Dusk is one of the most amazing moment for photography and to get a good picture at this moment is pretty easy if you know your basic.  First you’ll need a steady tripod, then make sure you are familiar with your camera &  system, the more you know the better your chance at getting beautiful photos as dawn fade away very fast, especially the best duration of ‘golden hour‘ is only about 10minutes at most;  You really do not want to be wasting your time finding a feature or setting of our camera.  So,  study your manual and understand your camera before you go out and shoot!

Generally, your will be shooting with a relatively long shutter speed to get the nice colors from the horizon.  In order to get the longer shutter speed we preferred,  we will be using low ISO together with a small aperture.  In this series of photos,  I used mainly Nikon 24-120VR, Nikon 18-35 and Nikon 50 f/1.4 on a Nikon D700.  Generally I used aperture smaller than f/5.6 to f/22 on some cases.   I’ve adjusted the ISO from 100 – 1600 depend on my subjects and the motion blur effects I wanted to archive.

Attached here with some of the photos I shot from a local theme park at Queensbay, Penang, there are edited with Adobe Lightroom 3.  Please feel free to comment or share them to your friends.

&. btw,  I am planning for an intensive class of Adobe Lightroom 3 for intermediate users,  do send me an email if you are interested.

&.&. btw,  if you are looking to turn your hobby into profession, please check this out.

Have you ever got frustrated that your high quality picture turn low quality when you shared them on Facebook?  This is because Facebook is having a very bad compression system and low quality re-size method.

What happens here is when you post and uploaded non-treated photos to Facebook;  The system will automatically re-size and re-compress your photos to smaller file to save resources.  Sadly, there are no way we could bypass this at the moment, but there are some tricks on getting the best out of the system.

Like the most of you, I am very active in Facebook and sharing photos is now a part of my lifestyle.  I found out that by preparing the photos to be Facebook-friendly prior to posting,  I am getting much better picture quality in the album.  They generally appear sharper, and clearer compare to non-treated photos.

How do I do it?  Here’s my recipe for Facebook-friendly photos,
This tutorial is based on Adobe Photoshop CS5  and the steps are more or less the same with other editing software.

Step 1: If you need to make adjustments to your photos, just go through all the tweaks and settings.

Step 2: Once you have finalize your adjustment, go to ‘Image Size’ [Alt + Ctrl + I], and re-size your photos with the following settings.

*1 – Make sure the longest side of the photo is set to ’720′, this is the longest supported size in Facebook currently.
*2 – Resample Image using ‘Bicubic (Best for smooth gradients)’ to get the best possible results.
*Notes: Resolution here served no purpose but I put it at 96dpi anyway, as most modern PC are now displayed at 96dpi.

Step 3: Once re-sized, you may view the photo at 100% by pressing [Ctrl + Alt + 0].  At the time being, you Photo may not look sharp enough as you lose details when re-sizing.  So, in this step, we are going to sharpen the photo by using a filter called ‘Unsharp Mask’.  You can call the filter out by going to ‘Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask’.  Adjust your setting with the following settings.

*Amount: 350% – 500%
*Radius: 0.2 pixels mostly and 0.3 pixels at most
*Threshold: 0 levels
*Notes: I usually start with 0.2 pixels in ‘Radius’ and 500%, if the photo appear over-sharpen (White lines around the subjects),   then I will slowly lower the value of ‘Amount’.  On some rare cases, I will use 350% & 0.3 pixels.

Step 4:  Alright, now you got a good Facebook-friendly photo and now you are ready to save it for posting later.  To get the optimum quality with smallest possible file size.  I recommend saving the file using the following setting from ‘Save-For-Web & Devices’ by pressing [Alt + Shift + Ctrl + S].

*1 – I used Jpeg with custom setting.  I turn on ‘Progressive’ option, but Facebook will make it into ‘Interleave’ anyway.  I set the Quality to ’95′ instead of the usual ’60-80′ ranges recommended by most,  as I noticed that at ’95′, after downgraded by Facebook, I am getting better photo compare to quality of ’80′.  I do not use ’100′ as I don’t see any difference between ’95′ and ’100′ with my bare eye.
*2 – Some of you might have shot the photos with Adobe RGB profile.  So, remember to turn on ‘Convert to sRGB’ for compatibility and since Facebook does not store and show exif data, so you can safely remove all Metadata here to conserve file size.  You can safely ignore this setting if you have no idea what it is.
*Notes: Once you are done with the setting, press ‘Save’ and export your file.

Step 5: Now you got a Facebook-friendly photos,  it’s time to post them.  Make sure to select ‘High resolution’ option when you are uploading using the new Uploader.

Once uploaded, you and your friend can enjoy your photos at better quality now!

Thanks for reading and if you think this tutorial is useful, please share it to your Profile, sharing is caring.  Stay tuned for more tutorials.

As part of my sharing of ‘video filming with HD-SLR’ to Freezed.asia members.  I am now taking order for the following equipment that are recommended for shooting video with HD-SLR.

