Tag Archives: Photography 101

Last week, fellow photographers on WordPress.com introduced their workflows and editing processes, and talked about how their very best images move from their cameras to their blogs. Today, we’ll wrap up this discussion and focus on important pre-publish tasks and ways to protect your photography online.

In her Photography 101 tutorial, Leanne Cole introduced us to the basics of image editing, using tools in Adobe Photoshop. As we mentioned, you don’t have to pay for software to edit and process your images — there are free options out there like Pixlr and Picasa, as well as built-in tools on your Mac or editing and organizing tools for Windows, like Photo Gallery.

Today, we’re talking with WordPress.com photographers about their workflows: after a photo shoot, what do they do next? How does an image move from camera to blog? “Getting the shot” is just one part of the process. Whether you’re a professional photographer or a beginning photoblogger, you should have a process for uploading and displaying your images on your blog.

Let’s read how others do it, shall we?

If you’ve followed our Photography 101 series from the beginning, congratulations! We’ve covered the fundamentals of photography — from composition to lighting to color theory — and hope our guest photographer-led tutorials have helped sharpen your visual eye and given you tips for using your camera.

Now that you’ve graduated from this section on the nuts and bolts of photography, let’s talk more about the post-shooting process. So, you’ve taken a bunch of photos in your camera. Now what? Here, photographer Leanne Cole walks us through some image editing basics: straightening; cropping; setting exposure, contrast, and saturation; and spot correcting.

Our last Photography 101 installment focused on color, so it’s only fitting that today we talk about black and white! If you’ve developed your own film in the darkroom, you know that working with black and white is a fun, rewarding experience. These days, many of you use digital cameras, so we’ll focus here on digital photography.

Over on The Gravel Ghost, photographer Merilee Mitchell wows us with her moody and evocative black and white images and photo stories: she captures vast desert landscapes, particularly in Death Valley and around California. In this post, she talks about her passion for black and white photography — and the power of telling stories in monochrome.

Yesterday, Ming Gullo, the photographer at A View with Ming, introduced the basics of color photography. Today, she continues her discussion and talks about hue, saturation, lightness, and contrast.

A look at hue, saturation, and lightness

Hue

Hue is what we usually define as color. The images below illustrate shifts in hue:

Our next stop in our Photography 101 series focuses on yet another essential element of photography: color. In this two-part post, talented WordPress.com photographer, Ming Gullo of A View with Ming, introduces us to the fundamentals of color, from temperature and white balance to hue, saturation, lightness, and contrast. The images on her blog, and below, are vibrant and stunning. Enjoy!

How a camera looks at color

To understand how our cameras recognize colors, let’s first talk about how our eyes recognize colors.

Now that we’ve covered a number of fundamentals in photography, from composition and light to focus and POV, let’s now think about elements out in the world that we can use to create more visually interesting images: shapes, lines, textures, and patterns. Today, we’re excited for photographer Evan Zelermyer, the blogger at Urban Mosaic, to share his ideas and illustrate shape, line, texture, and pattern through his urban, architectural, and abstract photography.

Urban Mosaic is the result of many years spent exploring New York City’s five boroughs, searching for interesting sights and finding lesser-known nooks and crannies. New York is a large and varied place, and serves as an endless source of visual inspiration. The goal on my blog is to provide a fresh perspective on familiar urban sights (streets, subways, architecture, etc.), and also to reveal hidden beauty in the marginal, little-noticed details of everyday city life.

Take…

In our last installment of the Photography 101 series, Matthew George at Photo Lord introduced us to the fundamentals of focus, including depth of field and aperture. Today, photographer Lynn Wohlers at BLUEBRIGHTLY walks us through the basics of point of view, or POV, building on some of the big ideas Ming Thein introduced in his photography overview at the beginning of this series. Lynn illustrates how you can take photographs that show your own perspective — and unique way of looking at the world.

Wanderings, observations, and visual treats — that’s the essence of what I try to provide on my blog. I’m a visual person and I’ve had a camera handy most of my life, using it to document my observations as well as experimenting with it as an artistic tool.

So far in our Photography 101 series, we’ve asked guest photographers to share their insights and tips on various elements of the craft, from light to composition. Today, meet Matthew George: the blogger at Photo Lord, a site that features and recognizes other photographers, and a passionate high school photography teacher. In this installment, Matthew introduces focus and the concepts of depth of field and aperture. 

Finding your focus — the basics

I provide some general guidelines to my students: