There are two types of corporate photography – event photography and portrait photography. Event photography means taking pictures of employees and guests in corporate events such as conferences, birthday parties, Christmas parties, receptions and sales events. Corporate portrait photography means taking formal pictures of employees for websites, magazines and other various publications. In this article, I will provide some tips on how to photograph corporate events.
One of the questions that I get asked very often from my readers and friends, is “where should I buy a DSLR from?” While this might seem like a pretty straightforward answer to many of our readers, I still decided to write a quick article about where to buy DSLRs and lenses and why.
This is not about what DSLRs and lenses you should buy and why. If you are looking for detailed information on what DSLR you should choose and why, please read my comprehensive “How to Buy a DSLR Camera” guide. If you are looking for a comparison between point and shoot cameras and DSLRs, then I highly recommend reading Lola’s detailed “DSLR vs Point and Shoot” article.
If you have already made up your mind on what DSLR camera and lens to buy but you are still wondering if you should purchase it online or in a local store, then keep reading, since I might be able to save you some money.
There are many different sources of where you could buy DSLR equipment, but I will talk about the two main ones:
Who wouldn’t want pearly white teeth gleaming through a beautiful smile! This is a quick and one of the most effective ways of whitening teeth in Photoshop. I’ve tried many different ways before, but once I adopted this particular method, I never went back to my old ways again.
Here is how I do it:
This Lightroom guide is for beginner-photographers who are getting started in Lightroom and are looking for a good way to organize their photos and photo catalogs. If you are looking for a generic guide on how to organize pictures without any third party photo software like Lightroom, then please read my “how to organize pictures” guide instead. If you do not currently own a copy of Lightroom, I highly recommend purchasing one from B&H or other resellers.
Lightroom has certainly become a very essential part of a photographer’s workflow. I personally cannot imagine managing my photo catalog without Lightroom and I use it every day for my Photography needs. In fact, 95-98% of my post-processing work is done in Lightroom today and I rarely use Adobe Photoshop for photo editing, which not only simplifies my workflow, but also decreases the amount of time I spend on post-processing. The below process of folder structures and organization within Lightroom is my personal way of storing pictures and working with them for my home and professional use.
The first question is, where and how do you currently store your pictures? I used to store all of my photographs in various subfolders of my hard drive (commonly in “My Pictures” or “My Documents”), but after I got into photography, I decided that it is best to keep all of my photographs in the root folder of my PC’s hard drive that I use solely for storing photos and small family videos. Hard drives are dirt cheap nowadays and you can snatch an external 1-1.5 Terabyte drive for under $100. I highly recommend getting a fault-redundant external drive though (usually two hard drives in RAID 1 Mirror configuration). There are also other fault-tolerant external drive array solutions such as “Drobo” that some photographers rave about, but I personally do not use them, since they are expensive and take too much space. As long as you have a good backup strategy, which I talk about below, you do not have to worry about losing data.
The RAW vs JPEG topic seems like a never ending debate in photography. Some photographers say shoot RAW, while others say shoot JPEG. What is RAW format in digital photography? What are the advantages and disadvantages of RAW versus JPEG and why? Should you shoot in RAW or JPEG? Will shooting in RAW complicate your post-production and workflow? These are some of the most common questions that people ask after they buy their first DSLR camera and go through the camera options. Having a thorough understanding of advantages and disadvantages is essential for photographers to make the right decision on whether to use RAW format for their work.
Sand Dunes - Shot in RAW
I remember my first time going through the camera options and reading the Nikon D80 manual, wondering about what RAW does and why I should consider using it. JPEG is a no-brainer – it’s the default image format that is used in most point and shoot cameras and we all got used to it and know it very well, seeing and sharing JPEG images online and downloading/uploading them from and to our mobile devices. But there was something about RAW that I wanted to find out about immediately. Maybe it was the word “raw” that sounded intriguing, maybe it was the immediate desire to get the sharpest, highest quality and best pictures ever without knowing much about the camera…whatever it was, I went ahead and changed my camera settings to RAW and tried to take a picture. The first thing I noticed, was how small all of a sudden my memory card became. Wait a second! How come the number of pictures went down from over 700 to under 200? The image looked exactly the same on the LCD and yet it consumed more than three times more memory? Bummer. Then, I took the memory card and inserted it into my laptop. To my surprise, I couldn’t even open the darn thing! Worthless, I thought and changed my camera settings back to JPEG.
