Add Voiceovers for That Professional Touch

A picture is worth a thousand words. But sometimes, you need 1,020 words to communicate what's going on. That's when it's time to step up to the mic and create a voiceover track.

A voiceover is simply an additional audio track for your digital slideshow or movie, in which the narrator speaks directly to the audience. If you've ever watched a nature show on public television, you know what a voiceover is.

Creating the Voiceover

Voiceovers can add a professional touch to your presentations and, believe it or not, they're not that difficult to create. The first step is to find a way to record your monologue. One route is to use digital recording software for your computer. All you do is talk into your computer's microphone, and the software records your voice and saves it to the hard drive as an audio file.

You don't have to spend much money for this software. For Windows, take a look at Easy Recorder (http://www.sell-shareware.com/easyrecorder/). I like Quick Voice (http://www.quick-voice.com/quickvoice/) for Mac OS X users. Each application sells for US$20. Save the files in either QuickTime or MP3 format which will enable you to assemble the presentation in QuickTime Pro.

You can also use a standalone voice recorder, which I like a little better, actually. I have the best luck creating accurate voiceovers that synchronize with the presentation when I can play the slideshow or movie on the computer (with the audio turned off) and simultaneously talk into the microphone of the digital voice recorder to describe what's going on. Then, simply upload the digital audio file to the computer, add it to the presentation, and everything is in sync.

If you have a powerful enough computer, you can use this same technique by having the presentation play in one window with the voice recorder software turned on in another. Or you can use two computers. I've had good luck using an Apple iPod (not the mini version) with a Belkin iPod Voice Recorder. I just talk into the iPod while in the field or while watching the presentation on the computer, and then add the digital audio file to the pictures.

Adding the Voiceover to the Presentation

Once you've captured your monologue, adding it is easy. If you've read the other hacks o building slideshows, editing movies , and adding music tracks , you know that I'm using QuickTime Pro for these projects. QuickTime also makes quick work of adding voiceovers.

 

Adding voiceover to a digital slideshow

Open your slideshow or movie and drag the insertion pointer on the scrubber bar to the point in the presentation where you want the voiceover to begin. For this example, I want to describe a series of shots inside Grand Central Station in New York City. I drag the insertion point to the first slide in that series. I then open my voiceover track and move the two bottom triangles on the scrubber bar to select the portion that talks about Grand Central Station, as shown in Figure.

 

Source: O'Reilley | Portfolio Website | Online Portfolio

Awesome Photography Trick: Un-erase the Lost

Nothing wrenches the heart like accidentally erasing a memory card full of images.But all is not necessarily lost.

A few years ago, a buddy of mine's mother was approaching her 100th birthday. She didn't get out much anymore, but she'd been to the hairdresser and had her hair Cool Whipped to perfection. She even went to the dry cleaner to get her Queen Bee formal gown pressed.

 

The tiara she always kept gleaming. She enlisted her friend to pick her up at her summer residence to drive her to her son's newly remodeled home. His dinky two-bedroom gardener's shack had been magically rebuilt into a four-bedroom palace with closets the size of shoe stores. And her son even got a haircut. She'd been begging him to do that for 32 years. "Danny, why don't you get a haircut? Take the money from my purse. Go on."

 

I'd recently been out to shoot the new baseball stadium in town, so I brought along the shots on the Compact Flash I'd used. While we were waiting for the Queen Mum, I plugged my digicam into their television and wowed the kids with delusions of a World Series to come.

 

Naturally, I also brought a blank card to shoot the festivities. And, as luck would have it, I got a once-in-a-lifetime shot of mother and son? yep, a rare simultaneous smiling. The next morning, before any cup of anything could clear the cobwebs from my head, I deleted the wrong card. "No," I said. "I didn't." Oh, yeah, I did. But I was confident I could recover the data from the card. I'd done it with floppies, why not with a card? So, I spent the next few weeks trying every trick in the book to undelete the files on the card. But they were lost.

 

I consoled myself with the thought that I'd get that portrait again one day, but the dear matriarch never lived to see her 101st birthday. And her son was so distraught; he let his hair grow out again.

 

It's a sad story. But there's no reason it should ever happen again. These days, even one of the kids could salvage that image while waiting for a World Series. All the little gotchas that defeated me years ago have themselves been defeated by modern utilities designed especially for just this sort of thing.

 

How They Don't Work

 

The first thing to know is that? Whether you are using a Macintosh or a Windows PC? Your storage device is formatted for MS-DOS. Macintoshes have no trouble reading and writing MS-DOS media (and PCs can handle Macintosh media with third-party software). But neither of them is any good at running disk utilities on the other's media. Norton knows your native file system, period. So, recovery of a DOS-formatted card is a generally a Windows task.

