The following steps apply to Lightroom or, if you are using Camera Raw (the Photoshop plugin that loads CR2 files), then this section applies to that as well.

1. Select the photo you want to work with and click on the Develop tab (on Camera Raw this is not needed).
2. In the Basic panel change the value of Recovery, Fill Light, Blacks, Brightness, Contrast, Vibrance and Saturation to the values shown below. Essentially what we’ve done is increased the contrast and brought down the saturation so that the colours look washed. The resulting output is shown adjacent.
   
3. Now go way down to the Split Toning panel and change the values as shown below. Here we are going to give hues to the highlights and shadow areas. What these values will do is give a warm colour to both highlights and shadows. This results in the effect shown adjacent.
   

That ends the bit you have to do in Lightroom (or Camera Raw). We can see that our adjustments in Lightroom have put Zayan’s left eye too much in the shadows that it is almost invisible. This portrait will look better with both eyes visible, so that’s what we are going to do in Photoshop in the next tutorial.

Here’s another example of how this toning has been used with slightly different settings. The source photo has an orange cast all over it from the bright orange paint on the wall. Try these values in combination to the above: Recovery = 36, Fill Light = 0, Black = 60.

In the end all that matters is how you adjust the different parameters to satisfy your own style. The split toning needs little adjustment. But don’t be afraid to experiment.

And finally, for your convenience, here’s the Lightroom Preset for you to download: mvphotostones1.zip

Unzip it in your User Presets folder of Lightroom. It is usually at:

C:\Documents and Settings\User\Application Data\Adobe\Lightroom\Develop Presets\User Presets

Apply to your photo and play around with the controls. Play around with the Vignetting controls too.

Thank you and I hope you’ve enjoyed that.

But when photographer Ferenc Ecseki gave a camera to just such a boy from Kampong Cham, Cambodia, he was literally blown away by the mastery of the boy. This here, was a master photographer in the making.

In his is photo essay chronicling the work of the boy, whose name I could not catch, he writes:

“His photos are so good that it brings up the interesting subject of: what are the ingredients of a good photograph?
The role of equipment, skill, chance, being at the right place at right time, access to intriguing visual material, trust between photographer and subject, open mind and confidence of photographer, innocence?“

Indeed, what makes a good photographer? Experience? the ability to detect good light? The ability to frame time and space? Whatever it is, this boy’s work will inspire us to let go of inhibitions and to just go with the flow and let your hidden talents take over.

Check out the page at www.ferenc.biz. Scroll to the bottom to see a portrait of the boy.

• 7 signs that you should be a professional photographer
  Photopreneur has this article about the 7 signs. Read on!
• Chicago in HDR
  This is a series of photographs that will delight all HDR lovers out there.
• 4 reasons not to write off shooting in automatic
  The people at Digital Photography School has this article on the matter.
• Richard Edson’s Beyond the Valley of the Micro-Bops Show
  Who’d have thought photographing abstractionist portraits of toys in macro would be such an art form? Check this out!
• Model Posing Tips
  So you’ve got this model to photograph, now what?

The list wouldn’t be perfect without some portfolios.

• Deanna Hall Photography
  I’ve a soft spot for portraits of little babies, toddlers and children in general. Check out the beautiful work of Deanna Hall - with background music to accompany you!
• Kristine Duran Thiessen
  I love those cookbooks with those succulent dishes photographed in exquisite light. This is it!

I hope you enjoyed that.

“The contest is an invitation to reflect on the potato’s key role in agriculture, the economy and world food security, to offer new insights into potato biodiversity, cultivation, processing, trade, marketing and consumption, and to contribute to a free and international exchange of information on this globally important food crop.”

