RoyalTutorial.com » Photography

Haunted House Photomanipulation

Royal Tutorial — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 15:26:44 +0000

As if a haunted house wasn’t scary enough on Halloween, let’s leave it up to some creative minds to make them even scary. This set of photographic and digital art brings out the deepest horrors and fears inside most of us. Imagine staying in one of these haunted mansion for a night by yourself!

No related posts.

Halloween Super Hero Costumes

Royal Tutorial — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 15:00:04 +0000

Halloween is the time of time of year when we can all dress up and be who ever we want to be. For many of us, it’s to be our favorite super hero or villain. This post will show off some of the fancy and creative costume work from portfolios and designers displaying their work at DeviantArt.

No related posts.

Zombies Photography

Royal Tutorial — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 20:45:18 +0000

It’s that time of year again for Zombies to run a muck in our neighborhoods and cities. This collection is an assortment of Zombie photography images taken from the wonderful members of DeviantArt. Be sure to get your share of blood and brains this Halloween!

No related posts.

Create a Flickr Widget for your blog.

BenSpark — Wed, 26 May 2010 15:52:19 +0000

Flickr is one of the most popular photo hosting sites around. You can post your photos, add notes to them, put them in collections and sets. You can interact socially with other photographers with comments and groups and discussions. You can post photos to your blog and send them to be bookmarked on Delicious. But that is not all you can do.

From RoyalTutorial Images

You can create widgets to display your photos on your blog in interesting ways. Flickr calls this a badge. You can create an HTML badge or a Javascript badge and add them to your blog. I created a couple of different sized badges that I provide to other bloggers so they can share my Photo-A-Day photos on their blog. IT is a really easy thing to do. First you have to find it. Scroll to the bottom of your Flickr page and locate the link to Tools.

From RoyalTutorial Images

From there you are going to go to the page where you can download the Flickr uploader and other tools for posting photos to Flickr, but what about expanding Flickr. For that you need to locate the link to Hey! Where is the badge?.

From RoyalTutorial Images

At this point you are presented with a choice. Will you create an HTML badge or a Javascript badge. Let’s opt for the HTML badge, more compatible with many of the free services that won’t allow javascript. Pick your poison (HTML or javascript) and then we can pick the flavor (content).

From RoyalTutorial Images

You can now choose to display your photos, a group’s photos or everyone’s photos. If you are looking to just display photos from your own set then you can choose that set. I decided that I wanted to display all of my photos that were tagged with “photo-a-day”

From RoyalTutorial Images

Once you’ve chosen the content for your badge you are presented with options to choose how that badge is going to look, will it be vertical or horizontal, will you use square images, thumbnails or mid-size images. How many images would you like to display (1,3,5 or 10). Do you want the most recent or a random selection of images? And, do you want your buddy icon (avatar) on the badge. You can also junk everything and style the badge by yourself, but that would be in another tutorial)

From RoyalTutorial Images

Once you have made your selections you can then choose the colors for the badge. You can change the background, border, links and text. You can also remove the background and border. This is a great way to match your new Flickr badge to your current blog theme. Once this is complete you can get the code so that you can post it to your site.

From RoyalTutorial Images

On the code page all you can do is copy the code. You cannot edit the code on this page because it will always revert to the code that Flickr supplies. So copy the code and then post it to your blog, there you can make any edits that you wish. Here is one of the options that people can post to their own blogs of my final badge.

From RoyalTutorial Images

I tweaked the code a bit myself and can probably do much more with CSS however for the basic user going through the steps should take care of most people’s needs.

No related posts.

Everytrail makes Geotagging Easy

BenSpark — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 15:00:16 +0000

From RoyalTutorial Images

I have a Motorola Droid and I often use it to take photos when I am out and about. I take the Droid with me everywhere. I enjoy geotagging my photos and have many different options to accomplish this with my photos. The easiest way so far is to take photos with my Droid and post them to Picasa because they are automatically geotagged because of the GPS in the phone itself. Suppose that you want to collect your entire trip and be able to go back and see them along the travel trail.

