GroovyDoodle Photography

It’s that time of the year – Backyard barbecues, pool parties, and who can forget the fireworks or, more importantly the rare elusive amazing fireworks photograph that most can only capture one time of the year in that very narrow window of time when they are seen “in the wild”. The perfect fireworks photograph is indeed a rare capture, but with a little help and some tips from us and others around the world, we’ll help you snag this beautiful, rare beast.

First, as always, I’ll preface with the fact that having an SLR camera will make it considerably easier to capture just about anything. However, that doesn’t make it completely impossible to get a great shot with a point-and-shoot, just more challenging. The real key is that your camera allows you some amount of manual control. Things like shutter speed and ISO are important components to capturing fireworks. But if you are in the market for an SLR, some serious deals can be had on the Nikon D40 right now, which is being phased out for the new D60. Don’t let all the new bells and whistles on the D60 fool you, the D40 is one of the most successful and longest manufactured cameras due to it’s success. [ B&H Photo | Adorama | RitzCamera | Best Buy ]

Next up, you’ll need a stable place to put your camera while you’re waiting on the beast to spring forth. Read more »

The most frequent question we receive as photographers, other than “Which camera should I buy?”,  is “How do I edit my pictures?” because “Photoshop is too complicated / expensive”. We stumbled upon an article with 8 free alternatives.

Sometimes you just want a light, simple program that doesn’t take forever to load and will let you do a few standard tasks. Well, here is a list of 8 simple free Photoshop alternatives under 2MB that will save you time and headache.

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/8-simple-free-photoshop-alternatives-that-are-under-2-mb/

Thanks for reading the first official article in our new GroovyTip series, where we share little tips and tricks to help you get the most out of your home photography. As much as we’d love to follow you around every day and capture all the great moments in your life, we know we can’t. So, we’ve decided to put together regular articles filled with practical, groovy tips so you can make the most of the time between your sessions with us!

But before we share our first GroovyTip, let’s chat a little bit about your pictures. It really doesn’t matter if you love how your photos turn out, if you think they are just ok, or if you don’t like anything that comes out of your camera. The most important tip we can give you is to simply get out there and try new things, get inspired by others, and don’t be afraid to copy ideas from other photographers, including us! If you haven’t yet, go check out Flickr or even take a peek at the various photos on the GroovyDoodle blog.

To improve your own pictures, we encourage you to keep a folder of photos you’d like to try to recreate, or search around for pics similar to yours to see how you might improve ones you’re already taking. Make notes on how you think the photos you like were taken, how you tried to take them to match the result, then get out there and try it again! We’ll assume you’re using a digital camera of some variety, so try as much as you want, it’s essentially free. And if you see something you like and just can’t figure out how to recreate it, send it to us. Who knows? It may be the next GroovyTip!

So with that, here’s our first article…

GroovyTip: Get Up-close!

You know the pictures we’re talking about – All those pictures of flowers, or bugs, or some cool root growing out of a rock. You take picture after picture but something about your shots just doesn’t look as nice as you’d like.

You don’t have to have a super-fancy SLR camera to get close to your subject. You probably have a setting on your camera you’re not even aware of that will help you do it. It’s usually referred to as “macro-mode”, or sometimes people call it “flower mode” since the icon to use this mode on your camera is usually represented by a flower, like so: . If you look at the dial on your camera, even a point and shoot, it most likely has this setting and looks like this:

Macro-Mode

The macro-mode will usually allow you to focus with your camera physically closer to your subject than you can normally get with any of the other automatic modes. However, one of the challenges with using the macro-mode is an increased sensitivity to camera shake. Because you’re closer than you would be taking a picture of a person just sitting, any shaking you introduce from just holding your camera will be amplified in your pictures. To work around this you have two choices: use something to stabilize the camera while shooting (like a tripod) or add more light.

Read more »

We get a lot of questions about a certain type of photograph customers see in our portfolio book because it has a very unique look which tends to catch people’s eyes all the time. We call it the “ringlight shot”. It uses a special light we have that allows us to light subjects in a unique way that can’t be achieved with regular studio lights. This type of portrait, as Mel likes to say, “takes off 10 years and 20 pounds”. As you can imagine, women love it. Here are some of our favorite adult ringlight shots…

Ringlight shots are not specific to adults though. We’ve had a few seniors that wanted to give it a try and absolutely loved the really unique results:

Kids also look great in ringlight shots…

You may notice that the photos above are black & white and standard portrait orientation (If you haven’t yet, just click on the pic of your choice to see the full version). Because of the style of processing we use for the ringlight shots, they look best as black & whites and cropped vertically, but they don’t always have to be…

So that’s basic ringlight shots, 101. Just another service we can provide for you next time you’re in our studio! Don’t hesitate to ask as it only takes a few minutes and it’s included in your session time should you want to try one. Just let us know!