phewse photoblog

One of my favorite parts of having a digital camera is how easy it is to share your photos with others. With a few clicks of the mouse, photos can be online and accessible to friends, family, and even people on the other side of the globe. So what’s the best way to do this? Well, there are several options:

Use an online photo printing service

There are many sites out there, such as Snapfish or KodakGallery, that are primarily for uploading photos to be printed. But, they can also be used to share photos with others.

The best part about using an online printing service to share photos is that everything is one place—you can share and print photos all from the same site. Prints are generally decent quality and quite cheap. But, unfortunately, sharing usually leaves a lot to be desired. There is little to no community aspect to these sites; for the most part, you put up your photos, and other people view them—no commenting, critiques, etc. Also, it can be a chore to allow others to view your photos, sometimes requiring viewers to register before seeing them.

My advice: Use photo printing sites for what they’re made for: printing your photos, not sharing them.

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Some helpful photography blogs I’ve come across recently:

• SyncSpeed
• DigiSniper
• DIY Photography
• Digital Photography School

I’d definitely recommend checking these sites out—there’s some great information to be found from them all.

Online photo communities have helped me improved a lot over the years, as they are generally home to some very knowledgeable people and are great places to post photos to for critique. Here are a few I’ve been part of:

• Flickr
  Without a doubt, this is my favorite—I’m planning on writing a full post on it at some point, but for right now I’ll leave it at the basics. Flickr is an excellent photosharing community complete with everything you would want from one; it’s very easy to use, there are some very knowledgeable people to help you, and it’s fun!
• FredMiranda.com
  This is a great resource for any type of photographer, beginner to professional. With forums for all different topics, you can post images for review and also ask gear related questions. There is a huge userbase, so questions are generally answered very quickly, and there are loads of very photo-savvy people to help you out. There is strong base of digital users, although there are plenty of film users as well.
• Photo Takers
  I just joined Photo Takers, but so far it seems to be great. Once again, some very intelligent people and there’s a large userbase, although it doesn’t seem quite as big as fredmiranda. The people seem very helpful, and if you’re more of a beginning photographer, this may be a little better for you, as they have more boards dedicated to photographic techniques as opposed to just putting photos up for critique.

As I find more communities, I’ll definitely post them, but these three are my favorites right now.

For the weekend, my family and I are up at our house on Sebago Lake, Maine, and I was out taking some photos of my mom as she floated on the raft. I took one of my favorites into Photoshop and did some editing, and in the process I got some help online as well. Here’s the final image:

So, first off, after playing around with levels and curves (good look at the curves tool here), I wanted to make this photo very sharp, if not oversharp, so I could get a lot of texture from the way she was squinting her eyes. A lot of places I’ve read always rave about using unsharp mask, so I did a little searching for info, and I came across this site on how to use it. After reading through and trying it, however, it didn’t quite turn out like I wanted. However, as I was doing this, I was also watching the Radiant Vista Sizing Files for Web tutorial, and he mentioned something about Smart Sharpen, so I tried that and really liked the effect I got.

Then, I wanted to give it a bit of a “grittier” type of feel, and I came across the Lazlo toning action which, after playing around with a bit, gave me exactly the look I wanted.

Finally, using the Radiant Vista method for resizing files for the web that I mentioned, I resized the image and put it up on flickr.

The other day, while browsing around, I came across The Radiant Vista, a really excellent site with loads of information. I watched a few of the video tutorials, most notably Combining Two Exposures and Making Sophisticated Selections.

The Radiant Vista offers all sorts of great help, such as The Photoshop Workbench, which is a really great feature, where:

Every week a 15 to 20 minute video will be available for download. This video will feature a submitted image onscreen in Photoshop with a soundtrack, which will contain suggestions on getting the most out of your image in the digital darkroom. These suggestions follow a general workflow making it very easy to pick up tips and tricks.

I really love learning visually, and this site definitely pulls it off. They offer PDF tutorials in addition to videos, and all of their videos are offered in Quicktime, Windows Media, and iPod formats.