Last updated 7/22/2004

Digital Photography Hacks

Digital Photography Hacks
Author: Derrick Story
Publisher: O'Reilly
329 Pages .... $29.95
ISBN 0-596-00666-7
100 Industrial Strength Tips and Tools

Ansel Adams is one of the great classic photographers. What he could do with his camera was amazing, but I did not know how much of the credit belongs to his work in the darkroom until I read the Preface to this book. Derrick Story stays that W. Eugene Smith, Jerry Uesmann, and Ansel Adams had more technical aces up their sleeve than a riverboat gambler. Their ingenuity and and photographic prowess inspired this book.

In the Foreword, Rick Smolan defines hack as a clever solution to an interesting problem. He says this book invites you to pick it up and open if to any page to discover something new to do with your camera and your photographs.

The first 15 hacks in this book are about digital camera attachments such as tripods and LCD hoods. Hacks 16 - 28 are about different daytime photo secrets including use of flash, and surprising ones such as using daylight inside when making your own passport photograph. Logically, hacks 29-38 are about nighttime photo hacks which includes the nighttime flash mode on my Nilkon Coolpix camers, that some of the best nighttime photos are taken at twilight without flash, secrets of fireworks photography (f8 - 4 seconds), and photographing stars.

After nighttime hacks, hacks 39 - 46 are hacks with flash. Some newer cameras wit external flash , can automatically expose correctly for bounce flash, Use a business card and rubber band for bright eyes.

Hacks 47-61 are about using the computer, starting with judging image sharpness by file size. He has a hack for using folder names to organize your images, such as 2003.12.25-Christmas. (The majority of web surfers still have a monitor resolution of 800 x 600 pixels. Keep tis in mind when choosing the large image size for your web gallery, but he recommends a JPEG quality of 5-7.) (He recommends QuikTime slide show large images of 640 x 480 and named sequentially, house01 with a frame rate of about 4 seconds.) Has hacks for adding music and voice over to presentations.

Hacks 62-74 are about using photoshop magic. His unsharp mask recommendation is a the most conservative that I have seen with Amount 12%, Radius 1.0 pixel, Threshold 4 levels, and 2, 3, or 4 times if once is not enough. For e-mail he recommends sampling down to 400 x 300 or 640 x 480. (Hack #65 Crop and Reasmple in ONe Step by setting Width, Height, and Resolution to something like 640 x, 480 px, and 72 may not work.) Hack #68, how to take two pictures instead of one when light range is greater than the eye can see. Expose fot light, and expose for dark, then merge using a layer mask in Photoshop. (Can also be done in Elements 2, but more difficult to explain.) He recommends using the desaturation sponge in Photoshop to remove the red eye without removing the highlights. (That is about what Elements 2 red eye brush does, changes red to black.) #70 To brighten teeth, first select them starting with the magic wand and making fine adjustments with the lasso tool. Then in use the Hue/saturation tool to remove some of the natural yellow tiint by desaturating the yellow channel to somewhere between -70 and -80, then move the lightness slider to the right to brighten the teeth, but do not overdo it. Remember the best corrections are the ones that look natural. #73 Fix flash falloff using an overlay mask. Select LayerÑ>New LayerÑ>Overlay mode and set opacity to 50%. wWith foreground color white and background black, click on the Gradient tool, and draw straight up the image from the brighter guys to the darker. Begin your gradient off the image or in the middle of the image or wherever it works best.. Then click on the background l layer and use the levels tool, move the middle triangle to the left until the overall brightness of the scene is what you want. His before and after pictures were very good.

I cannot comment on hacks 75-85 which are about using a camera-phone, but if you have a camera-phone, here they are.

Hacks 86-100 are weekend photo projects . He gives iPhoto its due because it has popularized hobbyist book production. #88 Keep a digital diary, The key is to have a camera available when events happen. Taking a picture every day is a good habit to acquire - just something to show what kind of day it was. Use your iPhoto or other digital shoebox to turn these into an album. Even after only a couple of months, you'll find that looking back is more fun than you would have imagined when you started the project. Archive your diary by exporting it to a web catalog using iPhoto Export, and then burn it to a CD or DVD. Max height 640 max width 640, quality 100, convert returns to
, show title, show comments, links on bottom, 20 links per row (his example_ (Pictures of TV screen - 1/15 second, turn off flash, use tripod & shoot multiple exposures) Get close with digiscoping - three images Nikon Coolpix 775, hand held 22 feet from finch feeder 3x optical zoom, 3 x optical zoom through tripod mounted 7 x 50 binoculars, and hand held 3x optical zoom through a mounted scope wiht a 22x eyepiece. Create a photo key for group shots - desaturate image to get black and white, adjust Brightness/Contrast until you have a ghost image, use Text tool to add labels in the image in a bold pleasing color, attach print to back of original photo.

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