collecting and subject content
| subject of collecting and Hobbies |
| Art Tips | |
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- Collecting Art Deco
- Collecting Bronze Sculpture
- Antiques
- Collecting American Folk Art
- Collecting American Quilts
- Collecting Chinese works of art
- Collecting Pewter
- Collecting Old watches
- Collecting Native American Silver Jewelry
- How to buy Jewelry at auction and save
- Collecting Stamps
- Collecting coins
- Collecting autographs for profit
- Collecting maps
- Collecting firearms
- Collecting old trains
- Collecting dolls
- Collecting comic books
- Collecting popular sheet music
- Collecting Rock and Roll
- Collecting Stock Certificates
- Collecting celebrity memorabilia
- Collecting baseball memorabilia
- Collecting Seashells
- Collecting Butterflies
- The Best Fly-Fishing equipment and where to fish with it
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| Portrait subject, photography secrets |
| People are the most popular subject for photography. People pictures are our most treasured keepsakes. There are ways to turn snapshots of family and friends into memorable portraits. |
| Techniques: |
- Get close. Too much landscape overwhelms the object.
- Keep the head high in the frame as you compose the shot. Particularly from a distance, centering the head leaves too much blank background and cuts off the body arbitrarily.
- Avoid straight rows of heads in group shots. It's better to have some persons stand and others sit in a two-level setting.
- Pose subjects in natural situations, doing what they like to do -- petting the cat, playing the piano, and the like.
- Simplify backgrounds. Clutter is distracting. Trick: Use a large aperture (small f-stop number) to throw the background out of focus and highlight the object.
- Beware of harsh shadows. The human eye accommodates greater contrast of light to dark than does a photographic system. Either shadows or highlights will be lost in the picture, usually the shadowed area.
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| For outdoor portraits: |
- Avoid the midday sun. This light produces harsh shadows and makes people squint. Hazy sun, often found in the morning, is good. Cloudy days give a lovely, soft effect.
- Use fill light to cut shadows. A flash can be used outdoors, but it is hard to compute correctly. Best fill-light method: Ask someone to hold a large white card or white cloth near the object to bounce the natural light into the shadowed area.
- Use backlight. When the sun is behind the object (but out of the picture), the face receives a soft light. With a simple camera, the cloudy setting is correct. If your camera has a light meter, take a reading close to the object or, from a distance, increase the exposure one or two stops from what the meter indicates.
- Beware of dappled shade. The effect created in the photograph will be disturbing.
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| For indoor portraits: |
- Use window light. A bright window out of direct sun is a good choice. However, if there is high contrast between the window light and the rest of the room, use filter-light techniques to diminish the shadow.
- Use flashbulbs. A unit with a tilting head allows you to light the subject by bouncing the flash off the ceiling, creating a wonderful diffuse top lighting. (This won't work with high, dark or colored ceilings.)
- Mix direct light and bounce flash. An easy way to put twinkle in the eyes and lighten shadows when using bounce light is to add a little direct light. With the flash head pointed up, a small white card attached to the back of the flash will send light straight onto the object.
- Keep a group an even distance from the flash. Otherwise the people in the back row will be dim, while those in front may even be overexposed.
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