fixed on photos
HDfx 360 today announced they have released a super-premium line of auxiliary smartphone lenses that bring professional image quality to today’s Smartphone Cameras.
Three ultra-high quality German designed Precision lenses – Fisheye, Macro, and Wide-Angle fit all phones and mobile devices.
Did you know that social media profiles with photos catch 14 times more attention than the ones without photos? This is what LinkedIn says, and in an effort to help their members look better online (and for corporate self-promotion, no doubt), last year LinkedIn sent a branded photo studio bus to 16 cities in the US offering free headshots.
In 2016, the LinkedIn photo-bus will be back on the road for the “Picture Opportunity Tour”. To check if their coming to your area, click here >
How this works? The process was fast but you needed to stand in line for quite some time when too many people showed up.
You take several photos with a professional portrait photographer, and then select the best one that will be uploaded to your LinkedIn profile on the spot. So, make sure you remember you login. And, no, they will not email you the shot.
In case you feel you picture needs some tweaking: make the skin less shiny, even out skin tones, fix the makeup, remove some sun burn and fly-away hair and such, just download the photo from LinkedIn and order photo retouching on PhotoHand.com website. There is no standing in line there.
These were unusually warm and fun 12 days of Christmas.
Candid photos are the best. Formal settings and posed shots are the things of the past. They were a must in the early years of photography when people had to remain frozen in front of the camera for extended periods of time due to long exposure necessary for making a decent shot.
Kids were notoriously difficult to photograph (they still are) as they have trouble staying still and frankly don’t feel the need to suffer for the sake of preserving images of themselves. This is why there are some weird vintage pictures where the controlling mother is disguised as a chair.
The modern cameras are fast at capturing images in action. There is no need for prolonged posing.
Though family photographer still like to create arty images and can be good at making children pose for them.
If you want to replicate such achievements, you are guaranteed to fail.
Where you can beat a professional photographer is candid shots. Children feel more relaxed without pressure of a timed photo shoot and their true personalities shine.
Engage your kids in their favorite activities and keep your camera ready. You’ll get much more interesting shots than the cheesy smiles into the camera.
“I don’t care what religion you are — if you don’t keep your husband excited, someone else will,” says a boudoir photography customer who is a member of a Jewish Orthodox community in Brooklyn, NY.
The recent article in NY Post shows that the trend among brides, wives, moms and grannies to pose for sexy photos is spreading to communities with restricted life style. the photographer interviewed for the article claims that boudoir bookings for the Hasidic community in Flatbush, Brooklyn, now account for 35 percent of her overall business — she currently juggles around 40 such shoots a year. Her packages, which cost around $1,000, appeal to women between their 20s and their 50s, mostly married, but some single.
The boudoir photography trend started long ago. Instead of whining about how unfair it is to picture sexy flawless model in glossy magazines, women of all ages are determined to show that they’ve got it too, but only show it to their partners and probably to some trusted female friends. Boudoir photo books (a popular gift on Valentine’s day) are usually locked away.
With the help of a skilled photographer and magazine quality photo editing now available to consumers, she will shine in her natural beauty.
source: NYPost, October1, 2015 - These Orthodox Jewish women are stripping for the camera
Valentine’s Day seems to rival Christmas for the amount of stress that people go through every year. Gift hunting, elevated expectations, fighting for restaurant reservations for the couples and feelings of failure for many singletons who are fighting back by throwing Singles parties on this day. This is also sad time of the year for those who lost their loved ones.
Luckily, the concept of the V day is beginning to change. More and more people celebrate this day by showing appreciation generally for the people they care about – friends, family and even pets.
Some cultures are leading the way in this direction. In Finland, Valentine’s Day is referred to as Friend’s Day. In Guatemala, it is known as Day of Love and Friendship.
This year consider everyone in your world that you care about and send them a token of appreciation. My suggestion is do it with a photo that you can email, post on Facebook, or print out and frame. It can be a photo of you together at a happy moment or a nice photo of them. Of course, PhotoHand is here for you to make this photo gift-worthy by fixing the flaws and giving it a Hollywood touch.
Happy Valentine’s Day to everyone!
On August 19th 2010, World Photography Day hosted it’s first global online gallery. With 270 photographs shared and website visitors from over 100 countries, World Photography Day was born.
Although the earliest surviving photo dates back to 1826, the history of photography dates back to 1790 associated with the invention and development of the camera and the creation of permanent images starting with Thomas Wedgwood.
So what is so special about August 19th? It was on this date in 1839 that the French government announced the invention of Daguerreotype technology a gift “Free to the World”.
