digital photography

Spring time is the right time for bird watching. I just have to step out onto my porch to hear the birds chirping and see them scratching for food. I was taking some photos the other day that made me thankful for my telephoto lens but really makes me think I need a more powerful one.

This was about as close as I could get to this fine bird. This was still about 25-30 feet away if I had to guess. I was getting as close as the bird was going to let me so I definitely would like a more powerful lens. My telephoto lens is 70-300 mm. My next one will be in the range of 500 - 1000 mm.

Spring is a glorious time to take digital photos. All the flowers in bloom and the birds in the air. It’s definitely inspirational.

If I had to choose my top blogging tool aside from my computer it would have to be my digital camera. Not only can I take photos to make posts more interesting but my digital camera serves more than one purpose. It actually helps me to organize my blogging ideas.

How you might ask? A lot of times I think of a topic to blog about but really have no way to make a note. Who am I kidding? Even when I make a note I usually lose it within a day. To compensate I’ve added a wipe board to one of our walls in our home. But still I run out of room quickly especially since I write for more than one blog.

I use my digital camera to take photos of my ideas. This way even if I forget my idea, I will remember it was I scan my digital photos for sorting purposes. By doing this I feel less stress when it comes to blogging. Having ideas is so important and losing good ones is frustrating. My digital camera and digital photos are the most organized part of my life. It’s seldom I lose digital photos but I lose scraps of paper and misplace notebooks all the time.

Since I use my digital camera for blog topics, I really need a memory card just for those pictures as this would really make it easy to locate my ideas.

When something catches my eye, I just snap a quick photo. It might be a product I tried, a recipe I made, or a tool I bought. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then hopefully I can at least get 1/4 or half for a decent blog post. Pictures do help to jar the memory. Next time you have a blogging idea, grad you camera and take a pic.

When I buy a new product, I always take a picture of it just in case I want to blog about it at some point. Doing product reviews is one of my favorite blogging subjects and a review post is one that definitely needs at least one photo.

When taking product photos for my blog, I like a clean background so that the product is the only focus of the picture. The best place that I have found to take these photos is on top of the washer.

It gives me a clean, white surface to take photos. Best of all, the washing machine is usually uncluttered unlike every other surface in our home.

Doing product reviews is fun and taking photos of products I already use gives me plenty of options. Using a white surface like the washing machine provides a clean back drop. This ensures only one subject of the photo and makes it easier to manipulate the photo.

If you are looking to share you digital photos online, then Flickr is definitely a website of interest. It is owned by Yahoo! and has a free and pay service. There is a lot you can do with Flickr. But let’s start with the basics like uploading photos.

First log in to your account. Click you ‘you’ at the top of the screen and then choose from the drop down menu ‘Upload Photos and Videos.’

Then there are three steps to getting your photos on Flickr: Choose, Photos, Upload, add titles, tags, etc. Once you have chosen your photos, click upload.

Now you can add titles and descriptions to your photos.

You can also add tags and place pictures in a set(folder) for organization purposes. Tags are used to help people find your photos through searches. So if you uploaded a bunch of photos of flowers, you would want to use the word flower as a tag and the names of the flowers.

Once you have filled in all that information, click save. Then you will be taken to your photo stream that will show your most recent additions first.

Flickr is a great resource for a blogger. I’ll cover more cool options of Flickr that are of interest to a blogger in future posts.

Today I took some pictures of our newest pets - chicks. I figured by the time Easter rolls around, they will be too big and ugly to photograph. So I found some plastic eggs and staged a small photo shoot with a few of them.

It takes patience to photograph animals. Thank goodness for the DSLR because I can’t imagine getting anything useful with my old digital camera. These chicks are fast.

I did get a few cute shots that I will probably use in blog posts as it gets closer to Easter. While there are plenty of free places to find photos, I prefer to take photos when I can. This gives me practice at taking photos and ensures a uniqueness to the image on my blog.

Ever since I’ve started this blog, I’ve struggled to do meaningful posts on it. I want to share information that is useful. After giving this some thought, I’ve decided to give this blog a purpose.

Instead of posting general digital photography information, I plan to make this blog as resource for bloggers. Here I plan to give advice on posting pictures, finding pictures, taking pictures, and other topics as they relate specifically to blogging.

If you have questions or comments, I would love to hear from you as I’m still developing ideas for topics and am willing to help fellow bloggers with their digital photography questions/problems.

One of the great joys of spring is all the flowers that are in full bloom. I love to photograph flowers. It makes all the exposure to pollen worth it to be able to photograph such beauty.

If I could become a flower photographer, I would. I’m not sure if there would be a demand for it but it would be a wonderful job.

My husband finally bought his beloved Blackberry which means that I inherited his Moto Q. The phone was only 4 months old and was having issues with non-3G network areas. So since it was under warranty we were sent  a new phone.

When my husband first got the Moto Q, I remember the pictures being clearer than my current camera phone. So I’ve been very disappointed with this new phone since the pictures are very blurry.

This was taken at Wal-Mart. You can barely tell those are packs of seeds.  I was being as still as possible. Just not sure if there is anything I can do to improve the quality as I would really love the camera for those candid shots instead of having to lug around an actual camera everywhere.

Anyone have advice on taking pictures with your camera phone?