Digital photography, inside out

[Ewan McIntosh]

A whirlwind sharing sesh around digital photography, creative writing, and online photo sharing for anyone working in foreign language education or English, primary language work or for Art and Design educators looking for a way to extend and publish students' work.

Rm: tbc

[Karen Moffat]

This sounds alike a great session - has the room been decided yet?

[Alan Levine]

I use PhotoDrop on Mac for batch resizing and converting images between formats:
http://www.kudurshian.net/photodrop/

For online editing, I love PicNik which works in flickr
http://www.picnik.com/

Also, I love the iPhoto Export Plugin- direct upload to flickr
http://connectedflow.com/flickrexport/

[Brian Lockwood]

my flickr page http://flickr.com/photos/how2what4/

[Jabiz Raisdana]

Looking to share some photo ideas here is my Flickr page.

[Alan Levine]

My flickr http://flickr.com/photos/cogdog

[Martin Brown]

How do you choose a camera.
It will depend on usage by you, your students and your school. Ewan bought his camera online and then looked on flickr to look at peoples cameras and to see what people have produced and what camera they are using. This information is held on the right hand side of the window and will give you the properties of the camera.
Do you want something which is a point and shoot, or something which you can put into a manual mode. Flickr will also give an indication of which are the most popular cameras on the flickr community.
http://stevesdigipics.com is a good website to compare cameras and puts photos side by side.

Taking good photos:
Get on street level; get the faces; rule of thirds; get close; leading lines; know your light source; break the rules; depth of field to blur the background; anything over 85mm is good with portraiture.
Go for the golden hours - earlier in the morning and later in the afternoon. Unless you are going for a special effect.

Find out about the sweetspot with the lens (both in the part of the zoom which gives the best image and the aperture which gives the best image as well). This can be looked up online for the specific lens.

One piece of advice I would give people who want to improve their photography is to keep looking at different images by other people, not necessarily photos on flickr, but to look at professional images which are making money for other people. What makes their images intersting and what techniques are they using?

Tagging is a great tool to be able to catalogue and keep a track of your photographs. You can batch tag on flilckr. Allow others to tag your photos so that more sharing can occur. Does flickr allow to raw - yes it does. Raw is a format which gives everything the camera sees without alteration and is available on DSLR cameras and only a few point and shoot cameras. Raw files have to be processed to give a final jpg using something like Photoshop or free software like GIMP. The camera you bought will also have it's own RAW processing software (e.g. Canon has it's own raw processing software).

Scooped is a scotish company which looks for photographs tagged with scooped on flickr. Scooped is owned by Getty Images.

Software you can use to improve your photography:
Photoshop - very good, can be complicated and it is expensive, however educators should be able to get a heavy discount on purchasing this depending on where you live.
iPhoto on the Mac - simple tools which can easily improve photos
GIMP - open source software for photo editing, I've never used it, but heard it's good
Aperture - allows you to edit and track your photos on your computer

Websites:
http://bigartmob.com
http://jpgmag.com
http://flickr.com
http://www.dcmag.co.uk/ excellent for learning and competitions.
http://www.masters-of-fine-art-photography.com/
http://dpchallenge.com

My photography:
http://martinbrownphotography.com
http://asimpleportrait.com
Martin Brown on flickr (I don't regularly update this, however it would be great to make some friends).
http://jpgmag.com/search/photos/mart_brown

Enjoy!