If you have an iPhone or an Android phone you can use EveryTrail, a great program that allows you to capture your trips along with location and photos. Every time you take a photo with your camera phone you can title it and post it to your recorded trail. Then you can go back and watch your trip like a slide show but instead of transitions you move along the trail and the photo or video appears at that location.

From RoyalTutorial Images

If you are going to take photos and capture your trip here are some tips to make your cameraphone photos better.

Light the subject well
Play with the White Balance
Get Close
Clean off the lens, keep it clean
Hold Still
Do not use the zoom, use the manual zoom, move your feet
Use the highest resolution on your phone.

Here are a few other resources I found on taking better camera phone photos:

Geek to Live: Take better cameraphone photos

12 Tips for Improving Camera Phone Photos

SnapFish: how to take better camera phone photos

Share your best Cameraphone Photos in the comments.

No related posts.

Get your Work in a Museum

BenSpark — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 15:00:38 +0000

Imagine your photos hanging in famous museums all over the world. Can you picture your fantastic photos hanging for all the world to see. What one would you choose to frame and hang? I picked one of my prettier photos and decided to frame it and hang it using Museumr through the fun photo enhancing site Dumpr. So here is one of my photos using one of the framing options.

To make your photos into works of art is very easy. You simply go to Dumpr.net and choose Museumr. There you pick your photo or upload a photo and then choose museum you want to hang your photo in.

From RoyalTutorial Images

Once you choose Museumr then you have to decide where to get your photo. You can upload one from your computer, grab one from Flickr or even from any web url you can find. So you can do some very cool stuff with other people’s photos and send them to those people. Be creative and have fun.

From RoyalTutorial Images

Once you have selected your photo and museum then you get your finished product.

From RoyalTutorial Images

At this point you can choose to upload the photo to Flickr, save it to your computer or e-mail it to someone. Here is one of my final products.

What will you make?

No related posts.

Some Macro Help

BenSpark — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 15:00:07 +0000

I’m a fan of Macro photography. Once you start with macro photography you start looking around at your surrounding in a whole new way. I had a run of macro photography that I really enjoyed doing a year or so ago. I need to get back into it. So before I do I figured I’d get myself back into Macro Shooting shape with a few video tutorials.

And if I get really ambitious I can go for a weekend project after I finish a stack of Pringles. Weekend Project: Macro Photography on a Budget This tutorial is from Make Magazine and includes an article with all the instructions.

You can see my volume of Macro shots on Flickr.

No related posts.

Hack your Canon

BenSpark — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 15:00:51 +0000

I have a Canon SD800is camera, I bought that one and the SD600is about four years ago. I take this camera everywhere with me and I have dinged it up many times. It is a workhorse and I am happy with the results I get from it. About a year ago I learned about this CHDK (Canon Hacker’s Development Kit) from Lifehacker and I installed the Canon Hacker’s Development Kit onto one of my SD cards (I accidentally formatted the thing a while back and never reinstalled it but will soon) so that I could shoot some time lapse stuff. I wanted to be able to set it and forget it when I took a bike ride. The closest I came was a Shopping cart and a Stroller ride with my daughter.

The Canon Hacker’s Development Kit is a piece of code that you can install on your SD card to be able to run all sorts of scripts that enhance and extend the capabilities of regular old point and shoot Canon cameras. The time lapse script is called the Ultra Intervalometer and with it you can set the rate at which your camera takes pictures. So if you wanted to have the camera take photos every 10 seconds as you rode your bike around your town you could do that with the CHDK.

That is just one of the scripts that have been created to automate and unlock special features of your camera. Some other features of the CHDK are enhanced image capture. You can actually capture RAW images on a point and shoot. You can set longer exposure times, you can even see more info like remaining battery life, histogram, depth of focus. The Lifehacker article and the CHDK wiki are great information sources for you to hack your Canon as well. If you do it let me know and share your experiments in the comments below.

No related posts.