Digital Photo Frames

By Olly Fallon

You may have heard of Digital Photo Frames. They are the new craze that has been hitting the market within the last year or so.

Since digital cameras first jumped onto the scene people have been hit by a dilemma - Everyone loves photos but they simply are not as enjoyable when sat at a computer screen. Where you used to pass around your family photo album for all to see, you now have to get everyone gathered round a small screen to enjoy them. This means that more often than not people just didn't bother showing them.

Since then there are companies that will print your photos out to look like original photos. This is a service used by some but generally, due to the ease of putting them on a PC people again do not bother. Sure there are printers that can print photos, but you need special paper and it requires a lot of ink. Mostly this is a very expensive way of doing things.

Here is where the digital photo frames come into play. These devices look like your standard photo frames seen dotted around the home. There is a big difference however, these digital photo frames do not display a paper photo - they display your digital photos directly from your memory card or on board memory. How is this done?

Well as we know, flat panel TFT monitors, LCD televisions and plasma screens have become more and more popular as well as more affordable in recent years. This has led to a boom in this technology. A digital photo frame utilises this technology by installing a tft screen into the photo frame shell. Once powered up the screen can display your photo in the best resolutions as it if was a real photo - what's more often the images are much sharper than a print.

The great thing about these devices is that you are not limited to showing one photo. You can set the frame to display a whole album of photos, one after the other, at intervals that suit you. You can choose frames the size of a standard photo right up to huge 12 inch frames and beyond.

Some digital photo frames will come with on board memory, others will require you to insert your memory card. Some will have effects such as sepia and negative and others will fade in and out your photos. Some come with a built in battery which is great for wire free viewing!

Check our fantastic range of Digital Photo Frames. You will find a Digital Photo Frame to suit any occasion.

If you want to improve your photographic skills consider the educational best selling book Digital Photo Secrets

The Best Digital Camera For The Money

By Chris Campbell

Nobody really wants, or needs the best of anything. It doesn't matter, whether it's digital cameras, automobiles, homes, or jet airplanes. What we really want and expect, is value for our money. If I'm going to spend $100 for a camera, then I better get $100 worth of features and quality from that camera. If I spend $1000 on a camera, then I better get $1000 worth back as well. If you follow a few simple rules, you'll see how easy it is to get the best camera your money can buy.

Acclaimed science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon was famous for a couple of adages known as Sturgeons Laws. My favorite, and the one most relevant to our discussion is, "Ninety percent of everything is crap." It's simple, direct and brutally honest. It also really helps narrow down our search. If the camera your looking at is not on at least one top ten list, then drop it from your search. If it doesn't have at least a four star review from someone, then drop if off your list. There are so many cameras to choose from these days, there's really no need to settle for anything less then the best.

The second step, and a little more effort intensive, is the trial run phase. You need to try out as many of the cameras on your now very short list (thanks to Theodore) as possible. Spend a day, and blitz your favorite camera stores. Go to two or three, and just annoy and pepper the sales staff with as many questions and requests as you can. If you go during off hours, you should have plenty of time and space to try out all the cameras you want. See if you can cajole them into letting you take a few home to try out. After this exercise, your short list should be really short. Maybe even a list of 1.

Of course if the above seems like to much work for you slackers out there, here's my short list of great cameras that are all money well spent. In the under $150 category, the Canon PowerShot A570IS. It's a simple point and shoot with 4x zoom lens, image stabilization, and Canon reliability. For the portability minded ultra compact FaceBook crowd, you can't go wrong with the Canon PowerShot SD1000 Digital Elph. Slightly less image quality then the A570IS, and slightly more expensive, but a very easy traveler. Another favorite compact of mine is the Olympus Stylus 790SW. The only waterproof, shockproof, dust proof, and freeze proof camera I know.

