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!

Sorry for the delay guys!

I go through one day of feeling horrible and another day feeling good. And that’s the day when I try to do EVERYTHING I’ve been putting off. I’ll be back to normal posting once I hit 2nd trimester, hopefully, so hang in there with me.

So today I had to wait for hubby to get home to shoot the GIF, because I wanted to use about 100 images and that would require someone else pressing the shutter button.

And then I had to edit and put together 100 images – You get the point!

So I’m done and here’s what I have:

Me playing drums to “21 GUNS” by Green Day. I wish there was sound

We have finally graduated from specific learning themes for Selfie Saturdays to simple fun open to interpretation topics.
So you are now free to shoot whatever image you like that fits the theme, however you like. All that is required is that it is a picture of YOU taken by YOU {exceptions can be made if the photo was thought of, set up and edited by you, but someone else pressed the shutter button}

NEXT WEEK’S THEME: CELEBRATION

<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

I finally got around to making and ordering my second Blurb Photo book. I have a lot of ideas for photobooks, but not enough time in the day to get them all done. Luckily, Blurb makes it relatively easy with BookSmart. They have really improved the software since the last time I made a book, including adding a photo spread, where you can have one massive photo have the span of two pages YAY

So my last book was about my mom’s adventures in the US, when she flew over to visit us. I shipped it all the way to Russia, straight from Blurb. This time the book was for me. I’ve been meaning to create a book of all the clones, photo manipulations and conceptual photos I’ve done, and use this book as a table book. Everyone loves seeing some of our trickier shots and this would serve as a perfect table book.

My next project will be The Book of Jumps ( self-explanatory), and then a book of 8 years of our life together, month by month, and then a pregnancy book, and then a baby book…. I can go on and on and on.

So this new book is titled Creative Self-Portraiture and it has 3 sections: 1. Clones, 2. Image Manipulation and 3. Creative Portraiture

I liked how the new Blurb software lets you create completely custom layouts, modify every layout, and of course the usual: themes, colors, etc.

So now I’d like to present to you my brand spanking newbook:

And if you’re all lucky, I might be able to do a Blurb book giveaway. Wouldn’t that be fun!?

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

Yay! I finally had a chance to participate in Ashley’s Scavenger Hunt  again.

I’m feeling slightly better so yesterday morning we took a long walk around the local nature sanctuary. I didn’t take too many pictures since it was hot and I was tired, but the ones I took were enough to participate this week.

This week’s items:

1. Natural Frame

 

2. Emotion

This was one of the first days that I was feeling better and just driving to the Sanctuary with windows open and music blasting was the highlight of my week. I was full of happiness and emotion. It’s great to be health (-ier)!

3. From a Flower’s point of view

 

4. Letters

 

5. Bliss

{one of the self-portrait we took at the beach last time we were there}