Holidays provide some of the best opportunities to capture wonderful moments with your camera, if you remember a few simple tips. Here’s professional photographer Nigel Barker of Americas Next Top Model, with great advice for getting the most out of every photo op.

Have a fantastic Thanksgiving, and while the family is together, snap a shot for your holiday photo cards / Christmas cards.

Kodak is challenging you to get your family together and show off your true colors in a 10 second video portrait.

Whether your family is your crazy in-laws, co-workers or your softball team, get them together, get creative and film the process to see if your family has what it takes to win the True Colors Challenge. You could win a trip to see The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien, YouTube fame, Kodak products and more.

Speaking of family portraits, Christmas is only 7 weeks away! Now is the perfect time to get the family together for your photo holiday cards.

Scott Bourne from Photofocus is doing it again. This month he’ll give away another Drobo to one of his lucky Twitter followers. There are a few other ways to win so check out Scott’s personal site for more details.

Never heard of Drobo? The company behind this amazing product have put together a demonstration video to show you the power of this technological wonder.

How do you backup your data?
Post your tips, tricks and favorite software. If you’re on a Mac, have a look at Carbon Copy Cloner from Bombich Software. CCC is easy to use, flexible and innexpensive (donation ware) backup software for everyone.

Increase your technical knowledge, but also to wake up every creative bone in your body at Anytime-Art Photography Workshop for Amateur Photographers.

You’ll learn how to make “Anytime-Art” out of your everyday snapshots. So if you have a good camera, a “good eye” and you would like to learn how to use them to make your own Art, this class is for you.

Where and When?
The class will be at the Renaissance Sports Club in Aliso Viejo on April 5th, 2009. The lecture will be from 3:00-5:00pm, then a photo shoot from 5-5:45pm. They will have live model, so bring your cameras and be ready to use them!

What will I learn?
You’ll learn photography skills that will allow you to properly expose your images, as well as how Orange County’s finest children’s and family photographers use natural light in most of their images. They’ll tell you how they think about composition for more interesting shots and discuss tricks to get real expressions and avoid cheesy smiles.

How much does it cost?
$95 (non-members) $85 (Renaissance Members).

Space is limited, so make sure you save your spot now at Anytime-Art.com

Love the $1 bin at Target. We picked up the pocket edition of Digital Photography for Dummies the other day, and thought we’d share some of the information treasures inside. When we create birth announcements, party invitations, save-the-date cards and photo holiday cards, we adjust photos to make sure they print the best they can. Here are some tips from the book to make sure we start with the best possible quality.

Avoiding Digital Measles
Are your images coming out of your camera looking a little blotchy or dotted with colored speckles? Or do some parts of the image have a jagged appearance? If your photos suffer from these defects, try these remedies:

Use a lower JPEG compression setting
Jagged or blotchy images are often the result of too much JPEG compression. Check your camera manual to find out how to choose a lower compression setting. My Canon PowerShot lists the JPEG compression at three levels, Superfine, Fine and Normal, and has icons showing a smooth and jagged arc.

Raise the resolution
Too few pixels can mean blocky-looking or pixelated images. The larger you print the photo, the worse the problem becomes. It’s okay to enlarge a photo beyond its captured size, but making it too big will result in quality loss. It’s like writing on a balloon and then blowing it up. When deflated, the writing looks good. After filling it with air, you can see the ink break apart. You can avoid this by always capturing at the camera’s highest resolution.

Increase the lighting
Photos shot in very low light often take on a grainy appearance. Adding a flash or other light source is a good idea, and make sure the light is at your back, not your subject’s. Backlit subjects can produce a silhouette, reducing the detail in your subject. When possible, natural, soft light is best.

Decrease the camera’s ISO setting
Some camera’s allow you to adjust the ISO setting. Typically, the higher the ISO, the grainier the image. Your camera may have nighttime settings or setting for sporting events. These settings give you a higher ISO but will push the camera to its limits producing grainier results. Double check your settings and only use the action and low light option when necessary.

When sending photos via e-mail, some software will give you the option to reduce the file size or quality so that the image transfers quickly. While this may be okay to share with family and friends, you’ll want to make sure you send us the original photo whenever possible. Opening and re-saving the photo on your computer will result in quality loss because you are re-compressing the image, often to your photo software’s default setting which may not be as good as straight off of the camera (SOC).