 

Unfortunately, Windows might see your card only as a network drive (where, as with floppies, deletions are not safely buffered in the Recycle Bin). And it's rude to reorganize the directories of network drives, so your usually reliable un-erase utility might not go there.

The size of your card is also a factor. The file allocation table for a 16 MB card is not quite the same beast as for a 256 MB card, which is also why some larger-capacity cards don't work in some cameras.

The complications build from there. You might have success using freeware to un-erase your card.

 

Source: O’Reilley | Portfolio Website   | Online Portfolio

Light Painting and Colored Gels

With an inexpensive swatch book of theater lighting gels, some night tlight bulbs, and a couple of LED flashlights, you can create the real color effects. And the best part is that you don't need Photoshop or even a computer.

Yes, you can manipulate photos in just about every way imaginable in Photoshop. But what if you don't like Photoshop, don't feel that comfortable with your image-editing skills, or just want to try something new? Alternatively, you can manipulate the picture as you actually capture it with the camera. Working with light painting and colored gels,is a great way to experiment with this type of creative shooting.

Crystal with colored gel

I use quartz crystals for my example because they're fun to manipulate with light, but just about any translucent or reflective subject has potential. My tools include theater lighting gels, nightlights, a photographer's light box, colored bulbs, and LED flashlights. One of my favorite combinations for experimentation is a regular nightlight bulb shining through Roscolux theater gels. For US$3.50 at Rose's Theatrical Supply, you can get a Roscolux Swatch Book that contains a sample of every gel in their collection.

 

For the crystal shots, I made a custom light stand out of a six-inch length of 2" 4" wood. I simply drilled two holes? one downward from the top and one inward from the side? to form an L-shaped opening in the wood. The crystal sits on the top hole, and the nightlight bulb goes in the side hole. Now, I can put any color gel I want over the top hole, and that will be the color of light projected up through the crystal.

 

When you use this setup in a darkened room, the colored light shining up through the crystal is subtle and quite striking. If you want, while the shutter is open, you can add more effects, such as light painting. This is why nightlight bulbs, which are typically only four watts or so, are good for this type of project. The dim light creates long exposures that give you the opportunity to paint with other lights, such as flashlights with colored bulbs, while the shutter is open.

Many of the new LED pocket lights that are available for US$10 or less have options for red, green, blue, and white bulbs. You can shop around at flashlight specialty shops, to discover a whole new universe of creative lighting options. And when you're not painting with them, they make great additions to your keychain.

 

The Set up:

Find a work area where you can control the ambient lighting. Set up your prop lighting (such as the light stand I discussed earlier), colored gels, and subject. Mount your camera on a sturdy tripod. You can use Auto Exposure mode, but check you camera manual for how long the shutter will stay open with that setting. Some cameras have a Long Exposure mode; if yours does, you should use it.

 

Most advanced cameras have Shutter Priority mode, which makes this work easier. You can set the shutter speed to three or four seconds, and the camera will handle the aperture settings for you. As you work, you'll have to lengthen the shutter exposure (such as 6, 8, or 10 seconds) to lighten the picture, or shorten the exposure (2 seconds or less) to darken it. Play with your settings until you get the effect you want.

 

I like to use a remote release to trip the shutter, but if you don't have a remote, you can also use the self-timer. The main thing is that you don't want to jar the camera when you initiate the exposure. Even the slightest vibration during exposure will degrade your image. Speaking of picture quality, set the ISO on its lowest rating: 50 or 100. This ISO will produce nice, long exposures under these dim lighting conditions, giving you more time to play while the shutter is open.

 

Now, dim the room lights and let your imagination run wild. Take the colored bulbs or flashlights and move them around in the scene while the shutter is open. You'll find that different speeds and angles create different types of brush strokes.

 

Source: O’Reiley | Online Portfolio Website | Photography Website Design

 

Street Photography Shooting at Night

Because of their compact size, pocket digicams are excellent street-shooters, enabling you to capture the grit and the glory of urban life at night? that is, if you know how.

 

When you sit back and look at your travel shots, do you ever feel like you're shooting the same thing over and over, and only the locations change (same boring group shots, blurry bus scenes through the window, and yet another statue)? One of the best ways to inject life into your photography is to grab your camera and hit the streets...on foot.

Now, I'm not talking about raw photojournalism or anything dangerous. Every major city in the civilized world has a good part of town and a bad one. Lace up your sneakers and go to the friendly part of town.

