A wedding is the most important day in a woman’s life. She dreams of the special day all of her life, since she was a little girl, and spends many hours thinking about it and planning it.
Wedding photos are one aspect of the big day, and a very important one at that. The wedding photos will be used to cherish memories of the wedding day, so will need to be of a very high quality. To keep your wedding photos you can have them printed and stored in a special commemorative wedding album, which you can look back on fondly, however a wedding album is often stored away in a drawer on a shelf. It’s not visible all of the time.
You can display your wedding photos on your wall every day by having them printed on canvas. Canvas printing is a great way of showing off the photographs from your big day as the texture of the canvas makes the bride look more radiant and her dress look more spectacular. Canvas is a special medium and is perfect for printing those important wedding photographs.
Don’t hide your best wedding pictures away in a drawer, print your photos to canvas and display them on your wall.
The advent of digital photography and the reduction in price of the equipment has made professionally finished photographs far more attainable to the masses. Photography used to be a hobby for the rich as cameras were expensive and having your own darkroom took up both a lot of space and money. Then when instant cameras, pioneered by Polaroid, came to the fore more and more people were able to afford photography and became interested in it.
Then of course there were the cheap development companies such as Truprint, and even Boots offered photo development. This allowed even more people to enjoy photography, but the cost was still there and quality was not that great.
With the digital age photography enthusiasts are able to take as many pictures as they want without worrying about expensive development costs. They can then download the photos to their computers and choose the best ones to print or even edit them using photo editing software. This ensures that for a small investment, anyone is able to possess the equipment that will allow them to take professional photographs.
The only cost then comes in the actual printing of the pictures, which can be done at home on professional printers with photo paper. All of this means that you’re left with nothing but the best photos, and the only choices you have are what are the best ways to print the photos? Rather than the usual photo paper printing, you could pick your favourite photos and have them printed on canvas.
We’re in the height of summer right now in the UK, although it doesn’t look like it. The British weather is legendary for it’s temperamental changes and violent skies, even when it’s supposed to be the middle of July!
This means that for getting a tan or enjoying a picnic, we’re not that blessed. However when it comes to taking photographs outdoors, our weather is just about ideal. The best pictures, that ones that look truly great when printed on canvas for example, are not taken during strong, brilliant sunlight. Instead, they’re taken during overcast conditions, low light, early morning or in the sort of muggy, nondescript weather that Britain has so much of.
Therefore if you’re looking to take some great photos with a touch of dynamism, don’t despair at the lack of sunlight we’re experiencing right now. Instead grab your camera and go outside and make use of the Great British weather.
This weekend saw the Glastonbury music festival, which is just one of many music festivals taking place over the summer. These events make the perfect opportunities to take great photographs as you’re surrounded by ecstatic revellers, great lighting conditions, impressive stage constructions and mud, lots and lots of mud.
It shouldn’t be too hard therefore to take some memorable photos, photos that would look good printed on canvas and displayed on your wall. However, because the unpredictable nature of the British weather, and the all too predictable nature of the British mud, you probably don’t want to be taking your expensive SLR camera along to the festival with you.
You’re probably better off taking a cheaper camera, but ensure that it does allow you to adjust the shutter speed so you can at least have some control over your pictures.
Obviously you’ll want to try to take some photos of the performers on the stage; this after all is why people attend festivals in the first place. Try to get as close as possible to the stage for this as you’ll want the artist to be as large within your frame as possible. If you can’t get too close, don’t panic, you can easily make use of other aspects of the festival for great images.
For example, try taking pictures of the crowd, of their faces. The reactions of people to a performer can be extremely expressive and make for really interesting photographs. Also you could try to take pictures of the things that happen away from the stage, as they can sometimes be the more interesting things at festivals.
Back in the days of 35mm film cameras and sending your pictures off to the chemist or the photo labs to be developed, you knew that what you got back was what you’d taken through the camera lens. The camera, as they say, never lies.
These days however with digital cameras, a multitude of camera effects and of course the availability of photo editing software such as PhotoShop, the camera doesn’t just lie, it completely makes up what you want it to.
You can take a photo of your subject against a white wall, drop them into any background or setting that you want and create it so that it looks real. You can correct any errors with the picture, such as poor lighting and intrusive objects, plus you can even correct any errors with your subject. For example you could get rid of spots, red-eye, whiten their teeth or even reduce their weight.
The power of image manipulation software is incredible, but is it real photography?
The truth is yes. You don’t think those recent photos that have adorned OK magazine from Wayne and Colleen’s wedding didn’t go unedited do you? She doesn’t look that good without some airbrush and clone tool work from PhotoShop. If you want your photos to look as good as the professionals, especially if you’re looking to get them printed on canvas, you’ll want to find yourself some image manipulation software and give yourself a PhotoShop makeover.
It’s not cheating; it’s what the professionals do!
In the digital age finding your photographs shouldn’t be a problem. It’s not like you’re having to deal with masses of negative strips like we used to have to organise when we used 35mm film cameras. In those days you’d need to keep them safe in wallets and make sure they didn’t get dusty or creased, because if they did you wouldn’t be printing any more photos from them!
