Having PHUN with PHOTOGRAPHY

1. Photos on Canvas

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to have your favourite wedding photo transformed into stunning photo art? By printing the image onto a hand-stretched canvas you can give an artistic, finished look to your most classic wedding photo.

2. Personalized Stamp

Turn your favourite wedding photo in a custom postage stamp. All you need to do is upload a photo and then customize it just the way you want. Each stamp is actual valid postage and can be used to decorate your thank you and holiday card envelopes or as creative wedding favours. Add a personal touch to everything you send by mail and create a timeless keepsake as well.

3. Custom Thank You Card

By featuring one of your wedding photos on the front of a custom note card you can create classy customized thank you cards for your guests and others who helped with your wedding planning. Each of your guests will now have a photo keepsake from your special day.

4. Create a Multimedia DVD Slide-Show

You can create a DVD slide-show presentation of your wedding photos that can be played on your TV. You can even select your first dance or other favourite song as your background music. A neat and interactive way to create a memory of your wedding day.

5. Online Scrap Book

Tell the story of your wedding by publishing an online scrapbook. Include photos from the events leading up to your big day including showers, stags, rehearsal parties as well as the ceremony and reception. Your scrapbook will be easy to share with all of your guests because it will be available via the internet.

6. Digital Photobook

Trendy coffee table style albums are becoming more and more popular with so many people looking for new ways to display their digital prints. These unique albums include hard cover options such as suede and canvas. The easy to use software helps you design your photobook just the way you want it with many choices for image sizes and layouts.

7. Wedding Caricature

A wedding caricature is cartoon version of you and your spouse on your wedding day. Each image is hand drawn by an artist and makes for the perfect first anniversary gift.

You can visit the The Free Library where I found this great artical by clicking here.

One of my favourite things to do with my photos is scrapbooking. I made my first scrapbook probably about 16 years ago...before it was the IN thing to do.

Over the years, as it has become more popular, there are so many more tools and products available for you to use to make creating a scrapbook, easier, more fun and more creative.

I myself purchased a CRICUT machine a couple years ago. It is amazing. They cartridges that you buy for the machine are available in different themes. You choose from the available font style or image, choose your size, put in the paper and press 'go'. The machine cuts everything out to your sepcifications. At the very least, I no longer had to trace out letters and cut them out myself.

Attached is a photo of a scrap page (no pictures) that I created using my CRICUT Expressions machine. The "It's a Boy", "Little One", the rectangles and squares and the baby footprints were all cut withing minutes by my CRICUT machine. I used 3D stickers, rub-ons and ribbon that can be found in any craft shop or dollar store to finish off the page. Now all that's left to do is add the pictures and insert it into my scrapbook. I will be using this page for my youngest son's scrapbook.

You've heard this before: Digital cameras do all the work. You just push the button and great pictures magically appear. The better the camera, the better the photos. Isn't that right? Heck no!

The truth is that you can make great photos with a simple consumer point-and-shoot camera, or take lousy shots with the most expensive Nikon.

To help you down the road to great image making, here are ten tips that will enable you shoot like a pro (without maxing out your credit card on all that expensive equipment).

1. Warm Up Those Tones

When shooting outdoor portraits and sunny landscapes, try changing your white balance setting from auto to cloudy. That's right, cloudy. Why? This adjustment is like putting a mild warming filter on your camera. It increases the reds and yellows resulting in richer, warmer pictures.
Take a few outdoor shots with the white balance on auto, then take the same picture again with the setting on cloudy. Upload the images to your computer and look at them side by side.

2: Sunglasses Polarizer

If you really want to add so me punch to your images, then get your hands on a polarizing filter. A polarizer is the one filter every photographer should have handy for landscapes and general outdoor shooting. By reducing glare and unwanted reflections, polarized shots have richer, more saturated colors, especially in the sky.

What's that you say? Your digital camera can't accommodate filters. If you have a pair of quality sunglasses, then simply take them off and use them as your polarizing filter. Place the glasses as close to the camera lens as possible, then check their position in the LCD viewfinder to make sure you don't have the rims in the shot.

For the best effect, position yourself so the sun is over either your right or left shoulder. The polarizing effect is strongest when the light source is at a 90-degree angle from the subject.

3. Outdoor Portraits That Shine

One of the great hidden features on digital cameras is the fill flash or flash on mode. By taking control of the flash so it goes on when you want it to, not when the camera deems it appropriate, you've just taken an important step toward capturing great outdoor portraits.

In flash on mode, the camera exposes for the background first, then adds just enough flash to illuminate your portrait subject.

Remember, though, that most built-in camera flashes only have a range of 10 feet (or even less!), so make sure you don't stand too far away when using fill flash outdoors.

4. Macro Mode Madness

Remember as a kid discovering the whole new world beneath your feet while playing on the grass? When you got very close to the ground, you could see an entire community of creatures that you never knew existed.

These days, you might not want to lie on your belly in the backyard, but if you activate the close up mode on your digital camera and begin to explore your world in finer detail, you'll be rewarded with fresh new images unlike anything you've ever shot before.

Just look for the close up or macro mode icon, which is usually a flower symbol, turn it on, and get as close to an object as your camera will allow. Once you've found something to your liking, hold the shutter button down halfway to allow the camera to focus. When the confirmation light gives you the go ahead, press the shutter down the rest of the way to record the image.

5. Horizon Line Mayhem

For some mysterious reason, most human beings have a hard time holding the camera level when using the LCD monitors on their digicams. The result can be cockeyed sunsets, lopsided landscapes, and tilted towers.

