All Things Blogging | Blog Photography - Part 2

Hey,

Today’s post is part 2 of my blogging photography posts that are part of my all-things-blogging series. If you want some tips on taking photos, composition, lighting etc then check out part 1, this post will also make more sense if you do! Today I will be chatting about my camera and editing software, so it will be a little more techy. I hope you enjoy it!

So first I want to talk about the camera you use when you taking photos on your blog. This grid of examples shows the difference in quality and colour depending on the type of camera you use. I haven’t edited any images.

For the first section, I used my basic digital camera. The one I used is one I’ve had for years and years, and is an old battered pink AGFAPHOTO 10mp camera. I can’t find it online, but similar alternatives are just £25 because the model is so old. The camera is pretty rubbish, but does have a VERY basic focus, flash and macro setting. I think this would be okay for a beginner’s camera but there are a lot of better digital camera alternatives.

You can see that the colour is a little off and the focus isn’t clear, but you still have a clear view of the product which is okay.

The second example is taking a photo with my iPhone 4. Now I did rush taking this, so the fact it’s blurred a bit is most likely my fault, but as you can see the quality is still hard to achieve. However, if you have a better camera on your phone then it may actually be okay to use for photography, or at least whilst you’re getting started!

The last section is the one that has been taken on my proper camera, and the one I use for nearly all photography on my blog. I am so lucky to have received this as a gift from my family, and I use the Nikon Coolpix L320. I love this camera. It takes some gorgeous photos, has some amazing settings and is easy to use. It has 26x wide optical zoom and a proper professional pop up flash too! I think the quality is so much better and the colours are completely accurate to real life! When I take most blog photos, I use a setting called ‘close up’. This basically produces a close up, zoomed in image that is incredibly focused and makes it easy to blur the background but keep the foreground crisp.

If you’re new to blogging then I totally understand that not everyone can afford to buy an expensive camera, so check out some cheaper alternatives. My top tip is that you pick a camera with a good focus!

Editing

I think I’ve spoken about my editing process once or twice, and the free software I use is called PhotoScape. I knew that I wanted a good photo editor but I also knew that expensive softwares like Photoshop were not an option. I did a little research and this one had some good reviews, and I love it. I can’t believe I downloaded it for free and it does all I need it to!

·         One feature I love about the editor is that you have so many options. One tool I like to use is the ‘page’ setting, where I can combine images into different layouts. This is what I use to create my title pages.

·         The ‘editor’ section allows you to edit colour, saturation, add filters and so much more. You can enhance the photo’s colour and make it look 100x better. An example of an edited photo compared to original is below and I think you can really see how one is an improvement to the other.

·         Another thing I like to do is to create title pages using a circle of colour to put text over. When you create the shape, i.e. I create circles, you can change its colour and the colour transparency. This looks so effective!

·         I also love using text in images and PhotoScape is a great software for this. It allows you to access all your computer’s text types, change the size, colour, transparency and if the text is vertical or horizontal. I love to try out different colour and text combinations before I choose a final title image.

So that’s all my editing tips and some information about the software I like to edit on. If you have any other questions then just put them down in the comments.

So I hope everyone has enjoyed the parts of my blogging photography tips! I’d love to know your tips and advice though because I’m always interested in improving when I can. If you have any requests for the rest of the series then I’m interested to know and as always, any feedback would be appreciated. I hope you all have had a lovely day and I’m sorry the post is up a little late,

Social networking-

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