Category Archives: Photo Management

Access your photos from anywhere

Posted by Terance on January 1, 2010 None comments

Were you ever out of town and needed access to your photos on your home computer? This can be extremely frustrating if you have no way of getting to the photos you need. With a Windows Home Server (WHS) and Internet connection, it’s never been easier to accomplish.

There are a number of ways to get a hold of WHS. You can build your own system and put the software on yourself or, as I would recommend, buy a box already put together by a vendor such as HP.

When you run the setup wizard for the first time you are asked to create a user account. You can specify whether this user has access to the home server over the Internet or not. If you allow this account to gain access, you can setup a web address you type in just like a normal website such as myserver.homeserver.com. If you have an HP WHS you are presented with a home screen such as the one below.

home screen

If you haven’t setup the photo or media streamer, you can use the “Access Files on Server” options. The WHS machine will then ask you to login using the user you setup at the beginning of the setup process.

Once you are logged in, you are presented with a file browser similar to the one you use to view files in Windows. You can navigate to the folders you want to view your files in, download files, create folders and even upload new files. This can be extremely useful if you are on a shoot and want to backup your files from earlier that day.

A Quick Look at flickr

Posted by Scott on October 25, 2009 None comments

 view_photo

If you have been taking photos for a while you have most likely heard of flickr. Put simply flickr is an online photo sharing website where users can upload their photos and short videos to share with the rest of the world. Flickr is the largest and most active photo sharing site at this time and is the most accepted by armatures as well as pro photographers.

Uploading your sports photos is fairly strait forward. Once you have logged in you click the down arrow next to the “You” menu item at the top of the screen and then select upload photos and videos from the drop-down menu. Once you are there you click the Choose photo text which brings up a new window of what is on your local computer. Some of the photo organizers such as Windows Live Photo Gallery include a button that enables you to upload your selected photos within that application so you don’t have to login to your flickr account in your browser. Others such as Picasa have third party plug-ins you can install to give similar functionality. I would actually recommend using one of these options over the online offering flickr has built in.

plublish_to_flickr

Flickr offers many of the basic features of most other photo sharing sites such as organization, tags and ordering prints but it also goes beyond this allowing you to do a fair amount of editing of your photos online. You can do your normal crop, rotate, and resize that others might offer but you can also adjust the color, sharpen and fix red-eye. In addition to fixing your photos you can also use their create feature.

In the create tool box you are given a plethora of filters and options you can use to modify and play with your photos. You can add a number of shapes to your photo or add a variety of frames and text. It’s just like having a photo editing program running in your browser.

photo_editing

Unfortunately this editing service is provided by Picnik and not all of the features are free. If you want full access to all of the options you will have to pay a $24.95 a year fee. This also brings up the point that flickr itself has a basic plan which is absolutely free but they also provide a premium plan which costs $24.95 a year note that even though this is the same price as the picnic service it does not include the premium options available through picnic. If you do decide to upgrade your flickr account you get unlimited storage and you can also able to upload videos. If you just want to stick with the free account you are allowed to upload 100 MB worth of photos each month. Keep in mind this is calculated by uploaded data and not storage. For example say you uploaded 50 photos and that used 50 MB of your transfer limit. So if you then delete 25 of your photos off of flickr you do not get 25 MB of your monthly limit back because it is the transfer amount and not the storage amount. If you are just a casual user and don’t want to store your entire photo library on flickr you should be just fine with the free account they provide.

Flickr comes with a great way of organizing you photos but it can be a little confusing at first. You organize your photos into sets. These are what you would probably think of as folders on your computer. The only difference that I can tell is that you cannot create a new set inside of another set. You can add photos to your sets easily by just dragging and dropping the thumbnails at the bottom of the screen into the big box they provide above.

Another great feature flickr has to offer is called groups. This feature lets you send certain types of photos to the same group as other people. An example might be you and your family members setup a group for the 2008 family reunion. Now everyone with a flickr account can submit photos that they took at the family reunion to that same group. This makes it very easy for everyone to get their photos collected into one location.

Overall flickr is a cool way to share your sports photos with the rest of the photography world. There is a bit of a learning curve to get through at the beginning but once you do surpass it you will be a flickr pro in not time.

