elf

Even with just linking you still have to ask permission, and get it in writing to cover your

ass.

Look, copyright infringement is serious business.

Go out, take your own photographs and do your own website but forget wasting your time

redesigning the site so you go on infringing.

You can certianly enjoy the images on your own computer for learning and pleasure, but

there really is no need to consolidate them on a public web site. By and large no one, but

your friends, is going to come look at them and you leave yourself open to copyright

infringment suits.

Go out and take your own photographs and put them up on a site. Study a lot of other

sites and figure out what makes good navigational behaviour in a web site. Study

copyright law and the Geneva convention, and if you want to go into the stock licensing

business for a small group of well juried eastern European and Slavic photographers, go

forward with that and see if you can make a living at it.

And do all of that before you start to redesign this site.

That you'd better get permission from every photographer whose picture you wish to use.

And that, once you've gotten permission, you set up the pictures so they're no bigger than

144 pixels by 288 pixels at 72 ppi and have forward and back buttons on the pages, and

legends in some romance language, as well as links to every site from which you stole the

pictures.

Rule number 1 of shooting around water- put the strap around your neck.

I'd say, buy a high end digi with good seals and get a rain cape.

Wow. My first thought is that you must be rich to pay California prices for a dash like that.

It's a long way and gonna cost a bunch of a scarce resource to do that.

Getting to your question, and keeping in mind the environmental effects of a pleasure

drive that long, and not knowing where you're starting from, let me at least suggest that

you select one spot on Route 1 maybe an hour's drive from you, and spend the day

concentrating on shooting there. That way you palliate your desire to get out and about,

use a lot less gasoline, and still get, if the weather's good, 3 or 4 hundred amazing shots

in 5 or 6 fabulous situations. And you avoid the cliche shots of the best known spots, to

boot.

I was able to get this out of it with some of Photoshop's better tricks. You can see that the

feet are sharp and the boxers soft.<div></div>

The next time you send a photo, resize it to 4"x6" by 72 dpi.

Shoot from down at floor level when they're on the floor, so the black floor doesn't eat up

so much of your light. Lie or sit down if you have to, to keep the light from being aimed

at the floor. Set your focus point in your viewfinder in the middle and point it at the thing

you want in focus. Learn to recompose before you release the shutter after you've

focussed. Anticipate the action. (The feet are nice and sharp, but the boxers are out of

focus.) If the coaches will let you use the flash, pop it up and set the camera in P mode.

You're pretty much stuck with 400 ISO but it's sure noisy in the places that are soft.

Maybe you could put a few pix up for us to look at so we can see what your problems

might be.

From shooting basketball for a local paper I'd recommend shooting in Exposure Speed

Priority at an ISO of 1200, at least. If you've got a 300mm or longer lens, use a monopod

and get yourself down by the foul line. Unless the school will allow you to set up lights

which you can fired from the camera, I'm not sure an on-camera flash will be much use.

Yup. Grain is a lot harder to create in Photoshop, whereas colors are easy to manipulate. I

imitate Velvia 50 when I tweak my RAW files all the time, but if I shoot above 200 ISO the

digital noise is completely unmanagable.

Not sure I see a problem. All publishing and most printing use now comes from scans.

Just tweak the colors from whatever film you're shooting.

Now grain? That's a whole other matter. Much harder to fake.

Walden Pond, Great Blue Hills, Wachusett Reservation, Quabbin Reservoir, Sudbury River,

Concord town center, Lincoln town center - get a map, throw a dart, explore. Everywhere

is beautiful out there as long as there's snow.<div></div>

For a start, there's too much range between the foreground and the background for the

camera to capture it all accurately. Either you expose for one, or for the other, but you

have to choose when you take the image.

Then the entire image is badly overexposed on my monitor so either your in-camera

meter is badly out of adjustment, or your monitor is not calibrated.

The best way to deal with it is to take two shots - one for the foreground and one for the

sky - and combine them in Photoshop. With a valley like that it's hard for a graduated ND

filter to deal.

You can do some good corrections burning in Photoshop as well, although unless you shot

RAW and underexposed when you took the picture, you may not have enough data to burn

out of the file.

Walden Pond in Concord might be OK. Have you got a car? Garden in the Woods In

Framingham?

Well, it really depends on what you want to do with the pix. Slide shows? Share with

friends? Decorate your house? License usage to publishers?

