Mike DelGaudio

I have recently started a new website, called Pictoot.

Pictoot was born out of the idea that finding new and creative things to improve and inspire my photography was a constant cycle of searching blogs, Digg, del.icio.us, flickr, etc. While each of those services does a great job of harnessing the power of the community, they are so broad that finding photography related tutorials meant a lot of great stuff got lost in the noise.

So I thought I would take inspiration from Digg, but narrow it down to just focus on aspects of photography, a topic that is of great interest to me. I’m hoping that other photo buffs like me will share and refer the best resources on the web for making us all better photographers.

If you have written (or know about) any photography related tutorials, please feel free to join up and submit them to Pictoot. That’s what this is all about!

Anyone can submit a story. Be it how-to articles on composition, lighting, editing, Photoshop, Gimp, Picasa, or equipment reviews or the best photo sharing sites — there is so much great stuff out there my goal was to make it easier to find and share the best. I hope my follow photographers will visit, submit stories, “Toot” their favorites and find new inspiration today.

Oh, if you have a website, I’d sure appreciate if you’d give Pictoot a little link love. Thanks!

[tags]photo tutorials, tutorial, photography, photo, pictoot, mike delgaudio[/tags]

Blog La Mengambrea used my photo titled “Nice” with regard to “energía renovable“. The post is in Spanish, so you may have to tranlsate it for yourself.

Gracias, César
Estoy alegre tú tuve gusto de mi cuadro.

[tags]Michael DelGaudio, César Rincón, La Mengambrea[/tags]

Sunrise on the Pier, originally uploaded by delgaudm.

Photos like this are one of the reasons I chose a Digital SLR camera. In my case I use a Nikon D70. When I want it to, It can really be used to create some stunning effects.

While you probably shouldn’t buy a camera based on one photo, here is a link on Amazon for more about the camera itself.
More About the Nikon D70
(This is an affiliate link, If you buy something after following this link, I get a tiny commission)

How this Shot was made:
This shot requires a bit of preparation. It is a sunrise shot, so I took it pretty darn early in the morning. The thing about sunrise shots is all the drama occurs BEFORE sunrise. Starting about 30 to 45 minutes before-hand. Choose a spot beforehand, and get there early.

What you’ll need:

1. Camera (duh) — with fresh batteries. cold winter mornings suck down betteries.
2. A Tripod
3. A pen flashlight, a little mag lite is perfect, so you can see the buttons on your camera. If you can work your camera with your eyes closed, this is optional.

About 45 minutes before sunrise, set your tripod up and make sure all the settings are correct. Make sure your ISO is turned all the way down (to 100 or 200 — whatever your camera has) Look through the viewfinder and make sure the horizon is level.

Know where your “Exposure compensation” button or dial is, and how to change it.

I set my camera to Aperture Priority (and a wide aperture, something like f5)
I also switched the focus to Manual on the lens, so that I just set the focus on infinity, and never changed it.

When you start taking pictures, try all different ways of setting the exposure compensation. In this case it was a
+2 — so the camera wants to make the scene brighter than it thinks it should be. The light changes fast, so try variations from -2 to +2 and places in between.

In the aperture priority mode, the shutter will open for various lengths. I prefer this when taking shots of the water, as the linger the shutter is open, the glassier the water looks.

Take LOTS of pictures. Different angles, different zoom lengths. Try to get some silhouettes of objects on the beach or in the water. This creates some visual interest.

[tags]Mike DelGaudio, photo, flickr, picasa. [/tags]

Thanks to blog nrc.nl for using my picture “Blackberry”

Jose Klaver posted the picture in a post regarding email and Blackberry, I think. The post is in Dutch, and I can’t find a translation service. Oh well!

Thanks Jose, I’m glad you likeD my picture!

[tags]Mike Delgaudio, Jose Klaver[/tags]

At the Rivers edge, originally uploaded by delgaudm.

This was a picture I took over the summer. At first I was only lukewarm on it, But after applying a little Picasa magic, I think it is much better. The key for making this a better picture for me was to apply a few subtle changes.

1. I cropped the picture using the Perfect Square Cropping methods (which is holding down Shift while you drag a cropping box)
2. I brought up the saturation just a bit to enhance the separation between the sky and clouds.
3. I sharpened once to enhance the tips of the tree.
4. I added a little soft focus around the tree. This smoothed out some camera noise and some artifacts from the sharpening.