Terance

ProPix Photography

The Sports Photography Professionals

Use Photoshop Elements to Create a Collage

Posted by Scott on September 28, 2009 None comments

Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 is the best sports photography image editing software I have used for someone who wants a little more control over editing their sports photos than the most basic features offered in most photo organizers and don’t want to pay the insanely high price that Adobe Photoshop CS4 costs. I won’t go into the details of the overall program in this article, but rather focus on one feature that many may find useful when they are feeling creative.

The collage feature lets you place a number of photos onto a single page in a variety of designs. You are given the options to rearrange and size each photo individually to your preference. After creating your collage you are can then save or print the final output. This is a great way to send a family member or friend the shots from last weeks soccer game in a fun and unique way.

The first thing you need to do is find the photos you want to use for your collage. You can either grab your photos from the organizer or just drag and drop them from your file folder to the Photoshop Express workspace.

gathering_photos

If you are in the organizer you can simply select the photos, click the create tab and select Photo Collage. If you have dragged the photos directly into Photoshop Express, you can click the create tab as well and select Photo Collage as well.

Now you have a variety of templates you can choose from. You will want to click the template you want to use and then click the done button near the bottom right of the window.

Collage_Tab

Photoshop Express will now place the photos you had selected into one template file. If you happened to have selected more photos than would fit on one template, it will give you multiple pages you can select from at the bottom of the window. Now that you have a basic layout, you can start working on arranging and resizing the individual photos.

building_collage

To move a photo to a different place, you just click and drag it around the window. To resize the photo you click on the photo you want to work with and click and drag a corner of the photo until it’s the size you would like. You may also notice a circle icon underneath the photos as well. If you click and drag this icon it will rotate your photo depending on which direction you drag your mouse. Alternatively you can simply click and drag your mouse outside of the photo boundaries to rotate your photo as well. You may also want to note that after doing your adjustments you may need to click the green check mark that appears or press the Enter key on your keyboard. This will finalize your adjustments and let you continue editing other photos.

There are a number of other options you can use found under a menu accessed by right clicking on the photo you want to use them on. For example to send a photo behind another one, right click on the front photo and select “Send Backward”. You can also resize the photo to fill more of the frame that it is constrained to through the same menu. It’s also worth noting that your photos are simply different layers on your one file. This means that if you go back to the edit tab, you can do all the adjustments you would normally have access to.

edit_menu

Once you are happy with your final creation, you can simply save it, print it, or do whatever other tasks you would do to any other file created in Photoshop Express.

Terance

ProPix Photography

The Sports Photography Professionals

What is a Tag

Posted by Scott on September 14, 2009 None comments

 tagging

If you have been working with a photo organizing application in the past couple of years you may have heard the word “tag”. Put simply tags are a way for you to find your photos more quickly and easier than manually searching through thousands and thousands of individual photos.

Technically a tag is just descriptive words that are saved into the photo file itself. This means that whenever you add a tag to your photo that information will stay with that photo. You will be able to copy it to a CD or upload it to your favorite online photo sharing site and the tag information will still be there.

There are a number of tag types you can add to your photos. For example you can add a title tag, descriptive tags, an author, and a number of other types. What tags you are able to add will depend on the software you are using. Some applications will let you add more types of tags than others. For example one application may allow you to add a GPS tag while another may not. This also brings up the point of compatibility.

Some applications may use a non standard way of adding the tag information to your file. This can be a major problem if you decide to use another program that doesn’t support the way that the other program added the tag information. The best way to find out is to try adding some tags in one application and then try to see that information in another application. If the other application can see the tag information than most likely you are safe. You should also be able to find out by either searching around on the applications website or just do a search on the Internet. I have found that all the programs I’ve used in the past year or so have all at least implemented the common tag types in a standard way. If you are still not sure or don’t trust the photo organizer you are using, you can always get a tool dedicated to adding tags such as Microsoft Pro Photo Tools or iTag. Both these solutions will allow you to tag all of your family photos without worrying about not being able to read that information later.