But it won't depend for too much longer in the Western World. The march to digital

capture is making it more and more expensive to buy and process film.

Remember, Galen Rowell ran 15-20 miles a day in the hills of Berkeley to keep in shape all

the way to the very end of his life. Doing exercises to keep your arms strong will make

that camera seem much lighter than you fear. If you must continue using film, you can

still maintain your body to do the work without a tripod.

And for some of those lying on your stomach shots you can get a carbon fiber tripod with

legs that will open wide enough, or brace yourself with your elbows out to the sides. Just

check yourself for deer ticks when you get home and get right in the shower. Put your

clothes in the washer right away, too. No use having the ticks get on all the housepets as

from your clothing.

"Welded" to anything is a reduction of variables. Reducing variables often leads to

reducing imagination.

Deciding what is right for the situation and then pursuing the conditions necessary to get

to it always seems to me a better life choice.

Exercise your visual imagination before selecting your gear.

Turn off the autofocus and do it manually. You have hardly a drop of depth of field, as

well, and will need a tripod and to use very small apertures to get any along with lots of

light. Shoot in manual or aperture priority mode and be prepared to use some flash for

light, but not the flash on the camera....

Seems to me there are three choices. Either bring lights, shoot when the sky is flat or hunt

extensively until you find locations that have a more balanced light.

In any case shooting RAW could be very helpful.

Is your ISO high enough? Shoot RAW and adjust one or two in ACR and find out what you

needed to do to correct the color and exposure, then go back to the setup and insert

those corrections.

On the basis of a few trips in that neck of the woods I would say that:

At ISO 50 you will not be able to get adequately sharp photographs at any time of day

without a tripod. If you're serious about photography go as high towards the top of the

line as you can afford and try them out before you buy.

Limiting yourself to 135mm will make it impossible for you to shoot about 75% of what

you probably will wish you had been able to get. A good Nikon zoom from 90-300mm

will be a much appreciated asset although not as sharp as the faster versions of such a

lens.

If the end goal of the trip is to hike and get a few nice shots, you'd probably be better off

taking a higher end digital P&S, a few flash cards and batteries, an adequate tripod and a

good solar powered battery charger.

Either shoot slides or take the high end digital Canon. A 10D or 20D will not cut it. Keep

in mind that E-6 processing is getting very scarce as the shift to digital barrels along.

Get wild animal reports wherever you go hiking alone and be fully prepared to defend

yourself against bears and wild cats. Buy DeLorme map books as you go or on Amazon

before you leave and study them as well as all other resources about your planned path.

Know what's already in the marketplace, by searching Corbis/Getty/most of the RF sites

and the major nature/travel/landscape agencies that are left before you go. Allow at least

a month of careful searching and note taking to do this.

Concentrate on developing a completely unique and distinctive visual style before you go.

Determine what your market goal is and find out what it wants and shoot that as well as

what your heart leads to you. Remember that all the time people are what stock agencies

want.

Learn everything about being in business before you leave your paying job.

Join the Stockphoto list for a couple months - go to yahoo groups for it. Check out

Editorial Photoraphers' web site thoroughly. Register you images as you go along with the

Copyright office.

Have about $100K to support you and your business plan before you leave. The more the

better. The first $20K of that will buy the equipment you need to get started.

Take a course in Maine or Santa Fe as part of your travels.

Get and stay in good physical condition.

Get business cards printed and give them out everywhere you go, especially to gallery

owners. Collect all of theirs as well and research their needs as you get to places where

you can get on the web.

Keep an extensive and careful journal of your trip.

Specialize as soon as you locate a market niche that isn't full already!

And, of course, the usual - use a tripod and shoot at the sweet light times.

I suppose just about anywhere you point the camera there will be something

wonderful to shoot. Just being able to be that near the Mississippi River would be a

thrill.

Think Katharine Lee Bates as you prepare for the trip and you'll find more than

enough to keep you busy.

Just thinking about a road trip and wondering where the line is that spring is

beginning. Has it made it to Philly yet?

make sure you get the light lit in the lighthouse

experiment with putting the horizon in different places in the image

put the kid on papa's shoulders

correct the sky color so it's less lavender

try out different approaches to the jetty

consider whether you want color on the rocks and learn how to get it there

use a wide angle lens to get the light and the people and lots less of the jetty in the

pic