With 4th of July approaching, I’m sure you are all going to be shooting fireworks. I am no expert when it comes to that. I’ve always meant to look up how to shoot fireworks, but every time I’d go out to shoot them, I’d be too lazy or forget.

Our fireworks happen on the beach which is the coolest thing. They  gather a huge crowd that spans miles and miles along the beach- so much fun!

So this time I decided to finally research how to properly shoot fireworks and and share it with you in case you’re as lazy as me and never got around to looking it up.

This is based on information I read in conjunction with my  own experience:
{NOTE: The photos below don’t always illustrate the tip I’m giving. I was not using half of these techniques shooting fireworks last year, so these shots are far from perfect}

 
1. ISO

Obviously, keep it low. The lower the ISO the less noise we get, which is very important when we’re shooting on a black background with bright lights.

2. Aperture

I’ve always shot fireworks at the same aperture that I shoot most everything else. Most of the time I didn’t even think about the aperture, I was too concentrated on other things. Truthfully, aperture doesn’t matter half as much in firework photography as shutter speed does. So keep it at medium range or whatever you’re comfortable with. f/8- f/18 is going to be good enough.

3. Shutter speed:

SLOOOOOW IT DOWN! Depending on the light conditions, you might need to go into the BULB mode of the camera. We want to see the movement of the lights. That might mean that you have to set your aperture at f/18 or so, if you’re shooting on manual, in order to NOT overexpose the photo.

4. TRIPOD

A MUST! You might as well leave your camera home, if you can’t bring a tripod. Tripod will be the only way you can get sharp and nice photos. Alternatively you can prop it on something sturdy.

5. REMOTE

Again: very important. Even if you have your camera on the tripod, pressing that  shutter button will give you some motion blur, so you need to have a shutter release or a remote handy for touch free trigger.

5. Focus and Exposure

If at all possible, set the camera up on manual focus in the very beginning. The last thing you want is the camera having trouble focusing. Adjust exposure as well in the first few seconds of fireworks.

6. Experiment

 Try different shots: out of focus , zoomed in on the sparks- Old and boring fireworks can be fun again!

Have fun and be safe!

Happy 4th of July, everyone!

Before I go into today’s tutorial, I’d like to feature one of the submissions from the PERFECTION challenge. As usual, I loved every single photo of every single participant this week. I loved the submissions that said “I’m perfect the way I am, I don’t need to be changing myself”, I loved he submissions that said:”I don’t think I am perfect and it’s something I struggle with and therefore I won’t make any changes to my photos”, I loved the ones that made minor adjustments and the ones that went further. Honestly, that’s what is amazing about challenge like that- everyone is different.

But I’d like to bring to your attention Shalay’s submission. I think she completely understood the whole point of the “PERFECTION” tutorial. It wasn’t to change yourself, it wasn’t to make yourself feel better about your body, it wasn’t to misrepresent yourself in pictures. It was to learn how to take a bad picture due to a wrong angle, or wrong lighting, or simply a bad hair day and turn it into something that you can look at and say “Oh I like that one!”

If you go to her post, you will see that she adjusted her hip that was sticking out in a weird way. I think the photo looks 100% better, and it’s still her, with her hips, but without the awkward pose! And looking at the edited photo, you’d never guess that she altered herself, because that’s how she looks normally!

Welcome to Week 19 of Selfie Saturdays.

If you’re new here, read what this is all about.
If you missed last 16 weeks of challenges and tutorials, here is what we learned:

Week 2: Basic Full Body Shot
Week 3: Couple’s Selfies
Week 4: Arm’s Length Selfie
Week 5: Conceptual Selfies
Week 6: Me Myself and I: Multiplicity
Week 7: Portrait Selfie + Squinty Model Eyes
Week 8: Self-Love
Week 9: Focus
Week 10: My friend, the FAN
Week 11: Magic Tricks
Week 12: Jump Shots
Week 13: Family Portrait
Week 14: Collaborations
Week 15: Stop Motion Photography
Week 16: Me then, me now
Week 17: Anonymous
Week 18: Perfection

This week’s topic is Animated GIFs

I know a lot of you have wondered how to make these fun animated gifs. Some people use services like GICKR, or sharewares dedicated specifically to animated gifs. But the problem is most of those resources put an ugly and annoying logo on your gif ( see gif below). So if you’d like to know how to make an animated gif fast and easy in Photoshop, read up!

