it has no color, but through reflection and refraction it can possess all of them, the entire spectrum of light…Consider that nature presents to us this vibrant energy daily wherever the ocean meets the shore. We are incapable of capturing these fleeting masterpieces with our own eyes, however, for the movement is too swift, and the tumultuous action of the waves too distracting in its kinetic form.”

Carreau’s images of these liquid sculptures have been collected into a series titled ‘AquaViva.’  Like their human viewers, no two waves are alike; the photographs speak to something inside of every individual. The images are also a visual representation of the rugged beauty and diverse appeal of water.

“This simultaneous depiction of roiling movement and suspended kinetic energy parallels the dual nature of the oceans and of water itself: life-giving and yet dangerous, inviting and yet fearsome, primordial and yet ever-changing and always renewed.”

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PictureCorrect.com: How to Add Intentional Lens Flare to Your Photos

To create lens flare, you need to do the exact opposite of what you would normally do with a key light—aim it straight toward the camera. Mark Wallace from Adorama demonstrates how he does it:

For this shoot Wallace uses a 50mm f/1.4 lens wide open. His shutter speed is set at 1/160 of a second. He places the key light, a Profoto B2 head, directly behind the model and aims it straight at the camera. The wall behind the camera is pure white, which throws back some light onto the subject. At f/1.4 and 1/160 of a second the exposure should be correct for the subject’s face.

The key light set up behind the subject is set to a brightness that meters f/6.3 on the handheld light meter. This is significantly brighter than what is required for the exposure and is intentional. At that brightness setting Wallace is going to get the angelic lens flare that he’s looking for.

Important note before you begin shooting. Make sure that you turn on the modelling light. This will enable you to set up the light so that you can catch the light coming straight down on the lens. Otherwise this is going to be a trial and error sort of thing as you fine tune the composition. By altering the position of the camera or the light, you can adjust how much of that light you can catch with your lens.

These kind of images warrant some amount of post-processing. You’ll need to increase the contrast, adjust white balance, and do a bit of this and that to really make the image pop.

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PictureCorrect.com: 5 Tips for Taking Travel Photos in Dangerous Countries

In December 2015, I stumbled upon a slum along the riverbank of Iquitos, an isolated Peruvian city in the Amazon jungle, and walked down rickety wooden boardwalk with my old Canon T2i in hand—snapping shots of the decrepit homes, crumbling wooden stilts, tattered clothes drying in the humid air—until a local security guard walked up to me and told me, in Spanish, that this area was dangerous and I should put my camera away.

It wasn’t the first time I’ve heard that. I’ve been told to hide my camera in Lima, Manila, Kolkata and beyond. If you want to bring your DSLR around the world, you’re basically screaming “Look at all this money I have!” to everyone around you.

The trick to nabbing good travel photos abroad in dangerous situations is a combination of luck and logic. In the five years I’ve spent living and travelling abroad, I’ve never been robbed, and still managed to capture shots of moments I’ve found honest and uncompromising. Here’s how.

Walk Safely

This means a few things: for starters, keep your camera strap coiled tightly around your wrist. (I’ve seen drive-by motorcycle thieves snatch purses from women’s hands; the best way around that is to not let loose any strap slack.) Secondly—and this should go without saying—don’t walk down quiet streets alone at night. This goes for all white-skinned travellers, but especially those carrying a $1,000 camera around their necks.

Linger Around for Good Moments

When you find a grungy neighbourhood, your first instinct might be to get out of there as quickly as possible. But I find the most awkward moments are the first few—after you linger a while, on a city block or in front of a food stall somewhere, people get used to you. That’s when they relax. Some of my favourite candid photos have only come after people relaxed a while and started talking amongst themselves.

Never Expose Longer Than 1/500

My style of travel photography leans toward subtle street photos, so I like to wait for the right moment and shoot from the hip. That means I may be walking while snapping the photo, or quickly drawing up the camera when I see something interesting. I tend to keep my shutter speed at 1/500 and my aperture at f/8, and adjust my ISO depending on the time of day and cloud coverage.

Bring a Versatile Lens

My favourite travel lens is my Canon 18-200mm. I admit it’s bulky as hell, and it barrels around the edges near 18mm, but the range is terrific if you only want to bring one lens on a trip. (I consider the weight offset by the fact that I rarely bring any other glass.) At its widest, it takes solid landscape and cityscape shots, but the zoom is great for snapping quiet candid portraits from afar, and it’s especially useful whenever I get a hotel room with a balcony facing the street. As a bonus, with one versatile lens, you’ll never have to stand in the middle of a sketchy street changing lenses—something else to keep in mind when travelling to developing nations.

Ignore People Trying to Scare You

While in Barranco, a suburb of Lima, I had a Limeño man warn me that I shouldn’t flaunt my camera in the neighbourhood. It was 12:30 p.m. on a Sunday; the streets were bustling with people. I ignored him.

Taking photos anywhere is alienating—by sticking a lens in front of your face, you isolate yourself; cameras can be symbols of judgment or an invasion of privacy to strangers. This concept is amplified by a million when you’re in a strange country that is—speaking frankly—filled with people less privileged and poorer than you. It can be tempting to pack away your DSLR and stick to disposable cameras or cheaper, smaller compacts.

