Photo Editing

After familiarizing yourself with your camera and learning how to transfer pictures from it to you computer you will need to get some sort of photo editing software.

There are a few freebies you can download from the Internet but at some point, if you are serious about photography you are going to have to invest in Photoshop or something equivalent. Personally, I think Photoshop reigns King. I have both Elements 6 and CS3. CS4 is out but I have heard some negatives and will stick with CS3 for now.

People who know little about photography think of Photoshop only as a means of doctoring a photo by dragging things into the photo that originally weren't there or taking things out such as power lines or some one's ex-husband. That is not the purpose of Photo editing at all. Nothing is sadder than to discard a good photo because it is badly exposed. So much can be fixed as seen in the before and after of the photos below.

Photoshop or photo editing software is the digital photographer's dark room. It is a must for any serious photographer to learn and be skillful at photo editing. If you learn nothing else in Photoshop learn how to re size and crop a picture, change the exposure by adjusting the levels, increase and decrease the saturation, and increase and decrease the contrast. These are the same things a Photographer did in the dark room with film.

Also, one final tip - always save a copy of your original photo before editing... meaning you will have two copies on your computer - the original photo and the edited photo. Every time you edit a photo it looses a little bit in the process. If you want to do something to that photo later you may not have enough to work with in the edited copy.

Camera Settings

These shots, which I thought were good, broke my heart. There was this terrific sky with the sun setting behind the hill and the old farm house out in front giving a great photo opp. I jumped out of the car and got as many shots as I could before the light was gone.

I looked on the back of my camera and many were, I thought, exceptional. Later, I would discover that they were all shot in Standard Quality JPEG. I had been shooting in RAW earlier in the day and thought I might be running out of space and decided to change to HQ JPEG but must have accidentally put it on SQ. Every one of them were smaller than 1 MB leaving me very little to work with in Photoshop and not very good for prints.

With prices so cheap now for large format video cards, there is no reason to shoot in SQ - EVER. I have a 4GB SanDisk in my camera and I carry a 2GB as back up - although I doubt that I will ever use it.

Customizing Your Camera Settings

Once I found out where to find controls on my camera, what they did and how to use them I discovered I had new question. Were the factory default settings the best settings? What did I need my function button to do, how much of an Ev step was best, did I need to adjust the picture mode settings? What settings had professional photographers who had used my camera determined made the best pictures and worked the smoothest. I discovered that they indeed chose to change many of the factory default settings in the Olympus 510. For example, by setting the noise option to "off" I found I had a much better picture. It is really only needed if the ISO is cranked up really high and then only in the "low" setting.

http://www.wrotniak.net/photo/43/e510-sett.html#LOCKRECOM is a great site for customising your settings for the Olympus E-510 or E-410. The web site also has a detailed review of the cameras which I found very helpful. There are other cameras in review there as well.

Once I lived with the suggested settings for awhile I then tweaked them a little to my liking, but pretty much found the suggestions to be spot on.

Camera Specific Tutorial for Dummies Found!

After having waited about 7 years to take the photography classes I'd dreamed of, I found I was sorely disappointed - at least in the beginning. I realize now I was just sorely lost. I had just bought my camera and had no idea how to operate it. I'd jumped into these classes with terms like apertures, white balance and metering and I had no idea how to find or set these features in my camera. There were only two of us with Olympus Cameras in the class and the other person was more lost than me. The instructor was a Nikon person and had boned up on Cannon but made it clear he couldn't hold the class back to figure out how my camera would set a custom white balance. He told me to read the manual then if I still didn't understand it he'd help me after class next time. I couldn't understand the manual. THAT was why I was in the class!

Being the impatient person I am, I didn't wait until next class to meet with my instructor. I started googling my camera on the Internet and low and behold there was LIGHT! On http://www.youtube.com/ there is video after video of people explaining every button, where it is, what it does and how to operate it. I found the Holy Grail! Just enter your camera make and model in the search bar. I spent hours there and have to say that by the time I went to class three, I was a master of my camera!

I did not go this route myself, but found out later that http://www.elitevideo.com/ sells really good instructional videos on just about any camera made. They are very detailed and go over every feature and button. Prices range from about $35 to $79 from what I could tell.

I had to understand how to operate my camera before I could move forward in understanding the technical side of photography. Once I did this, I was in the game.

Where Is A Digital Geek When You Need One?

It took me about two days to realize how over my head this new digital camera was. I'm pretty technically savvy for a Real Estate Agent / Mom / Grandma. This camera had more buttons on it than a 747! I had no idea how to operate it. The book was written in Geek and made no sense to me. I really wanted to know HOW to get the most out of this camera.

I looked for the University Catalog. The timing was right. I'd had my best year in Real Estate and my kids were grown. I signed up for a Fundamentals One class thinking that is all I would ever want or need to take. I mean all I really needed to know was what all those other buttons besides the green "A" on my camera would do, right? Yea... right!

Digital Deliema

I had tried a little Kodak digital camera when they first came out and hated it. It never worked right and the pictures were awful; but about 2006 I realized the digital camera quality was catching up to 35 mm. I knew that when the prices came down it would be much more cost effective to have a digital in the long run. I also liked the idea of being able to review your results imediately on the back of the camera.

In 2007 I started asking around and researching digital cameras. I was thinking seriously about a Cannon Rebel. One day my Broker told me of a lady that was trying to break into the photography business that would take really good pictures of my houses for nothing because she wanted the experience. I called her and used her as much as my conscience would let me without paying her - twice. She was really good. We stayed in touch and when I was just about to make the plunge I decided to call her first. She used an Olympus and liked it. It came from the box with two lenses - a wide angle and a telephoto. This would be perfect for me since I needed to take pictures wide angle for inside my houses and I loved doing nature photography as well. I looked up Olympus on the web and found nothing but positive posts. It had a stablizing feature in the body that many of the cameras didn't have. In March 2008 I bought my Olympus E-510. This picture of the blue bird on a bucket was one of the first pictures I took with my new camera. I was hand holding and this is zoomed up to about 7x. A little shake, but not bad.

The Hunger Begins

I saved my money and bought a Pentax ZX-7 35mm. Again, I never got past the "auto" mode - but loved it. Well, I did play around some with the macro feature without any outstanding results. But the landscapes were awesome. The camera really made me want to learn more about photography because I knew this camera was capable of so much more than what I could do with it on green "A".

About this same time, out of the blue, I started receiving a University Professional Studies Catalog in the mail every semester. I had never taken any of their classes, but loved looking through it. Every time it would come I would scan it from front to back and dog ear the pages with classes I'd like to take. The one that ALWAYS got turned down for sure was the page on photography classes. There was always an excuse. My job took a lot of my time, I was married and had kids so didn't want to be away nights, and finally money. It seemed like such an extravagant thing to do when we needed so many other things. I really did not see myself ever being able to take the classes, but I'd dog ear those pages just the same.

First REAL Camera

We were a nature loving family. Spent almost every weekend outdoors when I was growing up; backpacking, camping, and canoeing mostly. I really loved to take nature and landscape pictures. Taking pictures, however; was secondary to everything else I was doing. I never even considered spending a lot of money for a camera until I was in my mid thirties.

I was a Realtor and needed a decent camera to take photos of my listings. I knew nothing about cameras so my first purchase pretty much entailed walking into a camera shop and talking to the guy behind the counter explaining what I needed and how much I was willing to spend. He sold me a Minolta. It was one you could keep in "automatic" and it would make all the choices for you, or you could use it on manual and make your own. Of course I chose the former.

I took this picture of a sun set in California with it. I was very impressed with the results and took some really good pictures with that camera for quite awhile.

The pop up flash stopped working within about a year but I just worked around that by using 400 speed film whenever I photographed inside. Yea, this meant that I wasted a lot of film. For years my camera and I limped along like this. The rewind button finally did us in. It was this little rubber dot you had to press with the tip of a pen or something small like that. Eventually it stopped working for me. I took it to the camera shop and they told me it would cost more to fix it than the camera was worth. I'd had it about 8 years by then I think.

My Very First Camera

This was the first picture I remember taking. It was at girl scout camp and that is my girlfriend in the tree.

I must have just gotten my first camera and I was eleven. I probably got it to take on this trip. It was a Kodak Instamatic. I can't remember the model or anything but I know the first pictures I took with it were in black and white. That little Instamatic was a trooper. Even a kid couldn't kill it.

When I was about 15 I got a Polaroid. I was excited because it meant I wouldn't have to depend on my parents to get my film developed and the results were instantaneous. But the pictures weren't very good and the film was expensive. I went back to using the little Instamatic. I finally drowned it in a river on a canoe trip when I was in my 20's.