Win Nikon D3000

Win a Nikon D3000 with Q-Photo

Interpret the Cup Fever with your photos. You can enter 3 Photos online or in store.

Entries will be loaded onto the web site and the photo with the most votes from the public wins!

Grand prize is Nikon D3000 & Accessories worth R10,000.

Visit http://www.qphoto.co.za/ for more details and to enter

Closing date is Friday 30 July 2010

Win with ellesse

Legendary Italian sportswear brand ellesse is searching for the World’s most beautiful images of Sport & The City.

ellesse Sportswear launched a Photography competition where you can win a Nikon DSLR and a trip to London, Barcelona, Rome or Athens.

You can enter photographs which truly capture the spirit and emotion of your City.

I think with the current World Cup Soccer being held in South Africa we South Africans have an advantage over other countries.

You can get full details (and enter online) at http://www.ellesse.com

Can you make cash from your camera?

All of us who are photographers would love to make a regular income from the hobby or profession we love. None of us want to be told that it is difficult, it takes time and not many people make it. These dubious dealers give the impression that anyone can make money from their photos. Rubbish! If you take a look at the stock sites and see the quality of images for sale, you’ll realise that unless you are really talented you will never produce the quality that the buyers are looking for. Do yourself a favour. Do a search on the name of the ebook author who makes all of these claims using Google and then go to the major stock sites and do the same. Where are these authors making their money? From you! If it was so easy why don’t they have thousands of images on the stock sites? I rest my case.

Take a look at the guidelines for submission on the stock sites. Every last one of them requires a camera that takes a high resolution image. Some even state that they’ll only accept images taken on certain mid-range to high-end digital SLRs. Don’t even think that you will be able to compete with your compact camera. You stand no chance. Your images are just not big enough.

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Stock Photos

10 Important Mistakes to Avoid When Submitting Photos to Stock Photo Sites

A quick and easy way to make money with your photos is by submitting them to stock photo sites online. You can start earning money with the photos that are already in your hard drive; you don’t even have to take new photos right away.

If you want a step-by-step guide to monetizing your digital photos through stock photo sites and other ways, check out Turn Your Photos Into Cash.

Meantime, you can get started right now. But do make sure you don’t make these 10 mistakes when you submit photos in stock photo sites:

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Sunset

Digital photography could see the death of creativity in photography in general. Why such a harsh statement? Here’s why:

1. Lack of thought

As a film photographer the consumable costs of photography were much higher. This forced us to think and carefully consider each shot. There was a greater thought process. Using a motor drive for taking multiple shots was for the press photographers who could afford take thirty six images in a few seconds. For the rest of us we had to think more before pressing the button.

2. The Shakespeare effect

This is the evolutionary idea that if you give a roomful of monkeys a typewriter each and enough time, they will eventually produce a work equal in quality to Shakespeare. There is a similar mindset among digital photographers that if they shoot enough photos, somewhere amongst the thousands will be quality images. You have as much chance as that happening as a monkey.

3. Drive by shooting syndrome

This is similar to the lack of thought in taking a photo. Because of the multiple shot feature in digital cameras and the low cost of digital photography, it’s quick an easy to take an image. Just like a drive by shooting the camera is pointed in the general direction of the subject and a bunch of images is taken. Then you move on to the next target and fire away again.

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Photoshop is one of those programs the modern photographer just cannot go without. It is the most powerful image editing software on the planet.

I know many people are looking for a good Photoshop courses or tutorials and that some people stay to far from major cities to attend a proper course.

I found Lynda.com's Photoshop courses and tutorials to be very good. I started using it for DreamWaver courses and then also tried some of the PhotoShop courses. There are hundreds of courses you can attend online.

Give Lynda a try, visit them at http://www.lynda.com

Sony and PhotoComment are hosting a competition for the best image that defines your 2009.

Here are the details of the competition: (also see http://www.photocomment.net/)

Sony and PhotoComment
2009 YEAR END PHOTO COMPETITION
We want your image that best defines your 2009
2009 is fast drawing to a close and with it memories of an exciting yet challenging year for us at PhotoComment and most likely you, our readers as well.

Before the year comes to a close for good we thought we would launch our first PhotoComment competition. Submit your image with a brief story of the moment that made your year to stand in line to win the grand prize.

Judging will look particularly at the emotion evoked by the image in relation to the theme and caption.

Closing Date: 15 December 2009

Send your entries to: competition2009@photocomment.net

Sony

Terms & Conditions Apply

I received an email from Ethan Fried inviting us to subscribe to the National Geographic International Photography Contest. This contest is also open for South African entries.

Here are the full details:

Attention all travelers and aspiring photographers — National Geographic wants your photographs. Readers of National Geographic around the world are invited to take part in the 2009 National Geographic International Photography Contest. Readers of the English-language edition in eight countries, as well as readers of 20 of the magazine’s international local-language editions, are eligible to participate. The international grand-prize winners will receive a trip to National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C., a digital camera kit, and their winning entries will be published in all participating editions of National Geographic magazine. But act soon — the submission deadline is Oct 31, 2009. Full details can be found at http://www.ngphotocontest.com

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by Udo Kieslich, senior lecturer at the College of Digital Photography

Prepare an equipment checklist – this will help make sure you don’t forget essentials like tripod, lenses, extension tubes, batteries, filters, memory cards, flash, Lenspen, camera manual etc.

Leopard

Be prepared – always have your camera and lenses ready, and make sure all your equipment is working. The night before your game drive check / reset your camera settings (White Balance, ISO, exposure compensation, file size, quality setting). Make sure your equipment is clean and that the batteries are fully charged. Always have spare memory cards and ideally even a storage device to download your images onto. You can never predict when something amazing might happen.

Be patient – it is very difficult to speed up or slow down nature, and without patience you will struggle to get good results. You often need to remain very still for an extended period of time before the animal starts behaving naturally. Very occasionally you’ll capture something unique at your first sighting of the animal, but most of the time you just have to be patient.

Research the area you’ll be visiting – check the sunrise and sunset times so you can decide on the optimum locations for each time of the day.

Photograph normal behaviour – wildlife photography does not always have to be of spectacular animal behaviour. Just seeing normal animal behaviour in a natural environment can make a great photograph.

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The pupil of the eye becomes bigger or smaller in order to control the amount of light it allows through. When a person is standing in a dark room, the pupil of his eye will be large to allow more light to enter. The camera also has a mechanism which controls the amount of light moving through the lens – the aperture.

The aperture controls not only the amount of light moving through the lens but also the depth of field. The f-stop is the unit in which the opening of the lens is measured. The f-stop number is inversely proportional to the size of the lens opening. This means f22 is a very small lens opening, with a large depth of field, and f4.5 has a wide lens opening with a shallow depth of field. With a wide lens opening and shallow depth of field, more light will reach the film. Thus a large lens opening is more suitable for photography in bad lighting conditions, but unfortunately with a loss in depth of field. Also see illustrations below. The f-stop number is equivalent to the diameter of the opening of the lens relative to the diameter of the front lens unit. An f-stop of f16 will therefore be 1/16 (one sixteenth) of the diameter of the front lens unit.

Apperture size

Tip: If you have a SLR camera with removable lenses remove the lens from your camera. Hold it in a position to enable you to look through it from the back. Now turn the f-stop ring on the lens from side to side. You will see the opening of the lens changing as you turn the ring.

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