Just Imagine Sand Art

Programy do panoram.

Jakich używacie programów do łączenia zdjęć w panoramy, jakie są Waszym zdaniem dobre a jakich nalezy unikać?Ja używam oczywiście dołączonego do canona PhotoStitch, ale bardzo fajny jest także programik firmy Ulead "Cool 360 D " z przeglądarką obrotową panoram.Program jest w miarę prosty i oferuje dużo funkcji , poniżej link dla osób które go jeszcze nie widziały:http://www.ulead.com/cool360/runme.htmTechnorati Profile

Jak zmontować 3 fotki w całość....

Jak zmontować 3 fotki w całość.
Za namową @wtsz, @kwietczara, @nikx i @wifey....@miderskiejSpróbuję opowiedzieć w kilku słowach jak zrobiłem "Road to Hell" "Gifts" i "Szarotkę"....Ale po kolei...Z góry przepraszam za kiepską jakość tłumaczenia....nie jestem w tym dobry... Poza tym nie jestem ekspertem od PS-a...:)1 Należy przygotować zdjęcia ( ja użyłem 3). OPczywiście wskazane byłoby aby miały identyczne rozmiary. Fotki otworzyłem w PS-e....a następnie ...2 Utwożyłem NOWY obrazek...o białym tle o rozmiarach:3 razy szerokość jednego zdjęcia i wysokości jednego zdjęcia...PLUS ewentualnie kilkadziesiąt pikseli na tzw MARGINES...:)3 Skopiowałem moje fotki do schowka a następnie wkleiłem je do nowego dokumentu jako NOWE WARSTWY....4 Każdej z warstw można nadać "charakterek"...np...obrysować jakimś kolorkiem...dodać cień tak aby wyglądało z wodotryskiem...5 Oczywiście trzeba to ładnie wypozycjonować...poukładać ...etc6 Następnie takie warstwy należy połączyć...np: WYRSTWA/ POŁĄCZ WIDOCZNE....albo SPŁASZCZ OBRAZEK...7 tak spłaszczony obrazek można dalej edytować tak jak zwykłe fotki...np. skadrować utworzyć ramki etc....8 KONIEC

Aperture, Shutter Speed and Focus - The Only Features You Need

Cameras certainly got complicated in recent years. With all the features, functions and menus, the simplicity of taking a photograph has disappeared. Perhaps it’s time to revisit the basics: aperture, shutter speed and focus – the three ‘features’ you actually need.
I’m always intrigued when I ask someone to take a photo with one of my cameras. They see the aperture ring, a shutter speed dial a manual focus lens and freak out. Oddly, they seem more at ease sifting through countless menus and screens than using what is, in all reality, a very simple machine.
Whether you have a modern SLR (film or digital), a point and shoot, a 50 year old rangefinder, an 8x10 view camera, a 30 year old manual workhorse or anything in between, there are three essential functions all are relying on: aperture, shutter speed and focus.
APERTURE As the name suggests, the lens aperture is an opening. This opening is controllable by the photographer who determines whether a lot of light (large aperture) or a little light (small aperture) is to make its way through to the film plane or CCD.
By using the aperture ring, the photographer selects a ‘f-stop’ (f2, f2.8, f4, f5.6, f8, f11, f16, f22 etc), a pre-set opening. Each time you move one stop you either double or halve the amount of light coming through, depending on whether you are ‘opening up’ or ‘stopping down’. The smaller numbers (f2, f2.8 etc) are actually bigger openings and the bigger numbers (f16, f22 etc) are smaller openings. That’s about as complicated as it gets too. This halving or doubling relationship is very important and makes life very easy when dealing with shutter speeds.
SHUTTER SPEEDS Between the aperture and the film or CCD is the shutter. The shutter speed determines how long the light being let in by the aperture gets exposed to the film or CCD.
Where it all fits together beautifully, is that a change from one shutter speed to the next either halves or doubles the time of the exposure. Sound familiar?
WHAT TO USE Apertures and shutter speeds give certain looks. Using a large aperture (f2.8, f4 etc) gives what’s known as a shallow depth of field, where only what you focus on is in sharp focus and what is in front of or behind your subject is out of focus. Shallow depth of field is generally used for portraiture.
A small aperture (f11, f16 etc) allows more of the scene in front of and behind your subject to be in focus. A long depth of field is generally used for landscapes.
Shutter speeds can ‘freeze’ the action (think sports) or ‘blur’ part of the scene to indicate speed or movement.
When photographing, try visualising what you want the picture to look like and set your exposure accordingly. What’s in the shot, what are you trying to convey, should you use a long depth of field or a shallow one, do you need to freeze the action, give a sense of movement or simply have a workable shutter speed because you’re hand-holding the camera?
EXPOSURE Once your basic exposure has been determined (using an on-camera or hand-held meter) you can then adjust either your shutter speed or aperture to better suit your requirements.
Say for example, your camera is telling you that the exposure you need is f8 at 1/125 second. You are taking a portrait shot, however, and only want your subject in focus. An aperture of f8, you decide, will bring too much of the background into focus and you’d prefer to use f4.
By ‘opening up’ the two stops to f4 (f8 to f5.6 to f4) you’ve increased your exposure by two stops. To compensate, you have to decrease your shutter speed by two stops (one stop down is 1/250, another stop is 1/500). In other words, f4 at 1/500 second is the same as f8 at 1/125 sec.
By working up and down the scale, you can work out the other aperture/shutter speed combinations. All will have the same exposure but a different look. And that’s the beauty of photography: in any given situation, you can choose whichever combination suits your needs best.
FOCUS This is obvious and doesn’t need too much explanation. It is nice to be in control of it and not fight against an auto focus that’s doing its own thing.
The whole point of this exercise is to get a more tactile experience when photographing; to not be guessing at what’s going on but rather knowing.
The best way to achieve this is to switch off all the automated features that do the thinking for you and turn your camera to manual.
Interestingly, all those little icons on your camera dial like a face or a mountain scene or a person running are just telling the camera to prioritise a big aperture, a small aperture and a fast shutter speed respectively. It’s just as easy to do it yourself and be in control of your photography.
Although it may seem daunting at first, in practice using aperture, shutter speeds and manual focus is very simple and infinitely easier to understand than the manuals that come with cameras nowadays. The features are there to sell cameras, not make you a better photographer. Take the unnecessary features away and cameras don’t really need manuals at all.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Matthew_Smeal