Daguerreotype photographic processes, developed by Joseph Nicèphore Nièpce and Louis Daguerre,were officially unveiled by The French Academy of Sciences on January 9, 1839. Though from the modern perspective daguerreotypes were expensive and time consuming to produce, at the time it was the first practicable photographic process. Being unique images, daguerreotypes could still be copied by re-daguerreotyping the original. Copies were also produced by lithography or engraving.
The invention gave boost to the portrait photography market that became a flourishing business practiced by traveling photographers. For the first time common folks could afford to get the likeness of themselves and their loved ones captured.
By 1853 an estimated three million daguerreotypes per year were being produced in the United States alone. This might sound like an insignificant number given that today over 200,000 shots are being uploaded to Facebook every minute. But in those days someone would spend a day’s worth salary to have a family picture taken. These were family treasures to be kept through generations.
Nicéphore Niépce’s earliest surviving camera photograph, circa 1826
It’s been estimated that every two minutes, we take more pictures than the whole of humanity in the 1800s. How many of them were worth taking and sharing is a question that will not be answered.
With such a turnover per capita, one might think our lives are being documented at every step and then when a dear one passes away there is somehow no good photo to keep. I know this from experience as I talk to people all the time who call to ask if anything can be done to fix the cherished image. more often than not it’s a phone camera shot that gets too blurry when enlarged. Take good pictures of the ones you love while you still can!
Family Photos
I lift them like kisses from the wall:
my daughter in a pumpkin costume;
my mother and her poodle, the one she loved
like the sister, soul mate, lover she never had;
my father, shoulders back, belly out,
a flat blue lake, a gray sky. And in the spaces
left behind—one for each memory
wrapped and packed away— thin, sharp nails.
One-by-one I extract them, gripping
and twisting needle-nosed pliers
to prevent the chip or flake of paint.
But I can’t avoid exposing the plaster
under its layers of years, the same way
the mortician who applies the makeup
to my father’s body cannot prevent
the incidental scraping of his ear,
revealing the cold gray flesh. My wife
at the funeral says His ear is blue.
Once the nails are out, I consider
the pencil marks made years earlier
to define the placement of each frame.
I use an eraser, the kind you knead
until it’s warm and soft, pliable
as an infant’s fist, while outside the window
a sparrow hops across the brick planter,
one of the wild birds my father always fed
when he could still rise on his own.
When I see his body lying in its coffin,
I bend across the torso, press my lips
to the stone-cold brow. I kiss him
the way I never kissed him in life,
stripped now of all defenses, naked
before me even in his gown of coat and tie.
And I do not wonder why I kiss him.
I know I have lifted the pictures from the walls.
I know the walls are white and I will fill
the holes with care—covering anything
that might reveal what has been damaged, or where.
It was in 1975 when the world-renowned Detroit-born photographer Nicolas Nixon, a professor of photography at the Massachusetts College of Art originally photographed his wife Bebe and her 3 sisters. They liked the picture so much that they collectively decided to make it a yearly event – the annual family photo – the family’s “annual rite of passage,” as Nicolas Nixon has called it.
Each image reflects another year of life experiences that take their toll.
In 1999, when the resulting series of photographs reached its twenty-fifth anniversary, The Museum of Modern Art published The Brown Sisters photography book, presenting all of the portraits in sequence. “We might wish,” said Peter Galassi, the Museum’s Chief Curator of Photography, “that our family included a photographer of such discipline and skill but otherwise Nixon’s pictures do what all family photographs do: they fix a presence and mark the passage of time, graciously declining to expound or explain.”
That edition is out of print. Eight years later the Museum is published a second edition, including eight new photographs that brought the series up to date.
As of today the Brown Sisters photo story numbers 36 photographs – candid and and at the same time poetic.
Happy Independence Day! Most of us in the US will take photos of fireworks tomorrow so that we can share them on Facebook after. Of course you want your firework pictures to look great to reflect the joy of the celebration. Here are some simple tips for photographing fireworks with a point-and-shoot camera.
– Choose your location strategically: you don’t want any view-spoilers such as people’s heads, tree branches or wires.
– Keep in mind that if the smoke from the firework will blow towards you, the fireworks will be obscured.
– Avoid locations where street lights, the moon or any other source of light will shine on your camera lens. The light creates flare.
– Turn the flash off.
– Set your camera to the mode called Fireworks. If you don’t have it, use the Night Landscape or Mountain icons, or a Landscape scene mode.
– When taking pictures of fireworks, listen for the sound of shells going up, and press the shutter release just before they burst.
That’s all. Happy photoshooting!
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