It is sometimes used in a derogatory sense to describe the actions of amateur photographers, but that’s really narrow minded because professional and experienced photographers do that all the time.

Well, not for every photo they shoot, but for every important photo, say, the first of a series, to ensure proper exposure, white balance and composition. They review that image on-camera, make any necessary adjustments, shoot another test shot, adjust again until they are satisfied. Then they shoot away, confident that the exposure is correct and all they need to concentrate on is taking pictures.

Chimping is all the more important these days because the display screens on many digital cameras often show a much better image than you may have captured.

Many screens adjust intensity automatically depending on the ambient light and the smaller area often show your pictures as sharp when a closer look (using the magnification feature) often reveals out-of-focus or blurred areas.

You don’t have to chimp every shot you take. If you’re early for a photo shoot session (even if it is your child’s birthday party), take a few test shots and chimp them to see if there’s enough lighting, whether you need to use a lower or higher ISO, whether a tripod is warranted, whether you turned on Image Stabilization, if you need to adjust white balance, if you need to use flash, if the histogram is to your liking, and if you are using the appropriate lens for the setting. Or, simply, if the picture looks good! Then when you have made all adjustments, you can be pretty confident that you can shoot away and not appear [too] amateurish.

The sunny f/16 rule is based on the quantity of light falling on the scene and or subject, negating background tonal influence, and subject size relative to the image frame. It is because on a clear cloudless day the sunlight will peek consistently in intensity depending on latitude from mid morning to mid afternoon that we are able to use this rule consistently and accurately to set the midtone.

The Sunny 16 Rule provides a great starting point for outdoor photography on a sunny day, and cloudy days too. The rule is simple; set your f-stop to 16, and your ISO should be a reciprocal of the shutter speed. Thus, if the ISO is set to 100, the shutter speed should be set to 1/100 (or something close to 1/100, 1/125).

Things to consider :

1. Model – know how to make contracts/release papers, if needed. Tell them the concept/theme of the shoot. Tell them what to expect after the shoot – TFCD/print, food and transpo, xdeal or paid.  Know where to get them – model agency, modeling websites or get to know the model from pervious shoot – have their contact nos and schedule availability in case you will be needing their services again.  Besides having or getting a model, it is important to have a personal working relationship with them.  Making them at ease/relax with you before and during the shoot.  Show them pegs to follow and direct them confidently during the shoot.  Not a rule but an idea – show them the pictures you took and interact with them, get their opinions specially if its an xdeal shoot.

2. MUA(Make Up Artist)//HS(Hair Stylist)  – let them know the concept/theme of the shoot.  Tell them what will they be receiving in the end – food/transpo, xdeal or paid.  Shoot raw portraits that showcase their work – makeup-for xdeals.  No need to do the latter if they are paid in full.

- STYLIST. Responsible for making people look good. They also help to bring the photographer’s or director’s vision to life. Fashion stylists usually work in photo shoots, commercials, movie sets, print advertisements and music videos to style celebrities and models. Fashion stylists show the wearers’ personality and style through the clothes, wardrobes or outfits that they are wearing. They help boost the person’s self-confidence by helping them make a good impression. They basically assume all tasks related to styling and creating fashion visuals.

3. Location/Studio(fees per hr?) – outdoors(permit/no permit-paid/non paid), ex. parks, beaches, old/new bldgs, out of town.  It is advantageous for all participants(model/MUA/Stylist and photographers) to meet halfway.  Camera clubs have mushroomed coz of this reason.

4.  Fees-contributions per head that includes food/drinks.  It is advisable that fees be collected before the shoot.  This gives the organizer a lot of time to audit who and who does not-pay, rather than getting it at the end of the shoot where everybody is gone.  Total collected pay will be sliced based on what fees needed to be paid(model/MUA/Stylist/Location or studio).

5. participants-total number.  This is important for the success and failure of the shoot. Need to make sure that the numbers being met, otherwise, the organizer will pay for the rest.  Meaning, the model/MUA/Stylist fees, food and transpo, location or studio fees and other behind the scene fees.  Flakers/non-confirming are not encourage here.

6. Photo submission – a week after the shoot date.  In CD/Print or can be downloaded thru multiply/flickr or email.  Should be committed on what was agreed upon before and every shoot.

7. Multiply/flickr/facebook posting.  Include the name of model(s), MUA/Hairstylist and Location shoot(optional).

By John Sevigny

Photography has existed since the 1820s, according to most historians, giving the medium a history of less than 200 years. Two-dimensional art, meanwhile, has been around for 20,000 years, as far as we know — with the animals painted on cave walls in Lascaux, France, being among the first-known examples.