My favorite time to shoot on the streets is from about an hour before twilight until darkness.Generally speaking, there's lots of activity at this time, and the building lights come on when there is still some color left in the sky. It's a magical setting that's perfect for night photography.

 

But if you want to capture that magic, you have to turn off your flash. This is rule number one for interesting street photography. Not only does the flash draw way too much attention to your shooting, but it also kills the shots. The possible exception is using Nighttime Flash mode, but for most of your street shooting, leave the flash off.

 

The best time for "night" photography is actually twilight. Most city lights come on before complete darkness. Your shots will be much more colorful and compelling with the deep blue twilight sky rather than the blackness of night, as shown in the two pictures of the Chrysler Building. The first picture was shot late at night, when the sky was completely dark. I went back the next day at dusk and captured the second shot with more color in the sky. Which do you like best?       

As the light goes down, however, your exposures will get longer, which means you have to look out for camera shake. Here are a few ways to combat shake so you get crisp images, even in low light:

 

· Increase your ISO setting from 100 to 200

You can go up to 400 if you need to, but you will have more noise in your shots at the higher rating. Often, this isn't a big problem for street shooting, because the gritty look seems to work with this type of subject material. Generally speaking, though, don't increase your ISO setting any more than you have to.

 

Source: O’Reiley | Portfolio Website for Photographers

 

Night Photography: Nighttime Portraits with Scenic Backgrounds

Sometimes, capturing the background of a nighttime portrait as just as important as capturing the subject itself.

 

Long ago, in a distant place, a camera designer made the decision to set the shutter speed to 1/60 of a second when the flash is activated. I don't know exactly when this happened, but that's the way it's been ever since I can remember.

 

The problem with 1/60 of a second is that it often creates night flash shots with muddy o nonexistent backgrounds. To prove my point, find a vibrant night scene, such as a street composition in New Orleans's French Quarter, turn off your flash, and take a meter reading. I doubt that the shutter speed will be 1/60 of a second. Most likely, you will get a reading of 1/30, 1/15, or slower. Brightly lit night scenes usually require that the shutter stay open longer than in brightly lit daytime scenes. Have you noticed that your daytime fill-flash shots look better than your nighttime flash shots? It all comes down to shutter speed.

 

When it comes to flash photography at night, shutter speed controls the appearance of the background and aperture controls the exposure of the subject within flash range. If the background doesn't look the way you want, change the shutter speed. If the subject within flash range doesn't look right, change the aperture.

 

If you leave your camera in auto-everything mode, it sets the shutter to 1/60 of a second when you turn on the flash. This is a safe shutter speed that provides acceptable images in a variety of lighting situations, both daytime and nighttime. But if you're in New Orleans having the time of your life, acceptable isn't going to cut it.

 

 

Here's what you have to do: slow down the shutter speed when the flash is on. Almost every camera gives you some way to do this. Here's what to look for:

 

Nighttime Flash mode

Cycle through your flash settings and look for the icon of a subject with a star overhead. If you have this icon, kiss your camera and the person who bought it for you. Under this setting, the camera will read the background, choose the right shutter speed, and add enough flash for the subject. When it works right, both the background and subject are nicely exposed.

 

Shutter Priority mode

Typically, this setting is reserved for more advanced cameras. Often, Shutter Priority mode is indicated by an S. Other times, it's indicated by TV, for Time Value. Either way, you get to set the shutter speed, and the camera then automatically adjusts the aperture and adds the right amount of flash.

 

Long Shutter mode

If your camera doesn't have Shutter Priority mode, it might have an abbreviated version called Long Shutter. This mode allows the user to slow down the shutter speed for situations such as night photography. The camera will do its best to add the right amount of flash and set the correct aperture.

 

Manual mode

You'll see this setting more often on advanced cameras. Manual mode enables you to set both the shutter speed and the aperture. The camera adds the right amount of flash.

 

Source: O’Reiley | Portfolio Website for Photographers

Photography: Make Your Own Passport Photo

Don't spend money for a terrible passport picture that you'll be embarrassed to show to strangers all over the world. You can take your own shot, and make great first impressions instead.

 

 

Why is it that whenever you have an official photograph taken, you're made to look like a  criminal or terrorist? Sometimes, you don't have a choice in the matter, such as for your  

driver's license (or booking at the county jail). But when it comes to passport photos, you 

can submit your own picture, and I recommend you do.

There are general requirements for an acceptable photo:

· Photographs must be identical and recent (within six months), with a clear full-face  and front-view image. They may be in color or     black       and white.