Part of the problem is that your camera's optics introduce distortion when rendering broad panoramas on tiny, two-inch screens. Those trees may be standing straight when you look at them with the naked eye, but they seem to be bowing inward on your camera's monitor. No wonder photographers become disoriented when lining up their shots.

First of all, be aware that it's important to capture your images as level as possible. If you're having difficulty framing the scene to your liking, then take your best shot at a straight picture, reposition the camera slightly, take another picture, and then maybe one more with another adjustment. Chances are very good that one of the images will "feel right" when you review them on the computer.

6: Massive Media Card

When you're figuring out the budget for your next digital camera, make sure you factor in the purchase of an additional memory card. Why? Because the cards included with your new high-tech wonder toy are about as satisfying as an airline bag of peanuts when you're dying of hunger.

If you have a 3 megapixel camera, get at least a 256MB card, 512MBs for 4 megapixel models, and 1GB for for 6 megapixels and up.
That way you'll never miss another shot because your memory card is full.

7: High Rez All the Way

One of the most important reasons for packing a massive memory card is to enable you to shoot at your camera's highest resolution. If you paid a premium price for a 6 megapixel digicam, then get your money's worth and shoot at 6 megapixels. And while you're at it, shoot at your camera's highest quality compression setting too.

Why not squeeze more images on your memory card by shooting a lower resolution and low quality compression settings? Because you never know when you're going to capture the next great image of the 21st century. And if you take a beautiful picture at the low 640 x 480 resolution, that means you can only make a print about the size of a credit card, not exactly the right dimensions for hanging in the museum.

On the other hand, if you recorded the image at 2272 x 1704 (4 megapixels) or larger, then you can make a lovely 8- x 10-inch photo-quality print suitable for framing or even for gracing the cover of Time magazine. And just in case you were able to get as close to the action as you had liked, having those extra pixels enables you to crop your image and still have enough resolution to make a decent sized print.
The point is, if you have enough memory (and you know you should), then there's no reason to shoot at lower resolution and risk missing the opportunity to show off your work in a big way.

8: Tolerable Tripod

I once overheard someone say, "He must be a real photographer because he's using a tripod." Well, whether or not you use a tripod has nothing to do with you being a true photographer. For certain types of shots though, these three-legged supports can be very useful.

The problem is tripods are a pain in the butt to carry around. They are bulky, unwieldy, and sometimes downright frustrating. Does the phrase "necessary evil" come to mind?

For digital shooters there's good news: the UltraPod II by Pedco. This compact, versatile, ingenious device fits in your back pocket and enables you to steady your camera in a variety of situations. You can open the legs and set it on any reasonable flat surface such as a tabletop or a boulder in the middle of nowhere. Yes, then you too can be a real photographer.

9: Self Timer Fun

Now that you have your UltraPod in hand, you can explore another under-used feature found on almost every digital camera: the self timer. This function delays the firing of the shutter (after the button has been pushed) for up to 10 seconds, fixing one of the age old problems in photography: the missing photographer.

Instead, attach your UltraPod, line up the shot, activate the self timer, and get in the picture. This is usually a good time to turn on the flash to ensure even exposure of everyone in the composition (but remember that 10 foot flash range limit!). Also, make sure the focusing sensor is aimed at a person in the group and not the distant background, or you'll get very sharp trees and fuzzy family members.

Self timers are good for other situations, too. Are you interested in making long exposures of cars driving over the Golden Gate Bridge at dusk? Once again, secure your camera on a tripod, then trip the shutter using the self timer. By doing so, you prevent accidental jarring of the camera as you initiate the exposure.

10. Slow Motion Water

I come from a family where it's darn hard to impress them with my artsy pictures. One of the few exceptions happened recently when my sister commented that a series of water shots I had shown her looked like paintings. That was close enough to a compliment for me.

What she was responding to was one of my favorite types of photographs: slow motion water. These images are created by finding a nice composition with running water, then forcing the camera's shutter to stay open for a second or two, creating a soft, flowing effect of the water while all the other elements in the scene stay nice and sharp.

You'll need a tripod to steady the camera during the long exposure, and you probably should use the self timer to trip the shutter. If your camera has an aperture priority setting, use it and set the aperture to f-8, f-11, or f-16 if possible. This will give you greater depth of field and cause the shutter to slow down.

Ideally, you'll want an exposure of one second or longer to create the flowing effect of the water. That means you probably will want to look for streams and waterfalls that are in the shade instead of the bright sunlight.

Another trick is to use your sunglasses over the lens to darken the scene and create even a longer exposure. Plus you get the added bonus of eliminating distracting reflections from your composition.

You don't take a photograph. You ask, quietly, to borrow it. ~Author Unknown

Sometimes I do get to places just when God's ready to have somebody click the shutter. ~Ansel Adams

No place is boring, if you've had a good night's sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film. ~Robert Adams, Darkroom & Creative Camera Techniques, May 1995

When you photograph people in colour you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in B&W, you photograph their souls! ~Ted Grant

While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see. ~Dorothea Lange

A photograph is usually looked at - seldom looked into. ~Ansel Adams

There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer. ~Ansel Adams

I think a photography class should be a requirement in all educational programs because it makes you see the world rather than just look at it. ~Author Unknown

A good snapshot stops a moment from running away. ~Eudora Welty

The camera can photograph thought. ~Dirk Bogarde

There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs. ~Ansel Adams

My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph. ~Richard Avedon

A photograph is memory in the raw. ~Carrie Latet