Helderberg Photographic Society

Standards for submitting images

Please note the following requirements regarding images submitted for competition and evaluation. There are some changes (highlighted in yellow) that will come into effect for 2012.

Maximum image dimensions are 1400 pixels wide and 1050 pixels tall, which equates to 1,470,000 pixels or 1.47 megapixels.
Images that are too small do not project favourably and images should therefore be at least at least 1024 pixels wide and 768 pixels tall, which equates to 786,432 pixels or 0.79 megapixels. Images smaller than this may be excluded.
Image files must be no larger than 500KB (kilobytes) in size.
Image submissions must be received by no later than 10pm (22h00) on the Sunday preceding the meeting. Should a submission be received later than this, the email header will be checked and the submission will be allowed only it the sending date is before the deadline.
Images should preferably be attached to emails as attachments rather than being embedded inline within the email.
The attached image files must be named according to the guidelines presented in the How to submit digital images for competitions and evaluation evenings page. It is not acceptable to give your image files another name and provide the correct name in the subject or body of your email.

The onus is on members to ensure that their images adhere to these standards. Failure to adhere to the requirements may result in your images being rejected and excluded from the competition or evaluation. Remember that you can check that your attachments were sent correctly by viewing the sent email/s in your email program’s sent folder.

Does Good Photography Come From the Left Brain or the Right Brain?

EarthBound Light asks,

Perhaps it’s an oversimplification, but the left brain is generally characterized as being where logical, analytical thinking occurs while the right brain handles emotional, creative thought. So which is the most important in creating good photography?

Read the full article

Managing Your Digital Library

Jason Row writes on Light Stalking,

Today, there are many options for managing your digital library, some free, some not. Until a few years ago managing a large collection meant investing in some expensive top end software or simply cataloging in a folder hierarchy. As more of us take more and more images, it is important to keep on top of organizing them, how many of you remember a great shot you took, only to spend a significant amount of time try to find it again at a later date?

So why use an image management program? Well there are many reasons but lets start with the simplest and most important, knowing where your images are. By this I mean two things, firstly that the software knows exactly where your images are stored, secondly that you know where specific images are.

Read the full article

HDR for Black and White: A Step By Step Guide

Joseph Eckert writes on the Digital Photography School blog,

A few months ago, DPS published an article I wrote entitled “How to See in Black and White.” That article had a small bonus section at the end, in which I talked about how useful HDR can be to the monochrome photographer – a fact that is initially somewhat counterintuitive, since HDR is stereotypically held to be all about garish, over-done colors and excessive haloing.

In fact, as I talked about in that previous article, HDR can be extremely useful in bringing out microtexture, enhancing the effect of light and shadow, and in creatively influencing the overall tone of the image. All of these things lend themselves immediately and powerfully to black and white photographs, making HDR another viable tool in the monochrome photographer’s arsenal.

That section of the article received many comments and questions. In particular, a lot of photographers were wondering about the “right” way to make a black and white HDR, given that there are, in fact, numerous possible paths you can take through the editing process to achieve the end result. With this article I will show you how I do it – my ‘recommended’ way – and also address a few alternative methods. I encourage you to experiment and discover which method works best for you, artistically, creatively, and economically.

Read the full article

5 Things That Can Cause Confusion in Lightroom

Lightroom can be a confusing experience for many new users. This article from Pixiq may help to clarify things. It begins,

Lightroom has the joy of being simple to start with, but still having hidden depths. Sometimes this means we see things that can confuse new users when looking for solutions to problems. Sometimes these are in the form of homonyms, other times in how Lightroom works internally.

Read the full article.

10 REASONS WHY GOOGLE+ IS BETTER FOR SOCIAL PHOTOGRAPHY THAN FLICKR

Thomas Hawk writes,

A few months back I wrote a post “Flickr is Dead.” When I wrote that post I didn’t mean dead literally, I just meant that the soul of social photo sharing was migrating away from Flickr over to Google+.

Over the past few months the tide has begun shifting even more. Photographers are moving in mass from Flickr to Google+ as their primary photo sharing network.

Just like the social crowd moved from Webshots and Fotolog to Flickr a number of years ago, the social photography crowd is now moving from Flickr to Google+.

There are a number of reasons why this is happening and in this post I’ll outline some of the key ones.

Read the full article

And The Picture Becomes Clear

I read a blog, (The Customer Is) Not Always Right that posts funny things that customers say and do. This photography related one appeared today.

And The Picture Becomes Clear
(ELECTRONICS STORE, RETAIL | PARIS, FRANCE)
(The customer arrives very angry at my desk. He nervously holds a memory card in his hand.)

Customer: “I want a new memory card. This one is really bad!”

Me: “What troubles do you have with this one?”

Customer: “It only makes blurry pictures!”

Me: “Well, I guess the problem might be the camera, not the memory card.”

Customer: “Oh, and do you have memory cards in black & white?”

Me: “Or it could be the photographer…”

Black Friday offers from Craft&Vision

Black Friday is the day following Thanksgiving Day in the United States, traditionally the beginning of the Christmas shopping season. On this day, most major retailers open extremely early, often at 4 a.m., or earlier, and offer promotional sales to kick off the shopping season. (learn more at Wikipedia)

This coming Friday is Black Friday and Craft&Vision, publishers of photographic ebooks, are joining in with their own special offer. Their already inexpensive books will be available at considerable discounts. An email from them said,

Special Offer this Friday Only
On Friday, November 25th at 12:00am PST we’ll be updating our website and launching a 24-hour promotion that will give you 50% off our new PDF eBook bundles, collections, and gift coupons.

We’ve packaged up a whole bunch of eBooks into discounted bundles that we know you’ll love – such as Ten and Ten More, The Inspired Eye 1-2-3, Chasing the Look and Drawing the Eye, Making Light 1-2, All Black & White. There will also be a few select collections available like The Print & The Process Collection and author packages.

And to help you with your gift-giving, we’ll have a $40 Gift Coupon that you can purchase for just $20!

The Deal
The 50% discount codes will be distributed by email and through our social networks. This promotion will expire November 25th at 11:59pm PST and are for PDF purchases only.

Happy Thanksgiving!
– The Craft & Vision Team

So make sure you visit their web site and sign up for email updates (at the bottom of the page) or subscribe to their Facebook page or Twitter stream so you won’t miss out when they send out the discount codes on Friday.

A Lesser Photographer

CJ Chilvers has published his manifesto as an ebook and started a blog under the title A Lesser Photographer. He says,

Photographers are being bombarded by content that has only further removed them from their creativity (and money). They’re aching for something to cut through the nonsense and remind them of why they fell in love with photography in the first place.

This is my manifesto; universal truths I’ve learned since selling off my fancy cameras and challenging myself to maximize my creativity by minimizing everything else.

If you find yourself nodding in agreement with these principles, I’m relying on you to pass the manifesto along to everyone you know who loves photography!

Download the ebook, then visit the blog.