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“I’m having a wedding. Can you be my photographer?”

Let’s get one thing straight. I am an amateur photographer. I started photography as a hobby and it is still a hobby. I have a full-time job that is nothing to do with photography. I do it for love, not money.

You want someone to do some cheap photos for you, don’t you? As you know me, you have come expecting that I’ll do the job at little expense to you, perhaps even free.

Well I won’t.

I can’t guarantee that the results will be to your liking. I have no insurance against failures. I have no experience in wedding photography. I can’t do it.

It is YOUR special day. If you want good images and a professional organiser, then you have to pay for this sort of thing. If I do it, it will be a sham and I will lose the confidence of you and your guests. I may even lose your friendship.

I am happy to take some snaps of your cat. If they don’t turn out as expected, no worries. We can take them again or just laugh it off. However, you can’t get married again. It is a one-off process. The best and most reliable results will come from you paying what the service is worth. That means someone else, not me.

Get a professional wedding photographer. Don’t ask me to do it as refusal often offends.

Eric Hartwell runs the photography resource site http://www.theshutter.co.uk and the associated discussion forums as well as the regular weblog at http://thephotographysite.blogspot.com

In part 1 of: Get the most out of your camera, we looked at how to use the aperture and the creative uses of depth-of-field. In this part we’ll look at how to use the shutter button on your camera and how both the shutter and the aperture control exposure.

The shutter is a mechanical device that controls the length of time that light is allowed to act on the film.
Most standard cameras allow us to use a range between 16 second and 1/1000 second. You might be wondering, why anyone would use a long shutter time of 16 seconds: I’ve used this and even longer shutter times when taken lowlight landscape images. I would always advise the use of a tripod with these long exposures time to avoid blur images.

Using a shutter speed of 1/125 second should safely avoid overall blur due to camera movement if you hold the camera by hand. Any longer shutter time should require a tripod.

Each time you open the shutter by one, we double the light, when we close down the light by one we half the light. Open the shutter at 1 second allows twice the light as that of a second.

The shutter can also be used creatively when taking landscape images or sport images. If you want to add motion to your image a slow shutter speed can give an image an extra bit of sway. No more so than taking images of streams. Using a slow shutter speed when photographing water will cause the water to blur, resulting with the image expressing motion.

By contrast, a fast shutter speed of 1/250 would be used in shooting wildlife or where the subject that you’re shooting needs to be still and sharp. Most wildlife photographers would use a fast shutter speed.

By using the shutter and aperture together we control exposure. Both allow light to enter the camera: the shutter by time and the aperture by the size of the hole in the lens.

For example: you’re shooting a landscape scene; you get an exposure reading at f/11 at second. You know that by using f/11 that the entire image wont be sharp. You want to shoot at f/22, which is four times less light than f/11. You need to quadruple the light through time; each time you open the shutter by one you double the light, so open it by two stops and your exposure time will be 1 second. Your final exposure should read f/22 at 1 second.

At the best of times, calculating the correct exposure can be a difficult task, but with a few simple tips our images can produce eye-catching colours that we see all around us every day.

TJ Tierney. Award winning Irish Landscape Photographer. If you are looking for more tips visit: Photo tips. To view some of his images visit his on-line gallery: Pictures of Ireland

The digital format has taken over from film as the format of choice for camera enthusiasts everywhere. Today most non-professional buyers opt for a digital camera by default. Do you know how this immensely popular technology came into being?

The father of the still digital camera was the video camcorders (VTRs) used to record videos for telecast on the television. This camera captured images by converting them into electrical impulses and saving them on to tape. However, all these cameras were Analog in nature. This changed when Nasa converted the format to digital so that it could enhance the images on the computer. Thus the first digital video camera was born.

In 1972 Texas Instruments patented the first film-less electronic camera and in 1981 Sony released the Mavica, which was the first electronic still camera. Mavica recorded still images into a mini disc, which could be read by a video recorder connected to a monitor or a printer.

But the true digital still camera arrived in 1986 when Kodak launched the world’s first megapixel sensor. This image sensor could record 1.4 million pixels and produce a 5×7 photo quality print. This was the first true digital camera.

However the camera did not became widely popular because it was too expensive and did not yield quality comparable to film.

Later on Kodak made another major contribution to the home digital camera market by developing PhotoCD. Photographers could take a snap with their digital cameras and take it to a Kodak PhotoCD shop to get a professional quality printout. The company also released Kodak DCS 200, which was gave photographers path-breaking quality as per the standards those days.

But the credit of developing the first consumer level digital camera goes to Apple. The camera called Quicktake 100 could be connected to the computer through a serial cable.

The market for digital cameras really took off with the advent of the colour inkjet printer and the Internet. Now it became very easy to share photographs and even print them with professional quality.

Today digital cameras are cheaper than ever, and their popularity is zooming by the minute. Modern digital cameras also yield very good quality, with as much as 6 mega pixels, or above.

If you find this information useful you should visit the site http://digital-camera-offers.com where you will find lots of interesting articles related to this topic, all original and wrote by Michael Lastun.