Portraits by San Antonio Photographers

A career in photography can be educational, rewarding and lots of fun! But where do you start? How do you get your first photography job? Do you work for an advertising company, newspaper, or modeling agency? Maybe if you are a photography major. So where does that leave the rest of us.

Depending upon your level of motivation and commitment, you can be a successful freelance photographer lining up your own work, but that s another story OR you can find an employer to take you on and train you. Yep-sure, where are you going to find that?

How about an on-mountain photographer job at one of the Nations major ski resorts. Almost every major ski mountain has a photography program. Breckenridge, Steamboat, Vail, Copper Mountain Colorado, Heavenly California and Jackson Hole Wyoming will train outgoing and enthusiastic candidates to be professional photographers.

Have you ever wanted to become an extreme sports photographer? This is your chance. The action photographers shoot the ski/snowboard park and have private appointments that typically want extreme shots. Another part of the job is setting up on the side of a run and photographing skiers as they rip by. Your action shots get really good, quickly when you shoot a thousand pictures a day and you work on commission.

Do you have a zest for life, love working with families, would you enjoy working with a variety of groups or shooting child photography? Then a ski hill portrait photography job would be perfect for you. You set up your shop on the mountain at the scenic overlook. Families, groups, couples, kids ski right up for a photo shoot. it is not unusual to shoot 20-30 groups a day during peak periods like spring break, you can’t buy experience like that, but you can get paid to do it!

You will learn valuable photography skills that you can use the rest of your life. You will gain the experience and confidence to go up to anyone, anywhere take their picture and sell it to them. You will learn a work flow that can be applied to many different types of photographic situations when you freelance on your own.

The whole world will open up for you and your love for the art of photography with real world experience.

It is important to note that most of the ski areas will provide you with the proper camera equipment, uniform, and a mountain pass to get to your zone. You need your own ski/ snowboard equipment and Although they rarely provide housing they may have suggestions on how to get settled in to the area.

This isn’t for everyone, if you really just want to ski, get an evening job doing something else from 3-11pm. You can ski all day, everyday.

If you love photography and skiing you better hurry up and get in touch with one of the resorts right away because they fill their photographer jobs in October and November.

I have been a top professional photographer at several western ski resorts including Vail and Breckenridge Colorado, Brighton Utah, and Grand Targhee Wyoming. The season starts Thanksgiving and ends in April. I have exceeded $100,000 in sales in one season, a few times. I started out at Grand Targhee where I landed my first professional photography job taking action photos of skiers on the slopes. Now I live in South Lake Tahoe, California and this will be my 3rd season at Heavenly. To view my gallery of action and portrait photography visit freelancephotographerjobs.com There are a lot of photography free tips and info too.

I also publish a blog at: lookatyourphotos.blogspot.com If you know someone that enjoys photography and sking or snowboarding, email this article to them. They’ll get a kick out of it!

Brandon Baumgarten

“The Flow”

[techtags: Family Photography, Senior Photographers, Studio Portraits, Portrait Photography]

Basic Composition

Now that you are beginning to understand how your camera works you can begin to understand basic composition. I know that many people that I ve talked to think that photography is just pointing your camera and taking a photo but it s more than that. After you understand how your equipment works you can begin to get into the real art of photography and that art is called composition.

Basic principles:

1. Use all of your available space. Fill the image with the image. If the reason that your taking the photo is your daughter s beautiful face then get closer. If you re taking an image of the breathtaking valley before you. Fill the frame with the valley. Keep distractions out of the frame. They re called distractions for a reason.

2. Look at the forms in your image. You almost have to look at the people or the landscape before you in their simplistic geographic forms. A good way to learn form is to practice taking photos of still life objects, that you can arrange into pleasing forms. A good photo is always a beautiful arrangement of form. Whether it s the beauty of a woman s face, her features being forms, or a wonderful landscape, trees, rocks, and hills being forms.

3. Line or direction, motion. The direction of the forms in your photos is very important. Never have action or motion moving outside of your image. It will direct the eye away from your image. Diagonal motion lines are good, curves and s curves are better. The last two is probably way landscape photography is so popular nature is full of curves. Also never put a horizon line in the center of your frame.

4. Contrast, the difference between black and white. Now it is possible to have a beautiful photo with little contrast if that is your intention, this works best with color. But a lot of shots, some really beautiful shots have a nice balance of black, white, and grays. This can be manipulated for artistic purpose of course, but in the beginning you want to focus on trying to take shots with equal amounts of black, white, and shades of gray. (Shoot a roll of B&W film to really learn this principle.)

5. Color, you may have to familiarize yourself with the color wheel. (See my article Graphic Design Using Color for more information it s for graphic design but the first couple of paragraphs talk about basic color theory) Whether you re shooting nature or setting up your own shots in a studio you need to know what colors go together and why. Many of us have an instinct as to what looks good. When in doubt follow your instincts. Start out by taking shots of things that you think have pretty or beautiful colors. Show the photos to others and see if they agree. Photographers learn not only what they think is beautiful but what is universally beautiful as well.