As the infant of the visual arts, photography inevitably draws upon the millennia of picture-making that came before it. And the thousands of years of development, thought, research and hard work that have marked the history of art can provide powerful sources of photographic inspiration.

Here are just a few lessons that old paintings can teach us about photography.

Impressionism: Qualities of Light

Most photographers are aware of Impressionism, primarily because it is a movement dealing with natural light and the changing qualities of light. Claude Monet, Georges Seurat and others were more concerned with the way things were seen than with creating realistic descriptions of their subjects.

The movement paralleled the rise of photography. From about 1860 onward, there was a push and pull between the two, as each strove to define itself in relation to the other. At least one painter, Edgar Degas, created photographs himself, and those who study his compositions will recognize immediately that his unusual use of cropping was intrinsically photographic. In fact, it mirrors what most of us do today with Photoshop and other imaging software.

More than anything else, Impressionism reminds us that light is the primary source of an image, painted or photographed, and that the quality of light, which was of great interest to the Impressionists, can make or break a picture.

Chiaroscuro: Using Contrast

An Italian word for “light-dark,” the term “chiaroscuro” is used to describe the dramatically lit, high-contrast oil painting that reached its peak in the 16th Century. When a photographer today makes a portrait lighting a single side of the face while allowing the other to fade to darkness, he or she — perhaps unknowingly — is using a tool wielded by Ugo da Carpi, Giovanni Baglione, and still later, Caravaggio.

Chiaroscuro was a powerful technique in Renaissance art, and it remains so today in the hands of countless photographers. But as anyone who has worked in the studio knows, directing a single, highly directed light source can be a tricky business. Studying Mannerist and Baroque painting is one way to help master the technique.

Mastering Composition

The first and best masters of composition were painters and draftsmen. Most photographers have some awareness of the basic principles of composition: lines, the rule of thirds, shape, proportion and balance. The best painters were masters at using these elements together to create eye-trapping scenes.

Peter Paul Rubens, a Flemish painter working in the 16th and 17th Centuries, took compositional complexity to an extreme. Joan Miro, a 20th Century painter from Spain, used the same principles but applied them sparingly, including few elements in his paintings and drawings.

Some of our greatest photographers, such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Miguel Rio Branco, worked with brushes first and cameras later. Both are masters of formal composition because they spent long hours studying it. A deep familiarity with composition in painting can be applied to photography to create true works of art rather than snapshots.

Abstract Expressionism: Going Deeper

Often characterized by the loved-and-loathed drip paintings of American artist Jackson Pollock, Abstract Expressionism was much more than that. The idea of covering an entire surface with marks, and using non-representational imagery, was one of the most important artistic revolutions of the 20th Century.

The idea is that there is something deeper, something that flows from the subconscious, which can be captured and expressed in art. This is fertile soil for fine-art photographers and those who are interested in pushing their photography in new directions.

Remember, two-dimensional art is at least 10 times as old as Christianity. Photographers should not ignore this part of their visual heritage, but rather, embrace it, build upon it, and apply it to their work. Painting is not photography — but it contains lessons that can make us better at what we do.

Other than the 50-year Canon vs. Nikon holy war, nothing incenses opposing factions in photography circles like the debate over RAW vs. JPEG recording formats.

Why does this topic provide such great fodder for argument? As with most barstool discussions, it’s because there’s no right answer. Neither format is inherently superior to the other; it’s all a matter of how you work and how involved you want to be with image editing.

Most professional photographers favor RAW today, but it’s taken me years to finally join the club. I now shoot RAW almost exclusively — so I thought I’d explain how and why I came to my decision.

Convenience vs. Control

Whenever you take a photograph in the JPEG format, regardless of how you have the camera set up or what mode you’re in, the camera processes your image before you see it. Color saturation and sharpness are enhanced automatically, for example — making your images look as finished as possible right out of the camera.

For a lot of photographers (and photographic situations), this is a good thing. If you just want to drop your card off at the local CVS to be printed, this will vastly improve the quality and “prettiness” factor of your images.

The price you pay for that convenience, however, is that the camera has taken a certain amount of creative control away from you.

You can choose to set the white balance to “cloudy day,” for instance, to warm up shots on a cloudy day — but you are stuck with that white balance. You are also stuck, to a degree, with the exposure that was set when you shot the photo.

In many cases, this isn’t that big a deal. The larger problem is that, in order to keep files as small and manageable as possible and to keep your camera cranking out images as quickly as you can press the shutter button, the camera also compresses those images.