So there you have it, a few subtle changes, and the picture as a whole is better.

[tags]Mike DelGaudio, Photo, Editing[/tags]

You would even say it glows., originally uploaded by delgaudm.

My Submission to the DPBlogs Project of the Month, “Christmas”

[tags]Mike DelGaudio, Flickr, dpblogschristmas[/tags]

Create a “Time-Lapse” home movie with Picasa and PhotoLapse

If you have a digital camera, you can easily make a time-lapse video of just about any subject.
Using Picasa only or a combination of Picasa and a nifty little application called PhotoLapse you can create your very own movie.

If you don’t have Picasa, from Google, you should.

A time-lapse video is essentially just an assembly of a series of still images into a video file. Here is how I made a short movie of me playing with my kids in the back yard.

Here is the movie I created using this technique:

Setting up

Here is how you should set up.
- First, make sure that battery in your camera is charged up, all the way up. You may end up taking several hundred pictures. In my move I shot over 1000 pictures (and used about 700)
- Make sure your memory card is big, and empty. I use a 1 gig memory card in my camera.
- If you can set your camera to take the smallest possible pictures it can. You’re going to shrink them down anyway, so maximize the number you can fit on your card. The smallest resolution I can get on my camera is 1500×1000 which gives me 1,100 images on a one gig card.
- If you can, set your camera for continuous focus.
- If you can set it for continuous shooting or burst mode, do that too.

The idea here is to set your camera to take pictures at the fastest possible rate.

Take the pictures for your movie

All set? Good. Go take a whole heaping mess of pictures in a row.

In the video below, I just pressed the shutter button down and let the camera take pictures as fast as it could until the card was full. How fast this happens varies by camera.

Now, come back to your computer and dump all those pictures into one folder that Picasa will add to your library.

Resize all the pictures to a manageable size

Select all the photos in that folder by clicking one image in the folder, then CTRL+A to select all.

Click “File” then “Export To Folder”

Note how this is set.
- Give the folder a name like “resized”
- The “Resize to” slider is all the way to the left, making the images only 320 pixels on the long side.
You need to do this because the video is going to get big, fast. My video of 700 or so frames was 81 megabytes.

Depending on how many images you are resizing, this could take a minute.

Create the movie

Choice 1: Within Picasa (less preferable)

Picasa can assemble images into video.

Click the “Create” menu, then choose “Movie…”

In order to make it a time lapse choose click the “Delay between pictures” pull-down and select “Just Raw Frames”

Choose a movie size of “Small”

Then click “OK”

Picasa will assemble your movie.

I find that the movies created this way shoot by WAY too fast. Depending on how many pictures you take, it may work fine it may not.

Which brings us to

Option 2: PhotoLapse

Download the free application PhotoLapse

PhotoLapse is a TINY application that takes a folder full of JPGS and turns it into a movie that t a little bit more configurable than Picasa (but not as hard to learn as Adobe Premiere for that matter.)

First, use the pane on the left to locate the “resized” folder we just created with Picasa.
Click “Load Files from Current Folder”

Once the pictures have been located, you’ll want to set the Frames per second (FPS) that you TOOK the pictures at. I think it looks better if you set it a bit higher than what you actually shot at. Somewhere between 3 and 6 FPS works well for me.

Then click “Create Movie” You’ll be prompted to choose where you want the movie to reside. Just put it in the same folder as the resized pictures.

Next, you’ll need to tell what kind of Compression to use. Experiment with what you have, each computer has different compression software (called a “codec”). Or just choose “Full Frames” uncompressed.

PhotoLapse will churn away for a minute or two, and when it is complete it will open up your default video player and show you the movie.

In the next post we’ll show you how to post that movie to the popular video Sharing site Google Video.

Here is a preview of the completed Time-Lapse Movie on Google Video

[tags]Mike DelGaudio, Picasa, video, time-lapse, PhotoLapse[/tags]

Ocean Beach, Early Morning, originally uploaded by delgaudm.

[tags]Mike DelGaudio, photo[/tags]

Tallageda Days Hosted on Zooomr

[tags]Mike DelGaudio, photo[/tags]