Before we go any further let’s look at an example of what kinds of tags we would typically want to apply to our photos.

soccer player

As you can see from the image above there are a couple tags that have already been entered in for me. This includes the date the photo was taken, the camera that took the photo and a few other technical details. You can also see that there are a number of these tags that I can not change such as what settings I had the camera set to when taking the photo. The tags I am interested in adding are the descriptive tags and the caption. The descriptive tags should be something like soccer game and soccer tournament. The descriptive tag should be a quick summary of the photo. Something like State Cup Soccer Tournament would do just fine for this photo. All I do to add these tags is click just underneath the headings, where it says to add a caption or description. It then allows me to type in what information I want. Below is the same photo with the tags added.

soccer_tags_added

Depending on the program you are using it will vary where and how you add tags to your photos, but most of them will have a dedicated box just for this purpose. They may not call it a tag but rather something like “Add a description”.

Now that we have learned a little about tagging and how to add them, let’s talk about the benefits of doing all this work. The number one reason for tagging your photos in my opinion is to be able to find the photos you want quickly and easily. Let’s say you took photos at Grandpas birthday a couple years back and now Grandma is putting together a scrapbook and she needs some photos from the event. If you tagged these photos with birthday and grandpa it should be a snap to find them. Again depending on how your application does search this may vary, but let’s take a look at how we can find the cow photo above.

gallery

In the picture above it shows my main gallery with a total number of photos at 5539. Now on the left side you can see I can sort these by folder, date taken, people, or descriptive tags. To find my photo of the cow I can just click the “Cow” tag under descriptive tags. This Windows Live Gallery also provides me with a search box at the top in which I could also type in the word cow to bring up all the photos that contained the tag cow. In addition to sorting with one tag, you can select multiple tags at one time to fine tune your results. This would be perfect for finding that photo of Grandpa as you could find all the photos that contained both Grandpa and Birthday.

As you can see adding tags to your photos can be extremely helpful and if you add your tags each time you copy your photos from your camera to your computer it really doesn’t take much time at all.

Terance

ProPix Photography

The Sports Photography Professionals

The Sport and the Emotion

Posted by Scott on September 7, 2009 None comments

You have the right equipment, you have read the basic instructions, well get out there and start practicing.  The only way to get better is practice, practice and more practice.  Just like the athletes you are trying to photograph who are training and practicing, you must do the same to be a good sports photographer.  Practice at any and all events, share the photos you take with family, friends and team mates.  They will let you know the ones they REALLY like.  Your timing and anticipation will improve and your ability to get the easy shots as well as the tough ones will grow.  If you’re in the business of selling photos then the ones that sale or not will let you know what’s good and what’s not.

Faces of the Game (The Emotion)
Don’t forget there is a lot of fun, emotion and action before, in the middle and after the event or competition.  I like to refer to these as the faces of the game.  Surprisingly perhaps, these photos, the faces and emotions of the game are as popular as any of the great action shots you will take. I especially like half-time when faces are full of emotion, sweat, determination and grit.  Besides they are sitting quietly paying attention to the coach, drinking water or whatever.  Fill the frame with their faces and snap away.  Fill the entire frame with a single face.  Not just 3/4 of the frame fill it all and you will love the results.  Close-ups like that fill the photo with emotion and make it memorable.  These are not posed photos, it’s even best when they don’t know you’re taking the photo.  Move around or sneak around all you need, to ensure you get a clear shot at the face.  Keep that bigger lens on the camera so you don’t have to get close.  You will also find jubilation and sadness both strong emotions after a game, and a chance to catch team-mates hugging and groups cheering as well.  Don’t forget coach who deserves a nice close-up as well.

Easy Shots
If it’s an event and you want to make sure you get at least some good photos and not sure if you can, make sure to get the easy shots.  The close-ups discussed above are what I would call easy shots, but there are any more.  Each sport has it’s own.  They may be shots during warm-up, foul shots during the basketball game, warm-up pitches in baseball, throw-ins and corner kicks in soccer.  These are all easy shots that will mean you’ll have at least some from the event.  It will get you off to a good start and will ensure you at least have something at the end.

Blurring can be good
We’ve talked a lot about how to get a crisp and sharp photo, but there are times when you might want blur or when a blurred photo showing the action is actually a good thing.  The blur gives the impression of movement which is definitely occurring so that’s not always a bad thing.  Perhaps it’s the ball in the pitcher’s hand as it’s thrown, or the ball leaving the soccer players foot.  Whether on purpose or accident this is not always a bad thing, and will give variety to to your photos.
So, get out there and practice, you’ll be the next world-renowned family sports photographer!

ProPix Photography

The Sports Photography Professionals

Emailing Your Photos

Posted by Scott on August 3, 2009 None comments

 attach_photos

You always want to share those great sports photos.  It may seem like a simple thing to do, but there are a number of things to remember and be watchful for when planning to email your photos.

When sending your photos through email you may not want to send the full high resolution file. Many email services don’t let you send more than 10 MB each email. With the ever growing megapixel cameras this limit can be reached with just a few photos. Windows Live/Hotmail actually provides a great feature specifically designed for attaching photos. You can rotate, crop, adjust brightness and do a few other small adjustments right in your browser. Be careful with this feature as it doesn’t give you an option to change the resolution of the photo you are sending. The default size that it will send is a fairly low resolution version of the file. If the recipient isn’t go to print the photo then it’s not a big deal.

If your email service doesn’t provide this feature you may want to resize your photos before you send them to your family and friends. When resizing your photos make sure that you don’t resize your originals. I would suggest copying the photos you want to email to a separate folder first and then go into your favorite photo organizer/editor and do the resizing on the photos you just copied.

Speaking of photo organizers, many of them now include the option to email photos directly in the program. Some may just open up your default mail application, but at least it includes all the photos you had selected in the email automatically.

Email_With_Windows_Live

Whatever your preference may be keep the above suggestions in mind and your friends and family members will be enjoying your photos in no time.

Terance

ProPix Photography

The Sports Photography Professionals

Techniques on using Photoshop Actions

Posted by Scott on July 13, 2009 None comments

Photoshop Actions

actions_tab

If you have been lucky enough to get the full featured Photoshop product you may have seen the actions tab. This is an extremely powerful tool and at the same time very simple to use. This tool allows you to record a number of events, save them and finally play them back on any future photos you would like.

An example of a simple action might be that you want to automatically adjust the brightness and crop a number of photos. You simply start to record a new action and once you have done the adjustments on the first photo you stop recording and then hit the play button on all of the other photos you want to apply the action to. You can alternatively apply a hot key to any actions you would like to have quick access to. You may want an action that does a small curves adjustment set to F5 so that any time you need to brighten an image just a bit, you can simply press F5 and it’s done.

In addition to pressing the play button on each photo, you can alternately use the Batch option under file / automate menu item. When you use this feature you select one of the actions you have created and then apply it to an entire folder of images. This can save you time by not having to manually press the play button on each photo as Photoshop will do it for you.

batch_window

Now that you have a basic understanding of actions, let’s go ahead and create one. We will do a simple curves adjustment as well as a hue and saturation change.

First, load in the first image you would like to use to create the action. Now with the actions tab visible press the “Create New Action” button.

new_actionThis will now bring up a dialogue box with a few options. Type in curves and saturation for the name and hit the Record button.  You should now notice that the record button on the actions tab is active. This lets you know that Photoshop is currently recording anything you do.

record_button

Now bring up the curves dialogue box by pressing ctrl + C and make your adjustments and press OK. Now bring up the Hue/Saturation window by pressing ctrl + U and make your adjustments there as well. Press OK to apply your hue/saturation settings and then click the stop button next to the record button on the actions tab. You now have your action saved. If you want to apply these same settings to another photo or even the same one you have open, just press the play button next to the record button on the actions tab.

This is a great tool, that if utilized, can save you hours and hours of repetitive work on your sports photos. You should definitely give it a try.

Terance

ProPix Photography

The Sports Photography Professionals

Sync your Photos

Posted by Scott on May 25, 2009 None comments

Sync your photos

sync_your_photos

Ever wanted to show your friend a great sports photo from last weeks event? You pull out your laptop, boot it up, and then realize it’s back on the desktop computer at home. Don’t let this frustration ever happen again.

There is an easy way to avoid this situation and it’s called Windows Live Sync. This small application basically takes all your photos from one computer and keeps them synced up with your other computers. Anytime you add some photos to one machine it sends those same photos to all the other computers you specified.