If want to head for the semi-pro class of camera, step up to the Canon Rebel XTi Digital SLR. It makes an easy transition from point and shoots into the infinitely complex world of SLR photography for about $600. And, finally for those of you with bottomless pocketbooks, why not splurge and grab yourself a Canon EOS 5D for about $2000 plus change. With full frame technology at a very reasonable price, your bound to silence even the most ardent "film only" purists anywhere.

If you want to improve your digital pictures with your new digital camera you can try the great book of Digital Photo Secrets

Never Buy A Nikon Coolpix S51 Digital Camera

By Chris Campbell

Do people actually buy cameras because they think it enhances their image? With a name like Coolpix, apparently the good folks at Nikon seem to think so. The million dollar question here though, is whether buying a Nikon Coolpix S51 Digital Camera will allow you to take cool pictures like the name suggests. I suspect not, but lets take a look anyway.

One of the nice things about ultra compact cameras like the S51, is their portability. Being able to reach into a pocket quickly, grab your camera and snag a picture at a moments is a nice feature. If it works. Don't count on catching many of those candid moments with a Coolpix. It tends to take a few seconds to start up once you've powered it up, followed by another few seconds after you've squeezed the shutter button. Hopefully your subjects are slow (translation... not kids), and don't go scurrying off the second they see a camera in your hand.

Nikon, must know that the S51 is going to be carried around in all kinds of strange places. Pants pockets full of dust and beach sand, backpacks along with your paper clip collection, and car consoles right beside all your loose dimes and nickels. You'd think, they'd make the Coolpix LCD a little more durable for these hostile environments. Especially since there's no viewfinder, and your stuck staring at a scratched up LCD to frame all your photos.

Megapixels and LCD's screens seem to be the big selling point these days with manufacturers. If only more consumers realized that too many megapixels result in noisy pictures, especially with an ultra-compact camera that have such a small image sensor to start with. While bigger LCDs may seem cool, they're just a killer on batteries. I swear that little Energizer Bunny is subsidizing the camera manufacturers big LCD hype, just to ensure he stays employed forever. I'd gladly exchange a 3 inch LCD for a 2 inch one, if it meant I got 30% more pictures, and a viewfinder thrown in as a backup.

Just for good measure, here's a couple other shots to the body of the Nikon Coolpix S51:

- hard to hold onto, power switch too easy to press accidentally

- LCD display is very grainy

- door to battery and memory card is fragile and hard to open

- no auto presets dial

- photos under florescent lighting have greenish tinge

If honesty in advertising was applied to cameras the way it was to cigarettes, we'd have some pretty interesting warning labels on camera packaging. "Warning... this camera may make you a bad photographer". "Warning... pictures in LCD are grainier then they appear". "Warning... buying a Coolpix camera will not make you seem cool to your friends". Unfortunately you won't find those out in the real world, but at least you've been warned here first. There are of course plenty of better cameras out there, and not too far from here.

More camera details at Digital-Photo-Secrets.net

How to Improve Your Digital Photography Skills

By Lee Griffin

If you're like me, you love taking pictures. There's nothing like taking a trip down memory lane by looking at some old photographs you took using your digital camera. Use these tips to take your photography skills from good to great.

1. Environmental light is your friend.

Generally, flashes don't highlight our best side. Natural light does a much better job of making subjects look great, so try and use it if possible. If it's light enough to read a book, it's light enough to take a picture without using a flash. If not, try to use light other than your flash in addition to your fill flash feature.

2. Pay attention to the background.

Sometimes the background can be distracting. You wouldn't want to take a picture of your children playing at the park with a portable toilet in the background, or a garbage truck speeding by. Try moving yourself and/or your subject a few steps to either side; it could make all the difference.

3. Remember the rule of thirds.

It's always good to place the subject a little off-center in the frame. In fact, there's something called The Rule of Thirds that gives us some pretty good guidelines for how to pull this off. Imagine a tic-tac-toe criss-cross drawn on the frame. Now align the focal point(s) of the picture with one or more of the intersections formed by the imaginary lines. This will result in a much more interesting picture.