Creating Personalized Photo Calendars

About Personalized Photo Calendars:
Photo Calendars are 12-month, wall-hanging calendars that you can create using your own digital photos and captions. As you customize your own photo calendar, you can start the calendar on whatever month and year you wish. Most photo calendars are printed on white heavy-weight glossy card stock that you can write on, and they are spiral-bound in the middle.
Creating Personalized Photo Calendars:
Most online digital photo printing services, such as Shutterfly (my favorite), Snapfish and Kodak EasyShare Gallery, offer custom photo calendars. The process of creating personalized photo calendars usually involves:
1. Picking a starting month and year for your calendar
2. Selecting a page design from a variety of templates
3. Choosing your photos from those you have uploaded to the photo service's website and selecting which photo you want for a specific month
4. Writing brief photo captions to accompany each page of your photo calendar (usually optional)
5. Adding a cover photo for your personalized photo calendar
6. Placing your photo calendar order with the web site
Templates for Personalized Photo Calendars:
Most photo printing services like Shutterfly and Snapfish offer a selection of photo calendar templates to choose from. There are also several software programs that include free photo calendar templates. FotoFinish offers several photo calendar templates with its FotoFinish Suite software version, and you can download a variety of additional free photo calendar templates from its website. Adobe Photoshop Album and Jasc Paint Shop Photo Album 5 Deluxe also feature photo calendar templates.
Printing Photo Calendars:
If you design your custom photo calendar using an online photo service, to print it simply add your photo calendar to your online shopping account and check out. You'll have your printed photo calendar in a few days. The average cost is about $20 per calendar. If you are using your own software to create your photo calendar, you can print your calendar pages using your own color printer and have your pages spiral bound into a calendar at a local copy store.
Customized Photo Calendars Make Great Gifts:
Custom photo calendars make terrific gifts, whether for birthdays, Mother's Day, etc. Got an avid golfer in the family? What about custom golf photo calendars featuring photos of your golfer teeing off? Sometimes it is hard to come up with a good gift idea for elderly parents or grandparents. A photo calendar with pictures of your children makes a great gift that grandma and grandpa will enjoy anew each time they turn over a new month. Don't have kids? What about 12 months of your favorite pet photos? The ideas are endless.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Valerie_Goettsch