But that’s silly. If you care about photography, you should do it, no matter where you are—especially if you’re in a new country. Whether your goal is to take documentary shots, personal mementos or build up a travel portfolio, you can’t just put away your camera when people tell you to. Just play it safe and let your lens do the rest.

About the Author:
Michael Fraiman is a Canadian travel writer and photographer, and the author of A Long Way Back: Stories of Travelling Home.

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PictureCorrect.com: 13 Satisfying Photos that Use Patterns Perfectly

Our world is filled with patterns. They’re everywhere around us, but we often overlook them. Photographers often utilize repeated elements to give the viewer a pleasing sense of harmony and order. The elements might be shapes, tones, forms, or lines.

When taking photos of patterns, put focus on them by isolating them from the surroundings. You can either emphasize or break the pattern to capture a great image. Enjoy this collection of patterns in photography that we found:

photo by Luca Moglia

photo by Lucy Nieto

photo by Sid Mosdell

photo by Martin Gommel

photo by Peter Nijenhuis

photo by Zach Bulick

photo by Christiaan Triebert

photo by antifluor

photo by Michael Shaheen

photo by Tuncay

photo by Joelle Johnson

photo by Alejandro Rave

photo by Bob Jagendorf

On your next photo walk, look for patterns and repetition. Then show us what you found below!

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PictureCorrect.com: Stunning Landscape Timelapse Photography of the Western States

Timelapse videos are a dime a dozen, but every once in a while we come across one that’s truly well done—even stunning. This timelapse of the beauty of the Western states, made by Portland adventure photographer Leif Smith, might just be one of those:

Shot mostly in the western United States and Canada, Smith’s “Vista” timelapse captures glimpses from some of the West’s more amazing natural landscapes. Crater Lake, Joshua Tree National Park, Mt. Shasta—all of these offer amazing opportunities for photography, and Smith, after 2 to 3 years of shooting and editing, doesn’t disappoint.

Timelapse photography is extremely labor-intensive, especially in the post-processing. This particular video took Smith tens of thousands of hours editing and compiling. And that to the amount of travel needed to cover all of these amazing places and the equipment hauling and you get one major project on your hands. And while Smith is a professional photographer in his own right, the particular video was his “passion project for a long time now” and that passion definitely shows.

Equipment Used

• Canon 5D MIII
• Nikon D600
• Emotimo TB3 pan/tilt head
• Dynamic Perception Stage Zero rail

So what do you think? Would you rate this as simply well done or absolutely stunning?

For Further Training on Timelapse Photography:

There is a COMPLETE guide (146 pages) to shooting, processing and rendering time-lapses using a dslr camera. Found here: The Timelapse Photography Guide

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PictureCorrect.com: How to Create Custom Keyboard Shortcuts in Photoshop

Photoshop to edit your photos finding the right tool in Photoshop is often a click through a myriad of menu options. Keyboard shortcuts are like worm holes that let you slip through those menus and options and get to what you need at the blink of an eye. In this video, Aaron Nace from Phlearn demonstrates how you can customize keyboard shortcuts to speed up your workflow:

Though Photoshop comews with a lot of default keyboard shortcuts, there are a lot of frequently used tools without them. Let’s take an example. The often used Gaussian blur has no Photoshop shortcut by default. To select Gaussian Blur you have to go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. That’s a three-click, time-consuming process.

Getting to the Gaussian Blur tool without a keyboard shortcut

Nace shows how to create a shortcut for the Gaussian Blur:

1. Go to Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts. This pops open the Keyboard Shortcuts and Menus window.
2. Expand the Application Menus option.
3. Scroll down to Filter and then find Gaussian Blur on the list.
4. Click to edit the shortcut.
5. To edit the shortcut you have to actually press the keyboard shortcut that you want to use. In this case, the letter ‘G’ makes sense as the shortcut for Gaussian Blur.

The new keyboard shortcut for Gaussian Blur on Nace’s copy of Photoshop

6. Don’t forget to press either the Command / Control key or a Function key before the letter. Photoshop will prompt you in case the shortcut collides with an existing shortcut.
7. Press Accept to set the keyboard shortcut. Now you have a keyboard shortcut to bring up the Gaussian blur tool without having to traverse through that myriad of menu options.

You can create keyboard shortcuts for not only what’s there in the Application Menus but also under the Panel Menus and Tools. So if you want to create a keyboard shortcut for a new brush preset you can do that using the Keyboard Shortcuts and Menus option. But why keep it at just that? You can change around the keyboard shortcuts to override what’s been set by default and use your own shortcuts, something which makes more sense when editing your images.

Keyboard shortcut download

Let’s say that you want to download a list of all the possible keyboard shortcuts in Photoshop. Yup, that’s possible too. Photoshop can generate that list for you. While in the Keyboard Shortcuts and Menus option go to Summarize. When you do that Photoshop will give you the option to Save the keyboard shortcuts as an *.htm file. Hit Command / Control P to print it out or save that as a browser shortcut. Voila! Now you have a ready reference for all the current keyboard shortcuts on your version of Photoshop.

Let us know about your Photoshop customization in the comments section below!

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