Friday Finds: Reflections

Welcome everyone to another week of Friday Finds! This week, I found a lot of interesting links to keep your photographic wheels a-spinning! Whether you’re a beginner, advanced or like photo editing in the digital darkroom, there’s something here that will interest you!

This week’s Friday Find photographic theme is: Reflections. All the photos in this article are licensed under Creative Commons for legal use. Clicking on the photo will take you to its Flickr page, so be sure to go see some other work by these photographers! You can find all 18 inspiring reflection shots on my Friday Finds: Reflections Flickr Gallery!

I’ve been seriously thinking about announcing the Friday Find theme in advance and allowing my readers to submit their applicable photos for use in the next week’s article. Sort of like a blog hop, but you could enter any photograph you’ve ever taken, not a fresh one. What do you think? Would you be interested in participating? Let me know and stay tuned next week after I figure out the details! It would probably be required that you upload the photo to Flickr since I create a Flickr gallery for every Friday Finds.

Basic Photography

• Amy Deputy’s Unique Photography Tips – You absolutely must watch this video if you’re a new photographer! Professional photographer of 20 years, Amy Deputy discusses progressing in your photography. Challenge yourself. Ask for critique. Always. It’s never ending.
• Shooting Raw is the Only Way – I’ve linked to this article a couple times each week, but it deserves repeating. Shooting in Raw is easy and you don’t allow your camera to do your first round of post-processing! If you’re NOT shooting in Raw, you really should start. If my saying so doesn’t convince you (why would it?) check out this article and try to come up with an excuse NOT to shoot in Raw!
• Photography 101: Exposure Compensation – This is something I don’t use, though I recall playing with it shortly after starting project 365. Using spot metering, I find I can just meter a new spot and reshoot if the exposure isn’t quite right when shooting in my usual aperture priority mode, but this is a quick and easy way to compensate your exposure!
• Photography 101: How to Read a Histogram – This article came right on time for me as I just figured out how to view my histogram in camera (on my Nikon D50, you just push the up arrow on the directional pad until it displays). Looking at the histogram is a great way to tell if your photograph’s exposure is well balanced.
• A Secret Tip to Becoming a Better Photographer – Basically, the secret is to look at more photos with a critical eye. Become a photo editor and compile collections or galleries of photographs. I was delighted to stumble across this article since that’s exactly what I’ve been doing on my Friday Finds!

Intermediate to Advanced Photography

• How to Get the Best Results from Ultra Wide Lenses – I don’t have a wide angle lens at all, you folks know at the moment I’m stuck with only my 50mm. Still, I found this article very interesting with wonderful tips and beautiful photographs!
• Complete Workflow, Storage and Backup for Photography – This video went way beyond me technically, but I enjoyed the opportunity to see a cute guy talk about photography for 10 miinutes!
• How to Shoot Fireworks – With the 4th of July coming up in the US, these are superb tips to get some of those beautiful explosions caught on film (or SD card, whatever).
• Flare Fun: F Stop Fridays – These Prices is a wonderful blog I highly recommend! She has an ongoing series called F Stop Fridays which explain a simple photographic technique. Last week she talked about the best ways to capture sun flare and illustrated her examples with awe-inspiring photographs of her cute dogs! Be sure to check out this site for more great tips and superb writing!

Fun Photography Articles and Conversations

• Involuntary Faces – A fun collection of faces that can be found in the strangest places and a challenge to photograph some of your own involuntary faces!
• Feedback: It’s a Matter of Authority & Credibility – The author tells the tale of a wedding photographer calling him in tears because someone gave a mean and non-constructive critique online. Indeed, I know of some critique groups on Flickr (Delete*Me comes to mind!) that are downright mean and its members aren’t really qualified to say anything negative about one’s work. The author maintains that you should only ask for critiques from photographers who are well known and credible. I disagree, as you can be somewhat anonymous online while still having credibility in the photographic community through your photostream, website and comments to others. I find the whole back and forth discussion rather amusing from someone who identifies himself only as “admin” on his site.
• The Illegal HDR Follow-Up – This is an amazing story in and of itself, which is a follow-up to this photographer taking an HDR photograph in New York’s St. Patricks Cathedral! Unfortunately the blogger breaks a few basic blogging rules as he mentions a previous post and there is no link to the post, nor a previous entry link that can be used to navigate the site. I did the digging so you don’t have to; here’s the link to the original entry referenced: My St Patrick’s Cathedral HDR Photo Story

Digital Darkroom

• Old Farm Windmill Before and After – This is a wonderful example of what textures can do for a photo and also has several wonderful, free texture resources!
• How to Create a Simple Composite: Photoshop Creative – One of the more popular casual uses of Photoshop is to join two images together or take a part of one image and insert it into another. This wonderful tutorial shows you step by step with screenshots how to do this seamlessly!
• The Fast Way to Remove Dark Circles Under Eyes in Photoshop – This probably isn’t the best way to accomplish this, but this tutorial does show you how to easily use Photoshop’s patch tool, which is something I’ve wanted to learn more about lately. I’m excited to put it to use!
• A Complete Guide to Photoshop Shortcuts – The article mentions CS4 specifically, but I have CS3 and didn’t have a problem using any of these shortcuts, so I think they’re mostly standard. There are some great, quick tips in here! If you don’t use shortcuts in Photoshop, I’d highly recommend taking a few minutes to learn some. They are huge time savers!
• You Suck at Photoshop 10: Vanishing Point – Donnie Hoyle is a comedic genius and a Photoshop master! His You Suck At Photoshop videos are awesome on so many levels! This brilliant video highlights the Vanishing Point tool in Photoshop. I’m not sure when I’d ever need to use this, but it’s kind of creepy.

Please be sure to visit my Be Inspired page as there were many new bloghops and photo challenges added this week! I’ve also subscribed to tons of new photographer’s blogs, so check out a couple of awesome sites on my links page. Finally, I started a new page to display all the textures I have offered up for your taking: Free Textures! I don’t know if any of them are any good yet, but if you use them I would LOVE to know about it! Even better if you use a texture and give me permission to post the before and after on my textures page!

That’s it for this week! Did you find any great articles this week you’d like to share?