In digital photography, resolution is a measure of how many pixels make up a digital picture. It has become the holy grail of digital photography, as manufacturers compete to produce cameras with ever-higher pixel counts – the number of pixels in the camera’s image sensor, which determines how many will be in the actual picture.

The resolution of digital cameras is measured in megapixels, with a megapixel being a million pixels. The more pixels a camera has, generally the better the quality of its photographs

Check your camera’s settings. With most digital point-and-shoot cameras, you can actually choose a lower resolution than the camera’s advertised maximum. You do this by entering the shooting menu and selecting the “Image Size” or “Resolution” option. When you do that, you’ll see a series of number pairs such as these:

2048 x 1536 (high resolution, perfect for photo cards)
1600 x 1200
1280 x 960
1024 x 768
640 x 480 (low resolution, suitable for viewing on a computer monitor)

These are just a few examples, your camera may capture at resolutions greater than this.

The highest number pair represents pretty much all the pixels available in the camera’s image sensor. When you turn on your camera for the first time, it’s usually preset to this top resolution level. In most cases, you should probably keep it at that setting.

Keep your camera set to its top resolution level. If you want smaller picture files to email, you can always downsize them after the fact with computer software.

Send us your original, un-edited, un-cropped photos. We’ll do the rest. Anytime you open and re-save a photo as a JPEG you will lose resolution, and clarity in the photo. We suggest you send us photos exactly as they came off of your camera as these will produce the best quality. You can make note of any special cropping instructions or color (black and white, sepia) preferences you have in the special instructions area of our order form.

Happy photographing!

Apple today released Aperture™ 2.1, which introduces an open plug-in architecture that makes it easy for photographers to use specialized third party imaging software right from within Aperture. Available today as a free software update, Aperture 2.1 includes the Apple-developed plug-in, Dodge & Burn, which adds brush-based tools for dodge (lighten), burn (darken), contrast, saturation, sharpen and blur. Over the coming months, third party software developers will deliver image editing plug-ins for localized editing, filters and effects, noise analysis and reduction, fisheye lens correction and more.

Read on…

You shot it — now do something to it. Make it pop. Make it impossible to ignore. Upload, sort, polish, and store up to 2GB of photos. All for free. Resize, tint, distort, and more — add your mark to all your images. Then show them off on Adobe Photoshop Express or your Facebook page.

Amplify your image

Do what you want with your photos. Give them cartoon colors. Distort them. Go nuts. Turn average photos into jaw droppers with options like Pop Color, Sketch, Hue, Black & White, Tint, and more.

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Got thousands of photos buried deep in folders on your computer? Give them a real home, absolutely free, at Photoshop Express. All it takes is a quick registration and you can store, tweak, polish, and show off up to 2GB of photos.

Your gallery or mine?

My Gallery is the place to show off your photos, your creativity, and your individual style. Create your own exhibit and let people play and interact with it. Display your images in 3D or as a grid. The choice is yours. You control how everything looks in your gallery.

Advanced degree not required

Intimidated by lots of buttons, menus, and palettes? Just say whew! At Photoshop Express, turning a quickly snapped camera phone shot into a shareworthy photo is a piece of cake.

It’s one of the oldest, most common problems in photography… that picture you thought would be the prize shot is out of focus.

Introducing Refocus Imaging, Inc.

Refocus Imaging, Inc. is an early-stage company headquartered in Mountain View, California. Refocus is taking the next big step in photography, transforming the camera into a powerful computational platform.

Turning Imaging Hardware Into Software

A Refocus Imaging camera captures the entire light field entering the lens, not just an ordinary image. Our computational photography processes the light field to produce pictures, implementing in software what the conventional camera and lens must do physically in hardware. Using the power and economics of software, computational photography removes the physical constraints of camera and lens systems.

A Revolution in Photographic Capabilities and Performance

Refocus Imaging’s approach has produced revolutionary results. A Refocus camera can do things that have been considered impossible since the invention of photography. The ability to focus a picture after you take the shot is one striking example, and only the tip of the iceberg. Computational cameras will make photography dramatically simpler, higher performance, and much more fun.

Refocus Imaging is redefining photography. Computational imaging is the future.