Friday Finds: Camera Phone Shots

Welcome to another week of Friday Finds! I am glad that I opened up this challenge to participants because I had so much fun looking through your submissions! If I didn’t pick your photograph this week, it might be because of your creative commons license or you might not allow others to share your work. Check the rules for more information.

This week’s theme was: Camera Phone Shots, proving that it’s not your equipment, it’s YOU who takes the photograph. Check Flickr for the entire gallery of camera phone shot picks this week!

At the end of the article you can see more submissions from the Flickr pool and find next week’s theme.

Photography

• The Importance of a Lens Hood – I’ve been thinking that my next accessory purchase should be a lens hood and this article put a nail in the coffin!
• How to Take a Kick-Butt Silhouette – Some great tips and beautiful pictures to go along with them!
• Teaching Photography to Beginners – This is a great article if you like helping others.
• The Best of the Worst: Internet Photography – This article pissed me off a bit. Maybe it’s because so many of my own shots are completely cliche or maybe it’s because I posted my own blurry firework shot just because that’s all we got and I wanted to remember the night. Can’t people have fun and do what they want with their own photography? Some photographers have an air of smugness about them. It’s one thing to post a photo and then what could have been better about it, but he’s using someone’s work in an article and directly scolding them for ever publishing it to the internet in the first place. Then at the end, he’s all, “have fun!” Yeah, so people like you can rip us apart.
  Update 7/22/10 – My Broken Link detector tells me Fuel Your Photography pulled this article. I searched and couldn’t find it. Interesting.
• 5 Foolproof Tips for Photographing Kids – I already practice all of these except the first since I only ever shoot my own kids and I don’t need to win them over. I especially like the tip of forgetting the look-straight-at-the-camera-and-smile poses. Capturing a kid’s true expression is priceless!
• How to Shoot Light Trails – This is a really cool technique to show movement at night. Tips for setting up the shots and of course, gorgeous examples!
• Texture Photography Essentials and Tips – This articles goes over three types of texture in photography used to enhance details, drama or information.

Professional Photography

• 12 Excuses for Shooting Photos for Free — and Why They’re Bogus – I’m not a professional photographer of course, but the business does interest me in general. I think this is a great article to help you NOT offer your services for free. Sometimes it’s expected and sometimes it’s you giving away the farm, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
• Help for Photographers to Stand Out – What will separate you from your competition?

Photo Editing

• Getting the Most out of Your M4H Actions – This article was written specifically to highlight My 4 Hens wonderful actions, however the concept is easily applied to all actions and ties in nicely with my recommendation yesterday not to accept out of the box results.
• Photoshop: Smooth Skin Tutorial – Quick video to show you how to easily smooth out skin in photoshop!
• Non-Destructive Dodging and Burning – For the love of all that is holy, don’t dodge and burn directly on your background layer!
• Contest: Win Photoshop CS5 and MCP Photoshop Actions – There are still a couple of days to enter Jodi’s contest to win Photoshop CS5 or MCP Gift Cards!
• How to Prevent and Edit Out Reflections on Glasses – Some quick tips for photographing subjects wearing glasses and a quick Photoshop tutorial on using the healing brush tool!

Just Fun

• Flickr’s New Photo Page: 5 Great Things You’d Notice & Love – I love Flickr and have been using the new photo page for several weeks now. I still don’t like how “Older” and “Newer” directions are switched around and I don’t really care to see the map of where the photo was taken, but other than that I like it!

Video of the Week

There are tons of great videos on YouTube which teach photography and photo editing. I’m going to start featuring one video here each week!

This tutorial discusses the importance of light and three different kinds of light that will effect your photography: direct, diffused and reflected.

More Camera Phone Goodness

Thanks again to everyone who submitted a photograph to the Flickr pool this week! Here are some more great submissions:

The Next Theme Is: Macros!

In honor of me getting my cool new close-up filters I want to see what you can do with macro photography! Please enter your submissions to the Flickr pool by next Friday morning and tag the photograph with dwc-macro if you’d like the thumbnail to display on this site. You can see current submissions and read through the qualification guidelines on the Friday Finds page

Link Up

If you’d like to help promote the challenge, feel free to grab my button and link to this page!

This button was made by Christy of Skinned Knees. The photograph used is New “Camera”!, used under the Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Share YOUR favorite reads this week and link up to Friday Favorites at Life Without Pink!

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