5 Materials and Technologies That Just Might Eliminate Digital Camera Shutter Delay

Bob pushed the shutter release button and…NOTHING HAPPENED. The football passed into his son's hands and the actual photo he took was one of a cheerleader's pom-pom. Bob missed the touchdown too. He resisted an insane urge to slam the camera to the ground and jump on it.
This was his first digital camera, and Bob had just experienced an unpleasant surprise. He had used film cameras all his life, but when his Yashica went into the shop a friend loaned him a digital camera. He naively decided to take some action shots and discovered the most maddening "feature" of digital cameras – the shutter delay.
MADDENING AND FRUSTRATING
Articles on this subject have attributed shutter delay to:
1. The camera's focus system
2. The time it takes the camera to digitally process the image
3. Reaction time of the photographer
Numbers one and three are lag times that most people using digital cameras are accustomed to. Most have used a film camera and know it needs a few milliseconds to focus.
The no-brainer solution is to reduce the aperture of the lens to increase depth of field, or aim the camera at the object you wish to be in focus and depress the shutter button half way in order to "tell" the camera what to focus on, then move the camera to center the image and depress it the rest of the way.
As far as human reaction time, well, it hasn't really changed much for users of film cameras, and people experienced in taking action shots usually get what they want.
So let's look at number 2, the time it takes to process the picture.
TIME TO DO THE PROCESSING
Processing the picture (so the camera can be ready for the next one) comes in several steps to move it from the image sensor to flash card storage:
1. Color corrections. The camera has to examine each and every Charge Couple Device (CCD) element on the photo sensor. It adds green, blue, and red to achieve the right color balance. For a 3 mega pixel camera, the processor has to make 9 million calculations.
2. Sharpening. This boosts the contrast by detecting and sharpening edges.
3. Compression. This process converts the 12 to 14 bits of each CCD sensor to 16 bits by "padding" the information and compressing it to 8 bits. This compresses the file size to 9 megabytes.
These steps require a tremendous amount of computational time. No wonder Bob missed his shot!
CATCHING THE ACTION
There are two ways of capturing action:
1. The "consecutive mode". If the camera has this mode, you can take a series of rapid shots moving through the event. This requires a camera with a large ‘buffer" to hold photos for processing.
2. Anticipating shots by depressing and holding down the shutter release prior to the event. This requires an ability to predict the future, something most of us don't possess.
THE FUTURE OF FASTER SHOOTING
Obviously this would all be simplified if micro processing were faster. Even with large buffers, the speed in which data is transmitted to the processor is prohibited by the rate at which data is conveyed from the CCD. Micro processing speed is the next bottleneck.
Faster clock rates and data transfer speeds would reduce or even eliminate "shutter lag" time. There are several technologies in the wings that offer hope:
1. Nanotube and nanowire technologies. These are both the offspring of "nanotechnology", the ability to make tiny machines at the "nano" level, a billionth of a meter in size rather than a millionth of a meter (micrometer) and offer hope for a 500 GHz clock rate or more.
2. DNA Yes, you heard me right. Computing based on DNA strands in which information is stored and processed.
3. Other materials
• Gallium Arsenide with much a faster speed has been used for years for military purposes.
• Silicon-Germanium chips increase the transfer of light signals to silicon. These traditionally have worked best at ultra cold temperatures, but many computer simulations have shown that they may be made to approach 1000 GHz (1 THz) at room temperature.
• Indium-antimonide. Much faster than silicon
•Optical transistors. A glass material known as chalcogenide becomes a switch as its refracting properties are changed. No need to translate those photons into anything else.
• Coated Viruses. The latest research involves coating viruses with a conducting material. Much higher speeds at the molecular level can be obtained. This will give a new meaning to the term "computer virus".
4. Parallel Processing. As we've noticed lately with the war between Intel and AMD over the number of parallel processors crammed into a CPU, digital camera processing would benefit from parallel processors handling the focussing, sharpening and squeezing.
5. Software. Improvement in instructional efficiency by reducing the lines of code would make the whole process more efficient.
HOLD ON AND WAIT FOR THE FUTURE
The REAL solution to this maddening shutter delay appears to be in the material the processor is constructed of, as well as advancements in the software.
But we've got awhile to wait for it. Although a few alternate materials have been around for awhile, everything else is still in the research and development phase. Even when it finally trickles out of the labs, it will probably make your future digital camera cost around $10000 - $15000.
Quite a price tag for the ability to take pictures as fast as a film camera! Still…
Except for the lag, the digital camera has it all over film cameras, once the photo is captured by the memory card. The new technology will be worth the wait.
Digital camera owners are known for their ability to wait…as they desperately punch the shutter release trying to grab the fleeting smile of their new baby, or the football that lands in his hands eighteen years later, when he scores the winning touchdown.

Digital Photography Book You Will Need

Ben got interested in photography back in college. That time, students still had to load the camera with film and develop the pictures in the dark room.
Ten years later, things have changed. Professional and amateur photographers have shifted to digital cameras. Since Ben was slow in terms of welcoming new technology, this individual decided to do some research first to know more about it.
The bookstore will surely have a lot of books on this topic. After searching through the second shelf, there it was, publications on digital photography.
Ben noticed that most of the books were written at the turn of the century. This is because manufacturers only released a complete line of these products after Y2K.
There were publications available talking about digital photography in general but people who want to know more should get specialized ones.
The specialized ones will teach the individual how to shoot at night, how to achieve black and white color prints in the digital age, infrared photography, how to set up a digital studio and proper lighting in taking each shot.
There are pictures as well as texts so that the person can read first then apply the techniques illustrated in the book.
Famous photographers who have worked for major magazines and newspapers wrote. Be it for money or to spread the word about this art, these are really worth knowing for those who have done this as a hobby or are just starting.
Some other books will also teach the person the different kind of digital cameras that are available in the market. This proves there are pros and cons in choosing one brand over another and how the systems used are very different.
There are other sources aside from books to learn about digital photography. There are people who write articles on the Internet or have websites that have an open forum for those who enjoy this as a hobby.
The main reason why the demand for digital photography is high is because of its affordability. The individual can choose from a wide range of brands that costs less than $500 a piece. The price will be higher for the more high tech versions that professionals will need.
It is one thing to read the book and another to put it into practice. People who decided to get a digital photography book should apply everything that is written to be able to be just as good as those who have been doing for many years.