4. Think about your shooting angle.

Get creative with your shooting angle. Sometimes standing on top of a raised surface and pointing down at your subject can make the difference between a boring portrait and a fun picture. When taking pictures of children, try getting down on their level rather than snapping shots of the tops of their heads. Have fun, and don't try to line up just perfectly for every picture.

5. Use the whole frame for your subject.

Get close enough to what you're aiming at to fill the entire frame with your subject. This will leave no doubt as to what the focus of the picture is when you look at it in the future.

Follow these tips, and the next time you walk down memory lane with your digital photographs, you'll enjoy what you were trying to capture in the first place.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Lee_Griffin

If you'd like to learn more about digital photography secrets, check out our best seller book .

Tips to Enjoy Digital Photography in Ten Different Ways

By Claude Fullinfaw



After you have purchased your camera look at it as an asset. This small digital camera is going to be more than just taking snaps. You are going to be able to capture more images than before as you are free to take as many photos now and it won't cost you a single cent more. This is going to enable you to gather all your memories to share with your loved ones for years to come.



When you are ready to take a shot of an image you want to remember to always keep still with elbows close to you for stability, and refocus the lens by gently pressing down on the trigger halfway before you actually take a shot to be able to avoid the lag time caused by shutter error.



You can organize your photos into groups and this should become a habit early on in your digital photography hobby. By using the photo organizer and photo sharing software that came with your camera you can now literally take random photos and put them into groups to share with loved ones at a later date.



Arrange to have your pictures in a file sharing software program so that it's easily accessed by others at a later date. Make sure you have password security enabled the service to protect your photos. You don't want anyone and everyone viewing them.



It is important to transfer all your photos immediate off the camera onto your pc or photo sharing service to prevent images lost due to malfunctioning of your camera if it does happen. Sometimes your camera could be lost on a holiday and you could loss all your precious memories too.



Unwanted photographs should be deleted off the camera. If you are photo sharing on a service it is important to delete bad snaps as this could eat into your hosting bandwidth and reduce your storage capacity.



While it is such a good idea to share photos now via email, make sure you only send two or three each time with an email. If this is a problem you can opt for a photo sharing option on one of the many sites available on the net and simply direct your friends to your photos online. One such site is Flickr. This way all your photos are in one safe place and can be viewed almost instantly by family and friends when you allow them to. The old way of emailing photos is slowly dying.



You can print your photos off using your own home printer and some good digital photographic paper or just go online and choose from a number of printing services which will do the job for a very small fee. Snapfish is one such service on the net.



Have you thought of having your own blog? There maybe a few people who may not know what a blog is. It is simply your online diary on the net where you can keep notes of what you do and share photos or any thing that maybe of interest to your audience. A handy way to keep in touch if you are traveling.



Once you have organised your photos in a logical manner you will find it a pleasure to go back to them from time to time and enjoy the memories. Your family and friends are always going to praise you for this memory sharing gesture of yours.

Claude Fullinfaw is a successful publisher of digital photography tips for beginners at digital-photography-for-beginners

http://www.Digital-Photo-Secrets.net

How To Get Rid Of Red-Eye When Shooting At Night?

That is a problem bothering many photographers and especially ordinary people who tries to take pictures at a party in a very low-light conditions. In this case the built-in camera flashes are quite convenient but they can produce terrible results starting from red-eye to nuclear-looking and unnatural glow when used at evening parties.

1) Most cameras have a built in red-eye reduction mode like in the Canon Rebel for example. You can find it easily in the menu, just navigate to it and turn it on. It's that simple.

The idea behind the red-eye reduction is that the camera shines a bright light in your eye, right before the flash goes off. That's supposed to reduce the size of your pupil and than reduce the glare of your eye.

Most photographers don't like to use the red-eye reduction because for one thing the bright light in your eye is pretty annoying at a party, and for another thing you often still end up with red-eye, even when you're using the mode.

