Thursday, February 17, 2011

Shutterbugs, Cameras, Editing and More

Do you love photography?  I really fell in love last summer when my husband let me break down and get a "professional camera".  It was always me, scrapbook Mama who had the worst camera, or the camera that was almost dying - I had the family hand-me-down. 
I found out that the products I wanted to sell needed good photography.  All the other kids had it!!!! {you know what I mean}.  So, I found a decent Nikon D50 on Ebay.  It was used, being sold by some pawn-selling-husbands.  {you know the ones, their name is something like: pawnbros}  Okay, so I figured their rating made it safe to buy.  Well, they didn't dissapoint, it turned out to be the buy of the season for me! 
The Nikon D50 needs a memory card.  It has built in flash and holds a ton of pictures with a 2MB card.  Probably owned by someone that thought they were getting a "point-n-shoot".  This is not that.  It is manual.  You look through the view finder and  you use your lighting knowledge and you shoot!  It has a lithium ion battery that runs for days.  Still can't figure out why someone would get rid of such a good camera!  Oh well, my gain.
You can play with the settings and have fun with this camera.  The real job is the photo-editing that needs to take place for the world wide web.  This is the meat on the plate.  You have to have a good editing software or you can't function in today's world of scrapbooking etc.  I have three/four softwares I use. 
The first software I want to tell you about is HP Image Zone.  This is sold by Hewlett Packard.  I got this with a camera I had about three years ago.  It's still sold today with all HP cameras.  This is a great software because you do all your cooking in this baby {think Crockpot}.  You resize, adjust brightness, highlight, and crop here.  Highly recommend this software.  Oh, one added thing, Metadata.  Metadata is your receipe card for the photo you took.  What flash and shutter speed.  You will want to know this the next time you take a photo, because well, it will help you take better photos.




This photo taken has been cropped, resized, brightness, and a "logo" that was made in Pixlr Editor.  My number two software I am going to talk about later, stay tuned :)

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