Should you use DNG or RAW format? This is one of the most important questions that you as a photographer need to ask yourself, because it will definitely affect your digital photography workflow. Every photographer has their own say on whether to use DNG or RAW, but it is important to know the key differences between the two, along with their advantages and disadvantages. In this article, I will provide as much information as I can about both formats, in addition to my opinion and workflow. If you are looking for more information about how RAW images compare to JPEG images, then please read my “RAW vs JPEG” article.
RAW images, also known as “digital negatives” are truly “raw”, meaning they are almost unprocessed data coming directly from the camera sensor. Unlike JPEG files that can be easily opened, viewed and printed by most image-viewing/editing programs, RAW is a proprietary format that is tied to the camera manufacturer and sensor, and therefore is not supported by all software products. RAW files preserve the most amount of information about an image and generally contain more colors and dynamic range than other formats.
I wrote this basic guide on how to organize pictures for those, who occasionally take pictures with digital cameras and who are looking for ways to organize images on their computers. This is NOT a guide for serious photographers with large catalogs of photographs. If you are a photographer looking for ways to organize your photo library, please see my “how to organize pictures in Lightroom” guide written specifically for serious photography work.
During the last 10 years, all kinds of digital cameras have flooded both traditional and online stores. Today, the market is over-saturated with a wide array of digital cameras for personal and professional use and tough competition among the manufacturers pushed the prices so low, that most US households now own one or more digital cameras. Digital cameras have gotten so popular, that they made their way into our phones and other electronic devices as well. With such a wide array of sources where pictures come from, how do we keep them organized?
Most people do not even bother organizing pictures. They take pictures, leave them on their cameras and mobile devices and use them when needed – to share a picture via Facebook or to send the latest pic to their friends and family. As a result, many pictures get lost and memories are gone forever. So, what should you do to keep your pictures organized and saved?
Start with your computer and try to locate every single picture. Common places to look for photographs are in your “My Documents” or “My Pictures” folders, but you might have pictures in other folders as well. Just search your computer for all files with “JPG” extension and see what it finds. Create a local folder on your desktop and move all your pictures there. If you have other computers/laptops at home, perform the same search and try to find every single picture. Next, go through your mobile devices (iPhone, iPod, Zune, etc) and see if you have any pictures stored there too. Copy them all to your main PC, into the same folder that you created earlier.
Low light photography is not necessarily just night photography, as many people assume. There could be different amounts of light coming from various sources and whatever is less than daytime light outside, I consider low-light. Indoors photography without much ambient light (as in many of our homes) as well as the light that is barely visible to our eyes at night, is also considered to be low-light. In this article, I will provide tips on how to take pictures in various low-light environments, whether indoors or outdoors.
Antelope Canyon, 5 second exposure @ f/10, ISO 200
Before we go any further, let’s first identify the varying levels of low-light and categorize them, so that we could refer to them in examples. Although it is very hard to categorize the amount of light, due to the fact that it is a long range of light between very bright and pitch black, just for the sake of making it easier to explain and refer to, I still decided to divide it into three categories:
It is difficult to take good pictures without having a solid understanding of ISO, Shutter Speed and Aperture – the Three Kings of Photography, also known as the “Exposure Triangle”. While most new DSLRs have “Auto” modes that automatically pick the right shutter speed, aperture and even ISO for your exposure, using an Auto mode puts limits on what you can achieve with your camera. In many cases, the camera has to guess what the right exposure should be by evaluating the amount of light that passes through the lens. Thoroughly understanding how ISO, shutter speed and aperture work together allows photographers to fully take charge of the situation by manually controlling the camera. Knowing how to adjust the settings of the camera when needed, helps to get the best out of your camera and push it to its limits to take great photographs.
Having a good understanding of the digital camera modes is essential to control the exposure in photography. Whether you are a beginner or an advanced amateur, you should know what each camera mode does and when it should be used, under what circumstances.
Digital Camera Modes allow photographers to control the parameters of an exposure, specifically, Shutter Speed, Aperture and ISO. While certain modes can fully automate the camera exposure, there are other modes that let the photographer manually control some or all parameters of the exposure.
Back in the old days, there was no such thing as a camera mode – everything was manual. Photographers had to manually set the aperture, shutter speed and choose the right type of film for their cameras. To evaluate the intensity and the amount of light, they used to carry special light metering devices that measured the light and provided the exposure information, which they would then use in their cameras. In 1938, Kodak introduced a film camera with an integrated light meter and in 1962, a Japanese company called “Topcon” introduced the first SLR camera that measured the light coming through the lens into the camera. What this meant, was that photographers no longer needed to carry special light meters with them – the camera would do it for them. New “Automatic” camera modes started appearing on cameras, which would evaluate the amount of light that passed through the lens and would automatically pick the right exposure parameters to produce a properly-exposed picture.