The great part is if you use Windows Live Gallery, Sync is already set to be used. The first thing you need to do is make sure you have Windows Live Gallery installed on each computer you would like to keep synced. Now just open up Windows Live Gallery, click file, then select Setup gallery sync. It will guide you through a simple wizard to get you going.

setup_sync

Once it’s setup you don’t have to worry about it. All of the syncing takes place in the background so you can keep on viewing or editing your photos like normal, you don’t even need to keep Windows Live Gallery open for things to keep up to date.

Windows Live Sync doesn’t have to be limited to your sports photos either, you can have it sync any folder you want with your other computers. So if you ever find yourself wishing you had your other computer with the photos you need, you may want to take a look at Windows Live Sync.

Terance

ProPix Photography

The Sports Photography Professionals

Enjoy your Photos

Posted by Scott on May 11, 2009 None comments

Have you done anything interesting with your sports photos lately?  Why did you spend all the time and effort to take them?  Of course to share and enjoy them, and maybe even sale them.  When you realize that you’ve captured a great great the first thing you want to do is to share it with someone.  In fact, sometimes I’m so excited about the photo I captured, I need to share them right now, and will find myself walking over to people showing the photo on the camera’s LCD screen.  Although small it’s good enough to see and people get excited.  The next thing I hear is wow, cool, I need a copy of that.  There are many ways to share and enjoy your photos, many of which we often overlook.  We will look at them on the camera, maybe once on the computer and then we move on to the next event.  Here are some great ways to enjoy your sports shots that you’ve taken such care to capture.

Electronically
Of course you can look at them on your computer screen, but there are better ways to leverage your computer.  Select a photo as the background on your computer or specify a folder for the screen saver.  To use your photos as the background on your computer or to choose a folder to use as the screen saver slide show in windows, go to the control panel and double click on display.  It’s easy to do and you’ll be surprised at how fun it is to see your photos displayed as the screen saver.  I’m repeatedly surprised as I walk up to my computer and look at the screen saver to see photos that I forgot I had taken…………….

Prints
Yes, perhaps old fashioned for some, but many times nothing beats having a set of prints of your favorite sports photos.  It’s kind of like holding cash in your hand it feels so much better than a check…………….Options for printing your photos are numerous and inexpensive.  Do them online or locally, they will turn out beautifully and are a joy to view and share.  Don’t forget that there are many more sizes than 4×6.  In fact vertical shots of athletes are great in a 5×7 size which doesn’t cost much more, but appears so much larger.  Take your best shots, frame them and hang them on the wall.  Do 8x10s, 11x14s, 16x20s and larger.  There is so much competition for printing and the prices have come down so dramatically you should take advantage of printing your photos.

Calendars
A great way to enjoy and share your photos is by creating a custom photo calendar.  Many years ago at Christmas my wife and I did a photo calendar that took hours and hours and only had a single photo per month.  How things have changed……………  Now it is fast and easy with both online and desktop software providing this service.  Use your own photos to create a custom calendar, specify personal dates such as birthdays and anniversaries.  Select photos for the cover, for each month and even for specific dates.  You can choose different layouts, themes, backgrounds and artwork.  The past couple of years at Christmas my siblings and I have produced a custom family calendar for the grandparents.  It was easy to coordinate, since we created an online account to share.  Each sibling uploaded their own photos into their account and then populated the pages and dates of the calendar that they were responsible for.  Once complete we had it printed and shipped for a Christmas gift.  Calendar’s are a great way to display your sports photos because it’s something you use regularly and will be looking at all year around.  Online services such as www.photoworks.com, www.kodakgallery.com, and www.smugmug.com plus many others provide photo calendar services.

Photo Books
Create stunning one-of-a-kind custom photo books for the coffee table or table-top from your sports photos.  Choose from a variety of sizes, styles and materials.  They can be hardbound, softbound, linen, vinyl or leather.  You select the photos, the layout, backgrounds and custom text.  Professional online tools make them easy to build through simple drag and drop methodology and the ability to automate or customize as much as you want.  The tools allow you to create and build your book anywhere at anytime. They are actually amazingly affordable for a custom one-of-a-kind piece.  You can create one for each sport, each athlete or targeted for a specific event. Beautiful photo books can be made at such places as www.snapfish.com, www.shutterfly.com, www.picaboo.com, www.mypublisher.com and many others.