 Now, I spent a few years working on animated gifs manually, adding each photo layer by layer, which can get very very tiring and frustrating, until literally a few weeks ago, I said “Enough is enough!”. There’s gotta be a way to load all the photos into the same file as layers. After a lot of searching online, I finally found a solution and it’s as easy as I expected it to be. So now you get the benefit of not spending hours of your time messing around with each layer of the animated gif. I’ll accept thank yous later

Step 1: First you need a series of consecutive shots, of course
Step 2:  Make sure they’re all edited and ready to go, named in the same order that they need to appear
Step 3:Open Photoshop, FILE->SCRIPTS->LOAD FILES INTO STACK ( Do not click automatically align, it will actually screw up the alignment)
Step 4: Now that all your photos are in one file as layers, you need to reveal the Animation toolbar (Window->Animation)
Step 5: In the top right hand corner of the Animation Bar, you’ll find a little menu, and when you click on it, select Make frames from Layers
Step 6: Now  that all your layers are loaded as frames into your animation, select all the layers and pick the interval. Usually 0.2 or 0.5 work fine, but you can adjust it from there and even make it custom.
Step 7:Hit the play button on the Animation bar to preview your Gif.
Step 8:If everything looks good (remember to resize the image), go to FILE->SAVE FOR WEB & DEVICES and choose the 2UP preview screen
Step 9:Select Gif, Perceptual, Noise ( or play around with those settings to find those that fit your style, but make sure to always pick a GIF) and hit save.

Now you have a perfect animated gif ( remember you can only preview it in an Internet browser).

I have found so many uses for animations like that. Some of the funnest memories of my life are in the animated format, so I hope this tutorial will give you a few of those too.

So it makes sense to make this week’s theme ANIMATIONS and it does’t have to be taken by you, but preferably OF you ( that’s the point of Selfie Saturday, isn’t it?). So you can set the tripod up, set the settings and ask someone else to press the button to create a continuous motion.

Here’re some of my previous animations for inspiration.

These were, obviously, made before I had the patience to add layers by hand and was ok with using a trial version of some gif making program.

GO GET STARTED ON YOUR ANIMATIONS!

<a href="http://selfiemagic.com/category/selfiesaturdays/" target="_blank"><img src=" http://selfiemagic.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/gif-banner.gif" alt="" width="150" height="150" /></a><br />

LINK UP HERE

Welcome to Week 17 of Selfie Saturday.

If you’re new here, read what this is all about.
If you missed last 16 weeks of challenges and tutorials, here is what we learned:

Week 2: Basic Full Body Shot
Week 3: Couple’s Selfies
Week 4: Arm’s Length Selfie
Week 5: Conceptual Selfies
Week 6: Me Myself and I: Multiplicity
Week 7: Portrait Selfie + Squinty Model Eyes
Week 8: Self-Love
Week 9: Focus
Week 10: My friend, the FAN
Week 11: Magic Tricks
Week 12: Jump Shots
Week 13: Family Portrait
Week 14: Collaborations
Week 15: Stop Motion Photography
Week 16: Me then, me now

This week should bring out everyone who’s been too shy to participate before, because today we’ll be shooting BODY PARTS.
Up until now, our faces were the focal point of every single image. It’s a self-portrait challenge, and what self-portrait is without a face.
Sometimes, however, as you might have noticed in your usual photography, a part of a whole tells a better story.
So this week we need to forget about our beautiful unique faces and concentrate on other parts of our body that we love.

It could be a macro shot of one part of your body (this is actually at arm’s length): 

or a purposefully blurry body shot:

Really it can be ANYTHING! As long as it has you in the frame. The main thing, though,  is we can’t see your face. Faces are distracting, faces are what we all pay attention to instantly. We need to learn to tell a story in gestures, movements and moods and colors.

This shot below still feels anonymous, because you can’t see the eyes.

Once in a while, I would just take the camera, set it up and shoot randomly, not knowing what the framing looks like. The image below was a result of such an attempt.

I’d give you a few more tips, but I am starving and I think photos speak for themselves. In the end, just shoot what you feel like. It’s your body, you know it best. There’s gotta be at least one part of your body that you love, so show it to us!

