Dinadiawan Beach After Storm Surges

October 31, 2016, Dipaculao, Aurora, Quezon.  Storm surges from super typhoon Karen and Lawin created mini island.  During hightide and strong waves, waters pass-through pile of stones and sand, formed a mini lake across the beach.

Smartphone Photography

Make your first step into photography with your smartphones! There are lots of challenges when taking those precious snaps because smartphones are limited when comes to taking pictures. Here are tips to walk-through to your smartphone photography.

Smartphones and other digital cameras have common basics in photography like the lens and aperture, shutter speed that controls light exposure and ISO sensitivity in the camera sensor that records picture.

All images were taken by an iPhone 4s and post-processed with Snapseed.

Lens and Aperture

Just like other cameras, our smartphones has a lens and aperture. Lens are pieces of glasses in the camera and aperture is an opening or hole where light travels in the camera. 

Shutter Speed

Shutter acts like a window behind your lens aperture. It controls light exposure through the sensor by opening  and closing automatically everytime you take a snap. You can control shutter speed in some smartphones and digital cameras. 

Slow Shutter Speed. Shooting indoors might result a slow shutter camera settings. Slowing of the shutter makes blurry photos when subject is in motion. So you would hold still with your smartphones to get a clear shot.

Fast Shutter Speed. In bright scenes like direct sun light, shutter snaps fast, enough to freeze and record motion like walking and running. 

Color Negatives to Black and White Film Photography Workflow on a Budget

There are hundreds of workflows on how to shoot, develop, process and print or share your film photography to the internet.

I am a photographer on a budget, I finding cheap and accessible ways for my photography and get images I wanted. Got back to my storage bins and pulled my Nikon F SLR load a 35mm color negative and start shooting. When I was scanning my negatives with a HP Scanjet G3110 Photo scanner, I was not flattered with the scan output. Until I hit a magic button in Photoshop which is black and white. Now I can do more and play with it.

BASIC WORKFLOW

Settings and process will be different with gears you have.

Shoot click, snap, done!

Develop If you have the gadgets and capabilities developing film that's good. But, those are stuffs I and most people don't have. Try to find a photo shop who do film scanning.

Scanning Now this is the tricky part. You need an access to a film scanner. There are cheap flat bed and film scanner you can buy or you might have a friend that you can borrow. You can also check your local photo shop if they have film scan services to do the job. I use a HP Scanjet G3110 Photo Scanner, a document and film scanner. It's an old scanner, so it is not working as good like the new ones. You might have a better scanner and it's good for you.

Raw scan at 600ppi using a HP Scanjet G3110 Photo Scanner. 

Picture on top: Nana Wolf, lead vocals of Lycantha a goth
band in the Philippines.
Below: Blue Galindez, a hardknock.

Post Process You might have film scratches and minor tweaks in your photographs. You need a photo editing app to take out scratches and spots, color corrections, dodging and burning, black and white conversion and saving your image. Some times I leave the film scratches for a grungy effect.

Print or internet Let's make it cheap. A deskjet printer will do. Use a photo paper of your choice and hit grayscale and photo quality in your printer preferences. Choosing color printing options on not calibrated printers might result to color casts on your black and white images. In grayscale mode, most printer use black ink cartridge only.

Grayscale printing on a Kodak inkjet photo paper using an Epson ME OFFICE 1100 desktop printer.

National Bicycle Day

The world bike community celebrates the National Bicycle Day. Bike advocates promote to use bicycle to lessen power emission and air pollution led ny motor vehicles and to have a healthy lifestyle. 

DIY Pop Up Flash Diffuser

Say goodbye to harsh shadows when using your pop-up flash!  

Install in seconds and it'll cost you a piece of paper and tape!

This DIY photo equipment is inspired by Gary Fong's Puffer.  I simply cut two pieces of white bond paper exactly the size of an ATM card and attached it on my pop-up flash.  Quick and easy!

Here are some camera settings to get you started!  These cam settings are ideal for film and digital cameras that have automatic and manual features.  Although, you can try the DIY pop-up diffuser or other flash diffusing tricks in this tutorial regardless of the limitations of your gear.  Sizes of the DIY diffuser may vary on the size of your pop-up flash.  The DIY flash diffuser you see in the picture above fits for DSLR pop-up flash or alike.

Point and Shoot
For people who don't know about the ins and out of the camera.  Just simply attach the DIY pop-up flash diffuser weather you have a DSLR or a Point and shoot camera, you are ready to go!

GEEK TWEAKS
Fine tune your DIY pop-up flash diffuser by learning some camera tweaks!  Let us make experiments to define what camera settings to use in different scenes.