Slide shows
Transform your sports photos into an entertaining photo slide show including captions and music!  Capture the excitement of the sporting event for those who couldn’t be there.  You can do this and more with a photo slide show, which are fun, easy to make and free.  There are many services to choose from each offering a unique approach. but all letting you choose captions, music and even hundreds of photos.  They make it easy to share as well through email, blogs or social networking sites.  Popular services are smilebox.com, slide.com, slideroll.com and many more.

Don’t forget you worked hard to take those great sports photos so remember to take time to enjoy them.

ProPix Photography

The Sports Photography Professionals

How to Preserve Your Photos

Posted by Scott on January 23, 2009 None comments

You’ve invested in a good digital camera, you are taking great photos the capture the moments of your family and friends, and you’re regularly copying your photos to your computer…………………..and you ask, am I done?  These are your precious memories that cannot be replaced.  Are they protected and preserved in a way that will last forever?  What have you forgotten and what could go wrong?  These are important questions and one hard drive crash on your computer can cause your photos to be gone forever!  Don’t let this happen to your precious memories.

In the old days photo preservation was a challenge.  Photos went directly from film to print and the prints themselves would fade and degrade over time.  Pictures could also be easily destroyed or damaged by weather, fire, floods, children or simply by time and use.  Since digital photos don’t fade or degrade over time many of us think that all is well and our photos will last a life time.  While it’s true that digital photos don’t fade and we have the opportunity to do a much better job of preservation, there are still many risks in the preservation of digital photos and if we don’t take the proper precautions our photos are at just as much risk if not more than the old printed photos.

If you’ve been using computers for a number of years you know the issue.  You’ve certainly lost a document or project you’ve been working on and you’ve probably had your entire computer crash.  You’ve probably also experienced your computer crashing and even losing your entire hard drive.  This is not fiction or a scare tactic it’s reality.  Those hard drives are mechanical and are spinning every second of every minute of every day that your computer is turned on.  Commercial businesses spend a lot of time and money ensuring they have redundancy (duplication) of their data so they are protected from inevitable hard drive failures.  You need to protect against this eventuality as well as the chance of physical damage through fire, floor or other natural disasters.  Of course you don’t have the resources nor want to spend the money that a commercial business does, but you do need the redundancy or duplication to ensure that you never lose your precious memories

There are a couple of options that are both reasonable in terms of price and time.  The first option is to use a USB external hard drive.  This is a hard drive that comes in a case and you plug into your computer.  It’s easy to attach and then disconnect and put in a drawer somewhere.  Prices have come down dramatically and you can purchase many Gigabytes quite affordably.  Many come with fancy software to do automated backups but I prefer the simplicity of just copying all my photos to the drive directly.  Then unplug it and put it in a drawer.  Then make sure you pull it out and do the same thing again every month or so, that way when you hard drive crashes you will have a backup of all your photos which you can easily copy over to a new hard drive.  Don’t leave your USB hard drive connected to your computer or you run the risk of losing that drive at the same time you lose your computer hard drive.  Not as likely but possible.  Having your external hard drive in the same physical location as your computer does not protect you from natural disasters.  For this protection you might want to consider keeping the USB drive at family, friends or work.  This does mean transporting it back and forth, but it does provide the added safety. 

Another option is to backup your photos to the internet.  Use a reputable website and they will provide another layer of redundancy on their side.  The beauty of this is that you have access to your photos from anywhere and anytime.  Many websites offer this capability, some also provide automatic backups while others act simply as an external USB storage drive.  Some of these websites will offer limited storage for free and then a monthly cost if you have a large storage requirement.  Be careful of any sites that offer unlimited storage for free forever…………….there just isn’t a business model behind that.  Also be careful that some of these sites on upload will resize your photo and you won’t be preserving the original as you thought.  While these sites are a great option for a backup they shouldn’t be your primary storage location which should remain your computer.

Commit now to making a second copy of your photos.  They are too precious and represent too many great memories for you to lose them.  Do it today and sleep better tonight!

ProPix Photography

The Sports Photography Professionals