My personal opinion is normal healthy female form is beautiful, nudity is beautiful, we are all beautiful, even if some of us might not think so. And this is not coming from a religious point of view, but truly from the fact that I love the beauty of a human being. Our bodies should never be shameful, because they’re symmetrical and rounded and perfect. Every part of our body. Even those parts that we think are “ugly”, because it’s really all in the presentation and the angle you’re looking at.

<a href="http://selfiemagic.com/category/selfiesaturdays/" target="_blank"><img src=" http://selfiemagic.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/gif-banner.gif" alt="" width="150" height="150" /></a><br />

LINK UP HERE:

Welcome to Week 16 of Selfie Saturday.

If you’re new here, read what this is all about.
If you missed last 15 weeks of challenges and tutorials, here is what we learned:

Week 2: Basic Full Body Shot
Week 3: Couple’s Selfies
Week 4: Arm’s Length Selfie
Week 5: Conceptual Selfies
Week 6: Me Myself and I: Multiplicity
Week 7: Portrait Selfie + Squinty Model Eyes
Week 8: Self-Love
Week 9: Focus
Week 10: My friend, the FAN
Week 11: Magic Tricks
Week 12: Jump Shots
Week 13: Family Portrait
Week 14: Collaborations
Week 14: Stop Motion Photography

Oh I have waited for this week for so long! This is my MOST FAVORITE CHALLENGE EVER!

ME THEN, ME NOW is about taking your old photos and re-creating them right now.

I am sure we’re all sentimental about our past and re-living it and seeing changes is just such a moving thing.

There’s really not much to it.

You pick a photo that you can possibly duplicate right now. You try to match up backgrounds and hairstyles and clothing.
It’s a lot more special if you manage to recreate a photo with someone from your past- your family, your friends.
I know most of us live away from our parents, which is what would make it more special.

When my mom was visiting one year, I made sure we did one photo together, and difference that time made is amazing!

That same day I managed to re-create one of my baby photos, as well

That’s sort of where it stopped for me, until this week. Because this week I want to challenge myself and everyone else to re-create their favorite childhood/youth photo from the past.

For more examples, please go to ME THEN ME NOW FLICKR GROUP, it has some AMAZING re-creations! I really suggest you look through it- the images are so great!

So this week I will attempt to re-create both or one of these photos ( me at 17  or me at 2: 10 years or 25 years later)

Not only am I looking forward to seeing how you all changed, but I cannot wait to see your old photos!

LINK UP HERE:

Welcome to Week 15 of Selfie Saturday.

If you’re new here, read what this is all about.
If you missed last 14 weeks of challenges and tutorials, here is what we learned:

Week 2: Basic Full Body Shot
Week 3: Couple’s Selfies
Week 4: Arm’s Length Selfie
Week 5: Conceptual Selfies
Week 6: Me Myself and I: Multiplicity
Week 7: Portrait Selfie + Squinty Model Eyes
Week 8: Self-Love
Week 9: Focus
Week 10: My friend, the FAN
Week 11: Magic Tricks
Week 12: Jump Shots
Week 13: Family Portrait
Week 14: Collaborations

This week’s theme is

Stop Motion Photography

Let me ask you a duh question!

Have you ever gone somewhere only to return with over 600 pictures from one day?

Now did you ever feel like it seems like a waste to discard more than half of those photos you took simply because you  can’t store 15 shots of the same thing, but they are all SOOOO GOOD?
Will you be curious if I told you I have a solution for you?

Today it won’t be about self-portraits necessarily, though you’re very welcome to turn this into a self-portrait challenge if you choose so. Today I’d like to tell you what I do with my “rejects”.

I borrowed this technique from a fabulous photographer I know who takes literally thousands of photos daily.
Some of you might have seen the stop motion video I made from the photos my friend and I took at Universal….

All you’ll need for this is a video editing software. If you don’t have one, download a free trial of muvee here. It has everything you will need for this challenge and future photo and movie projects and I’ll explain how to use it in just a few minutes.

What I do when I take more photos that I can possibly keep, each one is as great as the other (or not), is make them into a movie. Not a typical slide show with every photo taking a few seconds on the screen but a picture movie, like this:

If you look at your photos before you toss the rejects, you will see that a lot of them are very similar with very subtle but noticeable differences. Those differences, if set at  high speed and to music, will produce movement similar to the one seen in a moving film. It becomes a quick and easy way of sharing your special event/day with friends and family without boring them to death, while using up the photos you normally wouldn’t get to keep.