That’s what JPEG is — a compression scenario that shrinks images by tossing out similar pixels before you’ve even seen them. JPEG is known as a “lossy” format, because it loses information during processing.

Lossy vs. Lossless

RAW images, by contrast, are recorded with virtually no behind-the-scenes enhancement. The image that comes out of the camera is almost exactly as you shot it.

In this way, a RAW image is more like a film negative. All of the information is there for you to alter as you see fit in editing, just as you would interpret a negative in the traditional darkroom.

Nothing is lost or left behind in translation. Every pixel that was exposed is maintained, and nothing is compressed. Thus, RAW is referred to as a “lossless” format.

Where RAW really gets interesting, and quite useful, is during the pre-editing process. Whenever you upload and open a RAW file, you first go through a “conversion” step that enables you to change some key things like exposure, white balance, tint, contrast and saturation — and to do so on a very detailed level.

In terms of exposure, for example, you can be off several stops in-camera and actually change the exposure during editing. You’re not just making a curves or levels adjustment, as you can do with a JPEG file; you’re actually changing the exposure. You can also adjust the white balance in any way you like.

If you weren’t sure whether you wanted the image to be warm or cool, for example, or for the dominant light source to be tungsten or daylight, no problem. You can make that decision after the fact.

You can also adjust the hue/saturation/luminosity of each individual color before you even begin to edit the image — quite amazing. And you can pre-adjust curves in the conversion process (though to be honest, I do all of my real curves work in Photoshop after conversion.)

What Won Me Over

It was largely the ability to change the exposure and white balance that won me over. Also, my good friend and one of the world’s premier food photographers, Jon Van Gorder, convinced me that by not tossing away duplicate pixels and by editing in 16 bits instead of 8 bits (another RAW feature), the quality of my images would vastly improve.

I tried it for a few weeks, and he was right. Once I switched to RAW, my images were radically better. I also exercised greater care in my editing; I understood more about what I was doing and why.

Are there downsides to shooting RAW? Yes, but for me they are relatively minor.

For one, RAW files take up huge amounts of both card space and hard drive space. But memory prices have plummeted so much that this is no longer a concern to me. You can buy a terabyte hard drive now for a few hundred dollars — unimaginable when I started shooting digitally.

Shooting RAW does slow you down a bit, because it takes the camera longer to transfer the images from the buffer to your memory card. And there is that extra step in processing to go through as well.

So is RAW better for you? That depends on the type of work you do, the level of quality you demand from your images, how much time you want to spend editing them, and how many memory cards you’re willing to own. Don’t let anyone tell you you’re wrong to shoot JPEG if the balance for you tips in that direction.

But if RAW sounds appealing to you, try it. Once you do, you could find yourself evangelizing in no time.

I brought my flash light stand and silver umbrella.  I was looking for a nice surface with nice background and i found this.

http://remabeza.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/img_3053.jpg

Hope you like what i took.

There will be two stops difference in the exposure reading from nearest to farthest. Quadruple the distance and there will be a 16th of the light which is four stops less light.

The spread of light can be compared to the spread of paint from the nozzle of a spray can. A surface held very close to the spray will receive an intense stream of paint focused in a small area. If the surface is moved back twice as far the spray will cover an area four times greater, but the density of the paint will be four times less (for the same duration of spray).

This dramatic ‘fall off’ is only significant when a light source is close to the subject. The sun is 93 million miles away so the difference of distribution across the earth is imperceptible. However a lamp 2 m from an object of 2 m width will illuminate the closest edge four times as brightly as the far side.

Equally, across a row of people at the same distance the nearest person will be two stops brighter than the farthest. (To make the light distribution more even the light must be either moved away from the subject so that the difference across is less significant – or the light can be bounced, so that the increased area of light will reduce the distance to the overall subject.)

• Most important : make sure that you’re entering your images into the right category.  It might seem obvious but you’d be surprised how many images would be better places ina different category.
• Be original. If you think your images look similar to other shots you’ve seen of the same subject or scene the chances are that the judges have too.  Thing about ways to approach a subject with a fresh vision.
• Play  to your strength. Don’t struggle trying to enter first rate portraits if the landscape is your thing.
• Edit your work ruthlessly.  Photographers can sometimes be their worst enemy when it comes t selecting the right shots.  Try to detach yourself from your emotional connection with your images and look at them with an objective eye.
• If you’re having problem selecting the right image recruit the help of a friend to critique your shots.
• Look at the other images that are being entered, along with the winners from previous years and ask yourself if your shots will stand up against them.  If not, go back to the drawing board and shooot some more.
• Read the category descriptions carefuly.  If the judges are looking for a fresh take on a subject, don’t submit cliches.
• Don’t go over the top with your post processing with the exception of the Digital Creative category the judges are unlikely to be impressed by heavy handed digital darkroom work.
• Competition is about finding well crafted and creative images and it is also about you having fun with your camera.