2) Another mode that a lot of cameras have that can help you reduce the red-eye is something called "night time flash" mode. In the case of Canon Rebel you simply turn the top dial until you get to a little picture that looks like a person standing underneath the star.

"Night Time Flash" mode slows down the shutter speed of your camera. So you capture everything that's in the background, but the flash still goes off and everyone with in about 10 feet of you is eliminated.

That gets rid of that artificial party look where everyone in front of you is really bright but it looks like there is no party behind them.

One thing to watch out with this mode is that you have to hold the camera really steady. Otherwise you get a lot of movement and blurring your shots. Which can be very artistic, but it might not be the one you're looking for.

3) Another setting you can use is called "Flash exposure compensation". You should use this setting when your subjects are consistently overexposed (too bright). Usually this setting is located in the menu of options, and it allows you to adjust the intensity of the flash. Recommended is to start with a setting of -1 and go from there.

4) Increasing the ISO speed setting can help you achieving some pretty good results, but remember to return to the default when you're done. By increasing your ISO speed from 100 to 200, 400 or more, you're essentially increasing the sensitivity of your image sensor.

The results usually include more background information and an extended flash range (from 8feet to 15 feet). You should know that you will get a little more image noise in the higher ISO settings. That isn't much of an issue in smaller prints, but it might be noticeable in enlargements, especially in the shadow areas.

5) Shutter Priority mode is one of the best tricks that you could use, if you're lucky enough to have it in your camera. Essentially, it allows you to set any shutter speed you want, and the camera then adjusts the aperture and the flash output to match. The default shutter speed in flash mode for most cameras is 1/60 second. If you switch to shutter-priority mode, you can slow down the shutter speed to 1/30 or 1/15 second, and you'll notice a big difference in your shots.

Those speeds are long enough to capture much more background information-such as twinkling lights, candles, and such--but not so slow that you get excessive blurring and camera shake. If you combine this technique with increasing your ISO to 200, you'll get some great results. This is a winner for party pictures.

Happy New Year. Good Luck and Lots of Hapiness in 2007

Hello, all. I hope that you enjoyed the holiday days as much as I did. Let me share the news with you. My country Bulgaria has officially joined the European Union. After 50 years of communism and after more than 15 years of chaos, I'm really really glad to announce that we joined successfully the civilized world in face of the European Union. Now hopefully we will enjoy better lifestyle and a life without war and violence. So once again I congratulate you all for me and my country.

Fortunately I managed to do some small changes to Digital-Photo-Secrets.net during the holiday season. The changes are very small indeed except one. I found a really useful Java applet written by a programmer named Martin Reiger. This applet makes possible to zoom in and out a digital picture (i.e. GIF or JPEG) with your cursor in a real time on a web page. If you didn't understand quite well what it is click here to go and see it for real.

It is called XIO® Software from Martin Reiger. You can check a real time demo by pointing your browser to that link. In my opinion that software was developed for webmasters of 'photography', 'image editing' or 'image trading/selling' related web sites. They can get use of that creation by offering to their customers to zoom in and zoom out large images directly on their web site. And all that in real time.

With XIOview Java applet, you can give to your customers an incredible convenience. Imagine that the user wants to check the image quality by zooming it but he doesn't want to start his heavy image editing software on his computer (like Photoshop etc.). Just by using the arrow keys on his keyboard anyone can easily adjust the zoom-level up to 800%. And the easiest thing is to point with your mouse where you want that zoom on the picture. Very well designed Java applet which runs smoothly on slow computers as well.

On the XIOview web site you can choose from a demo license for one month to a full license for up to five domains. If you'd like to test it first you can download the software and get a free trial key for one month from here. It's very smart software but I thought that would be wiser to test it before I buy it, so I downloaded the files installed them and got my trial license. After I did that I was really impressed by the way it can help me and my customers to feel better internet experience by visiting my web site. My Digital Photography web site needed this so I ordered a full license. If you want to do so. Click Here To Order Your License Now

Best Wishes and Successful 2007
Philip Krasteff

Web Site Update - from the site owner.