No, today we just need to save our images to a computer or a storage device and we can store tens of thousands of photographs as easy as we’d save files on the Internet. Then they’re ready for you whenever you need them to print as pictures, upload to websites or print on canvas.
However, you need to be careful with your digital pictures because you won’t have any negatives to rescue you, should you happen to lose the file or delete it accidentally. Therefore you should copy your images and keep backups, because if your computer crashes and isn’t recoverable, can you afford to lose the images it contains?
You can use an external storage drive, a USB flash drive, or even upload your photos to Flickr or some other such file saving website. The more copies you have of your pictures, the safer they’ll be.
Imagine if the worst happened right now, and you lost every photo on your PC; have you made backups?
When looking to take great photos that will look good printed on canvas you’ll need to ensure that you do everything possible to get the best shot, and the clearest possible image. As canvas prints can be very large in size, any blemish or imperfection in the picture will be very obvious in the final canvas print.
Therefore, one tip you should take heed of when taking your pictures is to use a tripod as much as you can. This might seem obvious, but many photographers try to ignore their tripods and work without them. They take too much time to setup, they’re too cumbersome, and they think they don’t need one. Particularly with today’s digital cameras having image stabilizing technology, the tripod isn’t required anymore.
That’s just not true however, the tripod is just as important now as it ever was. Using image stabilizing doesn’t allow you reduce the shutter speed enough for adding any creativity to your photographs, or for taking pictures in lower light conditions.
For example, you could reduce your shutter speed down to 1/15 or 1/30 a second, which would allow you to create great burred effects for action photography. This isn’t possible without a tripod, thus using the tripod could be the difference between a good photo and a great photo.
One thing many people don’t realise when they come to have their pictures printed, whether that be on paper on printed on canvas, is that the resolution is important to the outcome of the print. Many digital cameras these days allow you to choose the quality of the image that you’re saving, offering smaller file sizes and lower resolutions in order to save space and fit more pictures on the SD card. The downside to this is that the quality, or resolution, of the smaller files is too poor to print.
This means that when they are printed they come out fuzzy, grainy and blurry.
Cameras take pictures this low quality because they’re fine for use on the Internet, such as on Facebook or MySpace. The Internet displays images at the resolution 72 dpi (dots per inch) which is fine when the pictures appear on your computer screen. However 72 dpi is far too low a resolution to be printed. Instead, when printing an image you’ll require a resolution of a minimum of 300 dpi.
If you were buying images from a photographer’s website you would generally pay more for the higher resolution versions. Fore example the 72 dpi version may be the cheapest because it’s only useful for website work, where a 300 dpi or higher resolution image would cost more as it can be printed.
With this in mind ensure that if you’re looking to take a photo with a view to printing it on canvas, or on paper, that you choose the highest quality setting on your digital camera and use the highest resolution available. The higher the resolution, the better quality the photograph.
For most people, and especially women, your wedding day is the most important day of your life. You want it to be perfect. Every detail has to be just right and everything has to go off without a hitch (despite of course the ‘hitch’ you’re there for!).
However it can also be very stressful, and many things can go wrong. Above all else though, the wedding photographer isn’t something you want to go wrong. The pictures from your wedding are what last, capturing those enduring memories of your special day. They’ll stay with you for what should be a long and successful marriage, so you’ll want to make sure you have the best photographs you can.
In order to do this, and have wedding photos that will look good enough to be printed on canvas, you’ll need to make sure you choose the right wedding photographer. Make sure you see their portfolio first, and get an accurate quote on the prices they charge so that you know how many photos you’ll get and what sort of album you’ll be presented with.
Then you should consult with the people that matter, such as the bride and groom’s parents, on what sort of photos they’ll want. Be sure not take too much input though as it’s your day, and the photographer is the expert.
When you come to choose a photograph for printing on canvas you should pick one that shows the happy couple in close up, as the canvas texture always look great on skin tones.
Above all, enjoy the day. If you’re stressed and worrying about things, it will show in the pictures.
Taking photos of people outside is a great way of combining nature with portrait shots, and often brings the best out of your subjects. However when lighting your portrait photos outside you should rely on natural sunlight to light your pictures, even Mother Nature needs a helping hand sometimes. When you rely on sunlight you’ll often get light that is too harsh, or too flat, or creates dark areas on the subject’s face. To rectify this you should use something called a ‘fill flash’, or the ‘mode’ setting as it is sometimes known on digital cameras.
This will ensure that you don’t lose any of the details on your subject’s face.
The Fill Flash will create a subtle flash that throws a little light onto your subject’s face. It’s often used by professional wedding photographers to ensure that the bride and groom get the best possible pictures of their special day; particularly when faced by the strong sunlight every bride wants for her wedding day.
The Fill Flash on a digital camera takes a reading of the amount of light in the background of your image, and adjusts the level of the flash to compensate. This ensures that you’re not left with a strong backlight causing a dark effect on your subject’s face, silhouetting your subject.
Be sure not to stand too fare away from your subject though as the effective range of the flash is usually no more than 10 feet.
With the Fill Flash you can experiment using different natural lighting techniques. For example, you could position your subject with the sun behind them, or to the side of them, creating what is often known as ‘rim lighting’. This creates a slight halo effect behind them, highlighting their outline.