Nikon Non-DX
AF NIKKOR 14mm f/2.8D ED
AF Fisheye-NIKKOR 16mm f/2.8D
AF NIKKOR 20mm f/2.8D
AF NIKKOR 24mm f/2.8D
AF NIKKOR 28mm f/2.8D
AF NIKKOR 35mm f/2D
AF-S NIKKOR 50mm f/1.4G
AF NIKKOR 50mm f/1.4D
AF NIKKOR 50mm f/1.8D
AF NIKKOR 85mm f/1.4D IF
AF NIKKOR 85mm f/1.8D
AF DC-NIKKOR 105mm f/2D
AF DC-NIKKOR 135mm f/2D
AF NIKKOR 180mm f/2.8D IF-ED
AF-S VR NIKKOR 200mm f/2G IF-ED
AF-S VR NIKKOR 300mm f/2.8G IF-ED
AF-S NIKKOR 300mm f/4D IF-ED
AF-S NIKKOR 400mm f/2.8G ED VR
AF-S NIKKOR 500mm f/4G ED VR
AF-S NIKKOR 600mm f/4G ED VR
AF-S NIKKOR 14-24mm f/2.8G ED
AF-S Zoom-NIKKOR 17-35mm f/2.8D IF-ED
AF Zoom-NIKKOR 18-35mm f/3.5-4.5D IF-ED
AF-S NIKKOR 24-70mm f/2.8G ED
AF Zoom-NIKKOR 24-85mm f/2.8-4D IF
AF-S VR Zoom-NIKKOR 24-120mm f/3.5-5.6G IF-ED
AF-S VR Zoom-NIKKOR 70-200mm f/2.8G IF-ED
AF-S VR Zoom-NIKKOR 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6G IF-ED
AF Zoom-NIKKOR 70-300mm f/4-5.6G
AF Zoom-NIKKOR 80-200mm f/2.8D ED
AF VR Zoom-NIKKOR 80-400mm f/4.5-5.6D ED
AF-S VR Zoom-NIKKOR 200-400mm f/4G IF-ED
AF Micro-NIKKOR 60mm f/2.8D
AF-S Micro-NIKKOR 60mm f/2.8G ED
AF-S VR Micro-NIKKOR 105mm f/2.8G IF-ED
AF Micro-NIKKOR 200mm f/4D IF-ED

Canon FF
EF 16-35mm f/2.8L II USM
EF 17-40mm f/4L USM
EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM
EF 28-105mm f/3.5-4.5 II USM
EF 24-105mm f/4L IS USM
EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM
EF 28-200mm f/3.5-5.6 USM
EF 28-300mm f/3.5-5.6L IS USM
EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM
EF 70-200mm f/2.8L USM
EF 70-200mm f/4L IS USM
EF 70-200mm f/4L USM
EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM
EF 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 DO IS USM
EF 75-300mm f/4-5.6 III USM
EF 75-300mm f/4-5.6 III
EF 100-300mm f/4.5-5.6 USM
EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM
EF 14mm f/2.8L II USM
EF 15mm f/2.8 Fisheye
EF 20mm f/2.8 USM
EF 24mm f/1.4L II USM
EF 24mm f/2.8
EF 28mm f/2.8
EF 35mm f/1.4L USM
EF 35mm f/2
EF 28mm f/1.8 USM
EF 50mm f/1.2L USM
EF 50mm f/1.4 USM
EF 50mm f/1.8 II
EF 85mm f/1.2L II USM
EF 85mm f/1.8 USM
EF 100mm f/2 USM
EF 135mm f/2L USM
EF 135mm f/2.8 with Softfocus
EF 200mm f/2.8L II USM
EF 300mm f/4L IS USM
EF 200mm f/2L IS USM
EF 300mm f/2.8L IS USM
EF 400mm f/2.8L IS USM
EF 400mm f/4 DO IS USM
EF 400mm f/5.6L USM
EF 500mm f/4L IS USM
EF 600mm f/4L IS USM
EF 800mm f/5.6L IS USM
EF 50mm f/2.5 Compact Macro
MP-E 65mm f/2.8 1-5x Macro Photo
EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM
EF 180mm f/3.5L Macro USM
TS-E 17mm f/4L
TS-E 24mm f/3.5L II
TS-E 45mm f/2.8
TS-E 90mm f/2.8