photography website building tips: A special Report

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Create a Web Photo Gallery

A great way to share your pictures is to post them on the Web. Here's an easy way for photographers to leverage the greatest publishing tool of all: the Internet.

 

Creating a web site is a cumbersome task, even for people with quite a bit of web design experience. So, what if you just want to get some images up for friends, family, or a client to review and comment on? This idea will get you on your way quickly, using a built-in feature of Adobe Photoshop. That's right, by using a powerful tool called Web Photo Gallery; you will have a professional-looking site up in no time.

 

All you need for this idea is a copy of Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. Before I go further, let me clarify the difference between the two applications. The professional offering from Adobe is called Photoshop CS (http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop). It costs about US$650, runs on both Windows and Mac, and has many high-level tools, such as advanced batch processing that working designer’s need. Adobe also offers Photoshop Elements (http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopel), which is available for about US$85 and has most of the tools that CS offers. Elements also run on both Windows and Mac. For this idea, you can use either Photoshop CS or Elements. I refer to them both simply as Photoshop. The screenshots are from Photoshop CS.

 

When you have all your software together, you'll need access to web space for hosting your photo album. Check with your Internet service provider (ISP) to see if you have free web space (you almost always do!) and find out how to upload your files.

 

Most likely, your ISP will tell you to use an FTP application to move your files from your computer to their web servers. There are a number of good freeware or shareware FTP applications out there, and Mac OS X users have FTP built right into the operating system.

 

Okay, enough networks stuff; let's start building a great-looking photo web site! Open Photoshop and figure out which digital images you want to publish. They can be in any format Photoshop can open, and they can be as large as you want; Photoshop will take care of resizing them for the Web. You do need to make sure they are large enough to display in the larger size on your web page. A 200 KB JPEG is a good guide for a minimum size.

 

Go to the File menu and select Automate Web Photo Gallery. This will open a Web Photo Gallery dialog box, as shown in Figure.

The first thing you'll need to do is select the style of web page you want from the drop-down Styles menu. There are many styles available, and each will load a preview thumbnail in the dialog box, choose the one you like & get going.

Web Photo Gallery dialog box

 

Additional Tips:

1.    Photoshop creates an index.htm file and individual folders for images, pages, and thumbnails and places them in the destination directory.

2.    The destination folder can be uploaded to your Web server as-is, or opened in an HTML editor for further editing. The UserSelections.txt file is not required and can be deleted.

3.    You can replace the home.gif, next.gif, and previous.gif icons with your own images. If you use custom icons of a different size, however, you'll need to change the height and width attributes in your HTML files.

4.    You may want to rename all your photos with a informative file name before creating your photo gallery. See the links below for more information.

5.    Photoshop creates an individual page for each picture rather than linking directly to the image. This provides easier navigation and allows you to customize the page.

 

 Source: O Reilley | Portfolio Website | Online Portfolio

 

 

 

Capture the Nighttime Mood and Leave the Red Eye at Home

Shooting with flash indoors against a dark, boring background often produces overexposed subjects with red eye. But it doesn't have to be that way.

 

Built-in camera flashes are very convenient. But they can produce deadly results when used to take pictures of people in low-light situations, such as evening parties. Aside from the plague of red eye that turns your loved ones into otherworldly demons, there's also the nuclear look? Where the subject appears to be standing next to ground zero, glowing beyond recognition

 

It doesn't have to be that way. The easiest way to increase your success rate is to get an external flash; it's just easier to control the lighting that way. But for many people, that's not practical. So, in this hack we'll look at the options for the portable digicam, and then talk about more advanced techniques with external flash. Let's start with taming the pocketable point and shoot.

 

Pocketable Party Shots

The people who design compact dig-cams realize that these cameras don't always produce great flash results at night. So, many of today's models have features designed to help you get better shots in these challenging situations. Some of these features work better than others. Here's a quick overview of what to look for and what to avoid:

 

Red Eye Reduction mode

Avoid using this setting. In theory, using Red Eye Reduction mode makes sense: shine a bright light in the subject's eyes before exposure to constrict the iris, thereby reducing the chance of reflected red eye. But it doesn't work out that way. Flashes are annoying anyway, and torturing your subject with additional flash before taking the shot tends to kill spontaneity. Plus, even after you do that, you'll often still get red eye. It's just not worth it.

 

Nighttime Flash mode

Use this setting for artistic shots. At times, using this mode might feel like trying to tame a wild cat: you think you're making progress, then it gets away from you. The thinking here is that the camera slows down the shutter speed, allowing you to capture background scenery beyond the flash range, yet the flash still goes off, illuminating subjects within 10 feet. And it usually works quite well. But things get crazy if you don't hold the camera really steady or if there's a lot of movement in the scene. So, you'll get some absolutely great shots with artistic flair, and you'll get some failures. But it's definitely worth experimenting with. This control is also referred to as Slow Synchro Flash mode.

Slow Synchro Flash mode

Source: O’Reiley | Portfolio Photography Website for Photographers | Portfolio Website