Now the hard part practice all these principles at the same time. It s not easy! Now you really know why photographers take years to really learn their craft.

This week s assignment: Let s break this down into four assignments. You ll need four rolls of film. Roll one, fill your available space. Shoot pictures of whatever you like, but get closer. Eliminate distractions from your image. Keep the focus of your image on whatever it was that made you want to take that photo. Roll two, forms. Here s an old stand by that I did in college. Get out an assortment of vegtables and fruit from your kitchen. Put a sheet down on your table, no distractions, shoot an entire roll of the veggies and fruit making sure that your rearrange with each shot. Make sure you study your results and see which forms looked best. Roll three, Contrast, you can do this in B&W film if you want to. Take a shot of the flower in your garden in the early morning, afternoon, and sunset. Shoot some portraits at the same times, by candlelight too. When you see the results you will be surprised. Roll four, color. Use the vegtables again, this time paying attention to the colors. If you can tell me why a red tomato looks best on a green bed of lettuce or the orange sunset with the purple clouds is so captivating then you ve figured out some of color theory.

If you have some specific questions please visit my Photography Forum at: http://kellypaalphotography.com/v-web/bulletin/bb/index.php and post your question there.

Copyright 2004 Kelly Paal
Kelly Paal is a Freelance Nature and Landscape Photographer, exhibiting nationally and internationally. Recently she started her own business Kelly Paal Photography (www.kellypaalphotography.com). She has an educational background in photography, business, and commercial art. She enjoys applying graphic design and photography principles to her web design.
kellypaa@kellypaalphotography.com

[techtags: Family Photography, Senior Photographers, Studio Portraits, Portrait Photography]

Enticing title, huh? No, we won t be discussing nude photography, at least not today. Rather, this article will, hopefully, shed some light on the tremendous image quality advances of today s digital cameras.

Imagine taking a developed 4×6 snapshot of your child s birthday party and scanning it into your computer. If you printed the resulting photo, you would notice some considerable degradation of the image quality. The interesting fact is that most JPEG images are comparable to the quality of the scanned and reprinted image. Surprised? The JPEG image format is, by all means, acceptable for most consumer and even some professional purposes. JPEGs are definitely the best choice for sharing in email and even for printing on photo paper to place in an album or share with family and friends.

If, however, you are a camera geek (like me), you are simply not going to be satisfied with anything less than perfection from your images. In that case, you will definitely want to consider purchasing a camera with RAW image format capabilities. Working with the RAW format is the equivalent of working with a color or B&W negative. You have substantially more technical and creative control. The downside is that the RAW image format requires significantly more storage space on your media cards and demands more advanced photo-editing capabilities, which means investing in more powerful software with integrated RAW image editing functions (i.e. Adobe Photoshop CS2, retail cost $649). But, in my humble opinion, it is well worth the higher learning curve and expense.

Serious photography hobbyists and certainly those who may want to sell their photographic work will benefit tremendously from the superiority of the RAW format. The good news is that several reasonably priced prosumer digital cameras now offer the RAW image format. The Canon Digital Rebel XT 8 MP camera (est. retail $650) offers both JPEG and RAW formats. Likewise, the Sony Cybershot DSCR1 10.3 MP camera (est. retail $850) offers RAW image capture and an impressive array of features. For die-hard Kodak consumers, the new Kodak Easyshare P880 8MP camera (est. retail $500) offers a wide-angle optical zoom and RAW file support. Last, but not least, the Nikon Coolpix 8700 8 MP camera (est. retail $600) offers RAW mode image recording and many of the features commonly sought after by professional photographers.

So, if you are in the market for a new digital camera, you owe it to yourself to check out the latest, surprisingly affordable innovations in RAW image capture. I doubt you will be disappointed.

Balsman Photography, LLC

Kim Balsman is the owner of Balsman Photography, LLC, a small, professional photography studio in Longmont, Colorado. Kim s background is diverse, including formal education in communications and law at Truman State University and the University of Houston, as well as professional photography studies at the New York Institute of Photography. Kim spent more than a decade working as a paralegal, practicing in numerous legal specialties with law firms in Texas. Throughout her career, Kim has written thousands of legal documents but prefers the creativity of writing short stories, novels and journalistic pieces. Some of her work has been published in corporate magazines. Kim has lectured at entrepreneurial symposiums and educational facilities and led an initiative to help small printing franchisees compete for demanding legal document reproduction business. Kim enjoyed a brief career in real estate as a Century 21 agent in New England, grossing more than $2M in sales in a matter of a few months. She now devotes her full time to her photography business and writing.

[techtags: Family Photography, Senior Photographers, Studio Portraits, Portrait Photography]