Anyone can join and be in the running to win some very nice prizes from Nikon:

Amateur photographers category:

• 1st place - $US2 000 and a Nikon D60 kit (D60 body + AF-S DX Nikkor 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 G VR lens)
• 2nd place - $US1 000 and a Nikon D40 kit (D40 body + AF-S DX Nikkor 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 G II lens)
• 3rd place - $US 500 and a Nikon Coolpix S600 camera

Professional photographers category:

• 1st place - US$4 000 and a Nikon D300 kit (D300 body + AF-S DX Nikkor 18-70mm f/3.5-5.6 ED VR lens)
• 2nd place - US$2 000 and a Nikon AF-S DX Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 G VR lens
• 3rd place - US$1 000 and a Nikon AF-S DX Nikkor 16-85mm f/3.5-5.6 G ED VR lens

You can learn more on the contest rules, how to enter and register here.

So what’re you waiting for? Grab your camera and go shoot some potatoes and who knows, maybe you’ll be the proud owner of a Nikon D60 kit and $2,000 to spend.

Submission deadline is 1st September 2008.

On the 15th of March, in San Francisco, the popular photo website Flickr will be celebrating its 4th birthday. Several hours ahead, due to time differences, Maldives Flickr users will be celebrating the same event in Maldives. The details are below.

Venue: Sea House Restaurant
Time: 18:30 - 20:00
Date: 15 March 2008

The organisers, constituting primarily of Flickr users from Maldives, have planned some activities for the event, including a surprise.

Everyone is invited. So be there. MvPhotos.org supports this community event.

More information is available from this thread on the Flickr Turns 4 Group.

To enlist (optional):

• Upcoming event page
• On Facebook

So to try it out I did some macro shots of a toy car and manually moved the focus from the front to the back and took shots as I went along. To keep the camera steady I had it mounted on a tripod.

Here is the first of the frames - the front tip of the car:

After moving the focus ring of the lens (a Canon 50mm F1.8) and taking a shot as I went along I arrive at the rear of the car in focus:

Now, after loading up all the images in Helicon Focus and pressing the Run button, I have this:

Perfect, isn’t it? The software works like a wonder. Note that the above photos have not been cropped. This is important because technically we could get the whole car in focus by using a higher aperture or simply by putting some more distance between the car and camera.

During the making of my first feature (Home Lighting Experiment 1) I also did a session of macro photography to try out Helicon focus on the Orchids. Here’s how it went:

I mounted a 4x close-up, which narrows the depth of field significantly:

Then I started focused on the front petal of one of the orchids:

After taking many shots as I moved the focus point I got the petal at the end nicely in focus:

Then I selected the photos in Helicon Focus and ran them and here’s what I got:

Not too bad. Of course, my subjects are not that interesting for this kind of photography. An insect such as a dragon fly would have made a much more interesting subject. The above 3 photos are all full-frames, not crops.

You can download a 30-day trial version of Helicon Focus from www.heliconsoft.com.

If you do try it out then show us your results by posting them to the MvPhotos group on Flickr.

Thank you for your time and I hope you enjoyed that.

• Leigh Taylor Photography
  Beautiful portraits of babies and toddlers in different settings by Leigh Taylor.
• Steve Harrington Photography
  High school seniors, families and weddings make the portfolio of this husband and wife team of photographers. You will love the use of natural, outdoor settings as backgrounds for the portraits - a real departure from the usual studio portraits we are accustomed to.
• Heather Starr Photography
  There is something about women photographers and their work with babies and children. Click here for more beautiful portraits.
• Eva Kolenko
  For something quite different check out Eva Kolenko’s fine art portraiture here.

Aerial photography is not for everyone simply because it involves renting a plane to actually go aerial. But aerial photography is always interesting to look at and always gets everyone attention.

• Jason Hawkes Aerial Photography
  He’s got some great clients on portfolio. Watch the professional’s stunning works here.
• Alex S. MacLean
  With several books and a tremendously rich portfolio, Alex is the king of Aerial photography.

According to him he’s been a photographer since he was 15, that was when his grandfather gave Andrew his “old” Nikon Coolpix. Andrew says he “wasn’t all too serious at first” until he saw what others were doing in his Commercial Photo class in his second year at uni. During the  second semester, he says, he had “moved up” to a Nikon D200 - the camera he still uses today.

