Master Your DSLR Camera, Part 2: Manual Mode and More

More Master Your DSLR Camera, Part 2: Manual Mode and More

The GIMP

I've decided I'm going to give the GIMP a try. I've grown tired of Adobe Photoshop's ever-increasing cost and complexity and Photoshop Lightroom's cost. I'm looking for less for a lot less. I don't need (yet!) any fancy stuff. I've been using Photoshop Elements and find its image editing features to be solid, yet its photo cataloging abilities to be sub-par.

As far as I know, GIMP offers little, if any, cataloging/tagging/metadata capabilities. But that's okay because I've also been using Picasa, which is FREE, easy, and -- so far -- bulletproof.

So I'm going to begin using Picasa and the GIMP together to see if I can't rival something similar in functionality to Photoshop Lightroom.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Master Your DSLR Camera, Part 1: Program Mode

From lifehacker:

This is a nice beginning article on how to use program mode on your digital camera. It talks about flash, ISO, and white balance, to start.

Master Your DSLR Camera, Part 1: Program Mode

Twelve Essential Photographic Rules

From popphoto.com comes this list of 12 rules of photography:

1. Sunny 16 Rule
The basic exposure for an average scene taken on a bright, sunny day is f/16 at a shutter speed equivalent to one over the ISO setting—that is, f/16 at 1/100 sec at ISO 100. From this you can interpolate, and try f/22 at the beach, f/11 on a cloudy-bright day, etc.

6. Largest Digital Print Rule
To calculate in inches the largest photo-quality print you can make with a digital camera, divide the vertical and horizontal pixel counts (see your manual) by 200. For critical applications, or if you want exhibition-quality prints, divide the pixel counts by 250.

10. Megapixel Multiplier Rule
To double the resolution in a digital camera, you must increase the number of megapixels by a factor of four—not two. Why? The number of pixels in both the vertical and horizontal dimensions must be doubled to double the pixel density across the image sensor.

Twelve Essential Photographic Rules - - PopPhotoSeptember 2007