I'm very glad to announce that Digital-Photo-Secrets.net has been updated. There is a brand new site map page for easier browsing and integrity, and some other small changes as well.
Enjoy!

Keep visiting our Blog and stay tuned for the next update. It'll come very soon :-)

For the next update be ready to expect few more articles on the same subject. They will contain much more tips and tricks for taking great professional pictures so don't miss out. Everything is free of course.

Digital Photography - 5 Professional Insider Tips To Start Taking Photos Like A Pro

Let’s begin with the concept of digital photography. Digital photography is not much different than the ordinary film photography. The main difference is that in digital photography the camera uses digital memory device much like in the computer. It could be a memory stick, flash memory or other media. Some camcorders even use DVDs to store the captured information.

No matter what memory media you have, the results depend on the quality of the camera itself and other things such as resolution, lenses, brand or technology. However if you want to take better pictures with your digital camera, you have to follow some basic rules of photography.

These rules are not well known by ordinary people, so I hope that this article will help you a lot in the progress of teaching yourself ‘How to improve your photos like the pros do.’

1) Use optical rather than digital zoom.
Digital zoom as opposed to optical zoom is just a technological simulation of optical zoom. That means the camera uses special software to enlarge the image, which is the same as if you use your digital software on your computer.

In optical zoom, camera uses the lenses to bring the image closer. And that is the one you should use. You should avoid using digital zoom at all. If you ever need to use digital zoom, better do it on your computer, with your favourite image editing software. At the end you’ll have much better results with your image.

2) Move in closer.
Almost any shot will look better if you take two or three steps closer to your subject. When you do that and fill the entire frame with your subject, it will make a terrific difference to your photos. Why does this work? With less clutter in the image, there’s less to draw the eye away from the main subject of your photo.

If you can’t get close enough when you’re taking the shot, you can zoom in later using photo editing software. Just crop out everything except the subject’s face and see what difference it makes.

3) Take much more shots than you need and erase them.
One of the best advantages of digital cameras is the ability to erase your photos. We’d be mad not to use this feature to the fullest extent. We all know how the professional photographers do their photo sessions. They make shot after shot without thinking and after that they choose the best ones. The average percent of the best shots is about 20% from a hundred shots taken.

And if you think about it, it makes perfect sense because you can’t expect to make a perfect shot from the first time. My advice is in every half an hour of shooting, review your most recent pictures and erase any that don’t make the grade, or you have better versions of.

4) To use a tripod or not?
When speaking of tripods many people don’t like it because they are heavy to care and are pretty big. But no doubt it will help sharpen your photos. When you use a tripod your camera stands still on the top of it. There are tripods with just one leg called monopods. They are not as good as tripods but they are much lither to carry and will improve your pictures much more than if you’re just using your hands.

If you don’t like to carry with you anything except your camera, there is a simple trick that many people don’t know. Instead of a tripod you can use any other horizontal surface that is still. Surfaces like rocks, chairs, cars, anything could do the same work as a tripod. But be careful not to damage your camera, though as cameras have tendency to slip and brake when put on chairs, rocks etc.

5) Why should we use flash during the day?
It is a fact that professional photographers use flash much more often than amateurs. But why is that? Let’s imagine that you want to take a picture in a very sunny day. Most people never think of the flash in such conditions. The truth is they should. The reason is when you try to shoot a bird swimming in the water for example, the water is reflecting the sun. The camera is fooled by the bright surroundings and the subject appears very dark at the end.

That isn’t the effect we want so by turning flash on you will reduce the shadow areas of the image and make it much more pleasing. You’ll see the difference for yourself, when you take two same shots with and without a flash.

If you are really interested in digital photography, you can visit author’s website, which is dedicated to hand over free information to amateur photographers. Visit Digital-Photo-Secrets.net