Andrew’s photos, for me, has both a sombre and a haunting feel to them. Still some are even intense and mellow at the same time. Have a look at some of his portraits, they are just beautiful. The tones maybe pleasing to the eye but how he has used the subjects makes them very extraordinary. The framing, the composition and post-processing simply outstanding! What is clear to me, and this I think is an important fact, is that Andrew has found his own unqiue style in portraiture as well as nature and landscape.

On post-processing, he says, he uses Photoshop but that ”for the most part, I get it all in camera”.

Check out Andrews artistry at www.andrewhefter.com.

We’ve got a great mix of both articles from the New York Times and informative advice from various other places on the web.

• Digital SLRs that shoot like a Pro
  Great article on cheap digital cameras from New York Times
• Picture, Picture on the Wall
  Curious article from New York Times again. This one talks about how home owners are hiring pro-photographers to shoot their homes. It also gives you an idea of how much they charge for their services. Don’t surf away without having look at page ‘2′ where you can see some of those pros at work.
• Lenses for Photojournalism
  Beyond Phototips has this great article on what those photojournalists use for their work.
• Tutorial: Lighting for Impact
  Professional Photographer Magazine has this enlightening article on studio lighting
• Better Photography Tips
  NSLog has a list of very informative tips that he noted when he “skimmed a book at Barnes & Noble”. The book was How to Photograph your life.
• 12 Things to Photograph Before You Die
  Photopreneur.com blog lists out those 12 things to photograph before we hit six feet under but I would add one more and make it 13: a sunset in Maldives. It is to die for.

Do you have some links you want to share with others? Send them via the contact form and have a link to your photos published along side mention of your name.

If I am on your Flickr contact list you might have noticed that I once posted a photo of a lily that I said was shot at home with 2 table lamps and the TV as the background. This is the same experiment.

Stuff I used:

• A branch of orchids that I bought from Cactus flower shop (Rf 25)
• A plant that was growing in water
• A glass flower pot
• Camera (of course!)
• and Tripod (very important)
• 1 desk lamp (then added another later)
• LCD TV as the background. The other option is to use a black cloth that has no shine. I did try a black polo t-shirt but it was too worn out so the faded out material fibres reflected too much light.

Here is how the setup looked:

As you can see I had one lamp (white light) directly above my subject which is in front of our LCD TV which has a very low reflection surface. The camera is mounted on the tripod. If you mouse-over the above photo you can see how it looked without the flash. Yes, I had all the lights switched off because most of the room lights were tungsten.

I set the camera (my Canon 350D) to get the sharpest photo as follows:

• Enabled remote control (wireless / infrared RC4) shooting
• Enabled Mirror lock-up
• Disabled Image Stabilization on the lens
• I was using Aperture priority
• F: 8
• ISO 100
• Shutter speed: 1/6 sec
• Focal: 32mm

Result 1

Here is one of the shots from the setup above:

As you can see it is not very interesting. Now, I am not much of a flower-arranger so I wanted to make this look OK without doing anything with the flowers. So I used another desk lamp, this time one with a tungsten bulb, and pointed it at the base of the glass vase.

Result 2

This time the result was much more pleasing:

Of course, at this point I could have just finish the shoot and used some Photoshop magic on the photos to get something. But I still need something there. After a while it struck me: I need to spray some water on my subject and put more light from the bottom.

So I did and this time it came out perfectly. Here’s the image after I tweaked the colours in Lightroom:

Result 3

You might have noticed that I’ve carelessly sprayed the vase too in the process. I think it would have looked better without the vase looking wet.

Conclusion

If you are, like me, interested in macros of flowers and find that you cannot find unique flowers to photograph, then do what Scott Kelby says: go to your local flower shop and get a few flowers and shoot them at home. That’s what I did. The last time I went to Cactus the guy there gave me a lily for free because it was slightly damaged!

And if you have a tripod and a few desk lamps (or any direct light source) lying around the house then you can use it. The sharpness is quite impressive. Here’s the above image severely cropped to showoff some of the tack sharpness details:

Photography, for us hobbyists and aspiring students has to be something fun to do and in the end, while the technical rules are the same, what we do with those rules are our own invention. I hope you liked the article.

Thanks for reading!