Cell Phone Camera Tricks

I am going to start this post very irritated. There is a cell phone company that has a commercial that makes erasing unwanted subjects and objects from an image look like magic. In case you have not seen it, a family member is sitting in an audience and watching a graduation ceremony. Someone jumps in front of the graduate and the person taking the picture says no problem, I will just erase it and like magic the person who jumped in front of the graduate is gone. Well first of all that is absurd. If you take one image and someone jumps in front of the subject, that photo is one dimensional so there would not be a graduate behind the person jumping in front. What the cell phone company does not show you is that you have to take several images of the same pose in order for this to work. Firstly, what would be the point if you had other images of that exact pose. If there was only one image of the graduate receiving the diploma and someone jumped in front of that image, there is no way to have an image of the graduate receiving the diploma.

I pay professional graphic artists to remove people from family portraits all summer season. This commercial makes their job seem easy and makes it look like anyone can do this. This is simply not true. It take professionals hours to to this correctly and commercials like this trick the public into thinking it is automatic.

I just want the public to know that these functions are not what they seem. When you see your proofs and there are lots of unwanted objects in your image, Our professional graphic artists are not just clicking a button to remove them. They work very hard and use their professional skills turn your raw image into your perfect family portrait

Now my rant for the day is done.

Here is a video that shows exactly how this works:

http://www.talkandroid.com/guides/samsung-galaxy-s-4-guides/how-to-take-a-drama-shot-and-erase-unwanted-objects-with-the-samsung-galaxy-s-4-camera/

What Photography Means to Us…

The staff at Myrtle Beach Photography looks at thousands and thousands of images just like this almost every day. When you look at this image, you see a beautiful family. When this family looks at this image, they remember what the beach smelled like, what it felt like to walk on the sand with their their children, the giggles when they went to the amusement park, the taste of the seafood dinner where they all sat around a table together. That is what photography is. It is not a disk of images or hair out of place or the money that it cost. It is a special time that families spend together that can never be replaced. It is a feeling inside of you that you want to feel 50 years from now. Our job is so important because we are in the business of precious memories and feelings that we must capture so that those feeling can live on forever.

Should a professional photography studio sell raw unedited images…..

The big question is (drum roll please) Should a photography studio sell raw unedited images? I read many articles, and this one explained it best…..

http://digital-photography-school.com/should-we-ever-sell-raw-unedited-images

Do you think the way we preserving our photo memories is better today than yesterday?

Do you think the way we preserving our photo memories is better today than yesterday?

Remember when we put all of our precious photos in a family album? Our family vacations, our family holidays and birthdays were placed gently in a photo album and displayed. They were passed from generation to generation for families to look at, talk about and tell stories about our relatives. Today, we pull our phones out of our pocket and click silly faces of ourselves to post on social media. We have thumb drives and hard drives full of random pictures we don’t have time to look at much less organize and preserve.

What do you think?

The Exposure Triangle by Myrtle Beach Photography

Before you begin reading this post, be sure and click on the previous post that explains the elements that go into the EXPOSURE TRIANGLE. The post is called The Mystery of Manual Photography. It covers aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. This will help you understand and apply the exposure triangle theory.

To understand exposure it is important to understand “The Exposure Triangle” and how ISO, shutter speed and aperture come together to effect each other. In order to maintain the “correct” exposure, any change in one element needs to be compensated with an opposite change in one of the other elements. By adjusting the shutter speed we can better freeze or express movement. By adjusting aperture we have play with depth of field thereby either highlighting a small element of our subject or expressing the grandness of our subject. But in doing so, we now know how to get back to that “correct” exposure! Once you start understanding exposure in this way you are well on your way to increasing your photography skills.