Sounds fun, doesn’t it?

Sometimes I find that stop motion is more entertaining than actual moving video. I have quite a few stop motion videos with over 3000 pictures in play, like this one {my BFF from back home who lives in Italy now flew over to visit us for 3 weeks, so I took three weeks worth of photos and put them into one LONG stop motion video}.

Since most of you have kids, it’s even better, because kids are perfect for this kind of project:

I, pesonally, use Sony Pro software for my videos, so if you already have a video editing software – GREAT! If you don’t, feel free to download muvee Reveal {free 15 day trial}, as I will be explaining how to make a stop motion video using Muvee.

The problem that you might encounter is that basic video editing softwares don’t let you space the photos that closely. They want you to have a nice and slow slide show showcasing your pictures. Well, that’s not going to happen when you have 3000 of them. I don’t know anyone including creators of said slide shows, who can sit through a 3 hours presentation. I believe Windows Movie Maker is one of those inflexible ones, not that anyone should EVER use Windows Movie maker for any reason other than uninstalling it.

If your video editing software lets you create very fast slide shows, all you need to do is drop all the pictures you’d like to use {sort them by name or date taken first so that they’d appear in correct order}, add music and adjust the speed of the slide show! Make sure the speed of your slides is between 2 and 4 images per second and no transitions ( the photos should just sit back to back and snap from one to another). Put it to music, adjust the speed of changing slides to the beat and render it.

This was my first stop motion video done after a Black and White part we hosted for some of my bloggy-turned-BFFs friends

The best time to use photos to make a stop motion video is right after you’re done downloading them to your computer. If you have a batch editing software, like Lightroom when purchased with Photoshop CS5.5 software, apply the same preset to all photos to spice up colors and make them brighter and then use every single photo for the movie. After the movie is done you’re free to delete rejects. But if you do this after you’ve already eliminated some rejects or edited certain photos you will have a mismatched video. Unfortunately, I never remember NOT to edit photos prior to making stop motion videos, so you might have noticed the difference in processing between some photos in most my videos. And that’s just not cool!

The hard part of this project is not adding photos, like some people might have assumed, but to get them to show at the right speed and with a fluid motion. Luckily, muvee makes it super easy and even adjusts the slides to the beat of your music. It’s really a great program to do slide shows with, even if they’re not stop-motion videos.

If you choose to download muvee 15 day trial , here’s how to build a stop motion video:

1. Use add button at the top of the screen to add photos and add button at the bottom of the screen to add music.
2. Once the media is added, select a style for your slide show. For a stop motion video, it’s best to pick Ultra Plain or Classic Vanilla and customize them from there.
3. If you chose Classic Vanilla ,click style settings and chose FAST pace and LESS response to music. Check the box that disables transition colors and hit OK
4. If you chose Ultra Plain, go to style settings as well, chose FAST pace and CUTS as your transitions., then hit OK
5. Preview the video and adjust it as needed. If the slides are moving too slow to show a movie-like motion, you can do a few things:

• shorten the music you have selected by dragging the level at the bottom of the track
• go to Personalize->Duration->Manual Length and set the time based on these calculations {number of photos divided by 2-4 images per second=duration of your clip in seconds}. The number of images per second is up to you, but for the best motion use 2-5 images per second.
• Use shorter music track

6. If slides are moving too fast, you can either have the music repeat or add another track and follow the steps above to adjust the speed.

If you have any questions, shoot me an email at contact {at} selfiemagic {dot} com

So the challenge for this week is a lot of fun, because you’re free to interpret it however you want. If you haven’t participated in Selfie challenges before, this one doesn’t require you to step in front of the camera, so join in on the fun.

For this challenge you can “shoot” a brand new stop motion video with a storyline in mind {that’s what I’ll be doing} or you can pull all your unedited photos from the last vacation before you delete the rejects and put it together in a nice a fun slide show to remember those times forever, or you can go out with your kids and go into continuous motion snapping away for fun, because the more photos spaced closely together we have, the more movie-like the stop motion video will appear.

The most important thing is HAVE FUN!

<a href="http://selfiemagic.com/category/selfiesaturdays/" target="_blank"><img src=" http://selfiemagic.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/gif-banner.gif" alt="" width="150" height="150" /></a><br />

LINK UP