· The photographs must be at least 2" 2" (5cm 5cm), exclusive of any white borders. The image size, from the bottom of the chin to the top of    the    head (including hair), should measure between one inch and one and three-eighth's inches. There should be at least one half inch    between the      top of the head and the photograph's border.

· There must be a clear contrast between the background and the image of the subject. The background of the photographs must be white.      Grainy   photographs cannot be accepted.

Easy enough, right? Now let's talk about actually taking the picture, because that's the important part. Here is the equipment you'll need:

· Digital camera with a self-timer or remote release

· Tripod or alternative way to position the camera

· Two pieces of white foamcore, cardboard, or some other sturdy, reflective surface

· A stool or something else to sit on

· Inkjet printer with photo paper, preferably with matte surface

You want to avoid that stark, deer-in-the-headlights appearance that's usually caused by using a single flash in darkened room. You might still use a flash for your shot, but if so, it should be a fill flash and not the sole source of illumination. 

Look for a well-lit area that has a white or light background. You might use a brightly lit room in the house (with lots of light coming through one or more windows) or an outdoor setting, where you can use the side of the house for the background. But you don't want the sun shining right in your eyes. Diffused light is better.

Position your sitting stool at least five feet away from the background. You don't want to record much background detail. Instead, you want the background a little out of focus, and distance is the best way to create that effect.

Put the camera on the tripod and point it at the sitting stool. A trick I like to do is to put a lamp on the stool to act as my model while I'm aligning the camera. If you have a helper for this project, that person can serve as your stand-in. Position the camera slightly above eye level of the subject. By doing so, the picture will be more flattering and, if you do use a fill light, the shadows will be cast downward and out of the picture.

For your first test shot, turn off the flash. Let's see how it looks with natural light only. Turn on the self-timer, have a seat, smile slightly, and hold still until the camera has recorded the image. How does it look? If one side of your face is too shadowy, then position one of the pieces of white foamcore so it reflects light onto the dark side of your face.

Source: O'Reiley | Portfolio Website for Photographers

 

 

 

Smart Photography : Capture Kids Without Going Crazy

Sure, kids are cute in real life. But when it comes to capturing them with your digital point-and-shoot camera, they can be as elusive as leprechauns.

 

Digital point and shoots are great general-use cameras. But most of them are plagued by a phenomenon called shutter lag: the response time from the moment you push the shutter button to when the picture is actually captured is too long, sometimes as long as a second. In kid photography, a second might as well be a week.

 

Choosing a DSLR Camera

This next section of this hack provides ways to increase your odds of success with point and shoots. But first, if you want to cut right over to the fast lane, consider getting a digital SLR (DSLR), which has a much faster response time and performs better overall. DSLRs look and behave just like your favorite 35mm single lens reflex (SLR) cameras of years past, but they have a sophisticated image sensor instead of film.

 

Not long ago, this wouldn't be practical advice for parents, because DSLRs were just too darned expensive. But you no longer have to choose between a camera and a college fund.

Both Canon and Nikon have introduced quality DSLRs for under US$1,000, and more are sure to be on the way. The Canon Digital Rebel and the Nikon D70 are two examples of DSLRs that will help you keep up with your kids without maxing out your credit card.

 

DSLRs have minimal shutter lag times, allow for generous sequential shooting, accept a variety of lenses, and enable you to use external flash. In other words, they are perfect for action, kid photography.

 

Hacking the Point-and-Shoot Camera

Now that you know what your next camera should be, how do you get the most out of the one in your hand? OK, here are some tips to increase your odds of success.

First, get everyone outdoors, where there's more light, better backgrounds, and lots of things for kids to do. Then, make these three adjustments on your camera:

 

Set for the highest resolution your camera allows: This enables you to later crop out part of the picture, yet still has enough pixel information to make a good-sized print. It's like adding a powerful telephoto lens to your little point and shoots.

 

Find Infinity Focus mode and activate it: Essentially, this disables the autofocus (which is slow as mud on most consumer digicams) and lets you capture perfectly focused images from about eight feet to infinity. By doing so, you've just shortened the length of time from when you push the shutter button to when the image is recorded. This also allows you to hang back a few feet, so you're not spending all your energy chasing kids around instead of Photographing them.

 

Enable Continuous shooting mode: Instead of taking a bunch of single shots and missing the action, Continuous Shooting mode lets you hold down the shutter button and fire a series of frames. The knack to this is starting the sequence right before the decisive moment and shooting through it. Then, review your pictures on the LCD screen, remove the obvious misses, and keep the winners.

 

Source: O’Riley | Portfolio Website for Photographers

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