1st in the list is the HDV-Z96 LED Video light, for just RM 220 a unit, it provide adjustable fill light constantly with just 5x AA batteries.  Come with a tilt-able shoe-to-tripod mount adaptor, a snap on light diffuser and also a warm light color gel.  You can stack many units of the light panels to form a bigger panel.  For more details on this, read this review here.

Next in the list is the Zoom H1 portable audio recorder, selling for RM 375.  Zoom H1 act as a high quality stereo Microphone as well as a standalone portable recorder.  Come with a 2Gb MicroSD card for you to start recording directly.  For more details, read from here.

Last in the list is the Rode high performances microphones.  2 models are being offered now, one is a Rode VideoMic Directional Shotgun Microphone at RM 390, and another is a Rode VideoMic Stereo Microphone at RM 680.  These are one of the highly recommended microphone to compliment HD-SLR by the many cinematographer around the world.

To get one of these, kindly fill in this order form here,
I will then contact you as soon as possible to complete the purchase.

Finally, as promised earlier, this is the slides that I presented earlier in the sharing session.  If you are looking to join one of these workshops, kindly send an email here with the topic your are interested in.

Months after the short d90 video I do for fun, here I am with a brand new short video, shot entirely with a Nikon D3100 at 1080p24.  Geared with lenses like 18-55DX VR, 50mm F1.4D, 70-200 F2.8 and a 24-120VR.  Here I present to you, ‘Static . Motion’.  Have a look and feel free to comment!

Here’s a small reviews from me after using Nikon D3100 for a short while, the 2nd generation D-movie from D3100 (and D7000 also) is ways better than the old version. The rolling shutter problem is almost non-visible now.

The new expeed engine and sensor also provide a much better low light performances; the most obvious improvement I noticed is got to be the very sharp video so long that you got the right focus compare to the soft, and low detailed video from D90, D5000 and D300s.

Last but not least, I will be having a small talk on ‘video filming using SLR’ at Freezed.asia on 3rd Dec 2010 and if you are interested on the topic, feel free to join and kindly share this page to anyone who might be interested.

Thanks to Freezed.asia, I had a chance to share on Time Lapse photography with the members on 19th Nov 2010.
It was a short sharing session, and I managed to pull it through with some slides and time-lapse videos I liked.

Many thanks to all that come and support and I hope you learn something from the session.

Please check this one of the best Time Lapse video I found and shared during the sharing session,

Want to do your own time lapse but have no idea where to start?
Download my PDF guide of Time lapse photography and have a read and feel free to comment.

The club members will also be having an outing on 30th Nov 2010 for a time-lapse try out at Fly ver bridge near Komtar Penang.  For now, enjoy and stay tuned!

Updates:
The outing with the club members is a big success! I can see many videos floating in from the participants already in facebook.

I received quite a lot of inquiries on how to create the above photo montage.  The original idea came from another article off the net, which I can’t remember which one to credit to at the moment. So, I’ve created my version on how to create this montage in a few minutes time with minimum efforts.

To do this, you will need the following items (Click on the name to download them respectively)

- Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (LR2)
- Adobe Photoshop (PS)
- PanosFX.com Big Pictures action script plug-in (Free Edtion)
- AlbertYap.com Template for exporting original file in Lightroom 2

Notes:
I assumed you already know how to import action script for PS, and also template for LR2, if you do not know how to do this, please do a Google search or contact me.  You are also assumed to be able to understand PS & LR2 basics such as running an action, exporting picture in LR2 and etc.

Instructions:
1. Select and prepare 25 landscape photos in LR2, vertical oriented photos does not work very well in this montage.  Arrange them in the way you preferred after adjustments.

2. Once you have selected the 25 photos to be included in the final output, go to LR2’s Print module. As illustrated above, by using the attached template (Star 1). You get to preview the output similar to the above screenshot.  Here, you can click and move the small individual picture a little bit to the left or right for better composition.

3. When you are ready for the next step, click “Print To File” on bottom right (Star 2) and save the photo montage as a JPEG file.

4. You will then have a newly created JPEG file similar to the above, without my watermark of course, if you are not happy with the arrangement on the small pictures, you can always go back to step 2 and rearrange them in LR2.  When you are ready and happy with the result, proceed to close LR2, and execute PS for the final effects.

5. I am using Photoshop CS4 for this tutorial, so it might have a difference user interface as your Photoshop especially older versions.  Nonetheless, they are all the same, download the correct version of action scrip from PanosFX.com for your Photoshop and we are ready for the next step.

6. There are 2 actions included in the current edition from PanosFX.com, one is called “Big Picture flat actions”, and another one is “Big Picture curled actions”.  I am using “Big Picture curled actions” for this tutorial sample,  you can try either one of them as they work the same way, just produce difference results.

7. By executing the action, you will be requested to open up a landscape picture, if you already opened the file you saved earlier, just close the open dialog and it will then automatically proceed with plenty of recorded actions and once they are done, you will get a few results, pick one and save a copy and then your are done!

Thanks you for reading this tutorial and enjoy creating your very own photo montage!
Please do leave a comment if you find this tutorial useful and please share them with your friends.  I will be sharing more in the future and if you are interested, you are recommended to bookmark this blog and visit me regularly.