My payback to a nice person

[MichaelHarris]

I want to do something for whoever gave me a star. Since I don't know who it was I decided to do photo tips every week, hopefully I can share some knowledge I've gained over the years.

The first one is not really a tip but a very cool service I've used. It's called MPIX.com and you can make these really cool hard bound books from your photos. I use it to preview what I send to a publisher. I've used it to organize my Palouse photos. The link is:

http://www.mpix.com/productsinfo.aspx?prod=21

The software is free and a 30 page hard bound book is 30 dollars, it's a great gift also.

The first real tip is using a telephoto lens to shoot landscapes. Most people grab a wide angle lens for those open vista shots but sometimes a tele can really make a photo pop.

Here is an example I shot today:



This was shot at 200mm with an aperture of f5.6. If you close the lens down to say f8 it will be a little sharper but the wide open f5.6 for this lens softens it up a bit giving it a dreamy look. The telephoto lens "compresses" the hills making them look closer together than they actually are. A forest fire also helped a little with the haze.

This can also be done with digital point and shoot cameras. You usually don't get to control the aperture but you can zoom in on a landscape that has features such as rolling hills, trees and even buildings.

A good thing to know about apertures is that the closed down they get the image sharpens a bit. There is an area where you start to loose resolution though, every lens has a "sweet" spot. Take a lens that opens up to f2.8, it has a very small sharp center at 2.8 but at f8 that sharpness extends towards the edges. Play around with various lenses and find that sharp "sweet" spot.

[mvccd1000]

1. Nice. Thanks for the tip! nt

[Writer]

2. Someone also gave me a star, but they will not let me know who they are...

so I can thank them properly! It's most annoying.

I hope you can find your generous donor so you can give them this wonderful software. I can only offer mine a great big hug and a thanks!

~Writer~

[redqueen]

3. Cool!

Thanks for the tip. :hi:

[Rhiannon12866]

4. What a wonderful thought and a spectacular photo...

Kudos to you!:yourock:

p.s. I'll be passing this on to my mother, who's an excellent amateur photographer...:hi: