Category: photography

The Dallas Camera Club had its annual photography scavenger hunt about a month ago and I’ve uploaded my images. I took 76 images and I’ve posted 8 of those in the Gallery. Like any scavenger hunt, there are items that need to be found; but, in this case, participants are awarded based on the categories found along with the quality of their images.

The categories this year were: “An Old Building”, “A Modern Structure”, “The Color Red”, “A Statue”, “A Reflection”, and “Lines of Perspective”. We started at 9am and met back up for lunch, so we had around three hours to get all the shots. The extent of my knowledge on Dallas is largely limited to how to get to work downtown; so, I mostly just wandered around.

This isn’t my first scavenger hunt with the Dallas Camera Club — I also went last year — but I really enjoyed myself. I found that walking through Dallas has a much different perspective than driving through it and Dallas can be a surprisingly photogenic city at times. The hardest category for me was probably “Lines of Perspective”. I ended up going with a long shot down a street and I’m curious whether heavier traffic may have improved the shot.

Standard photo-entry text: All my photos are released under a Creative Commons license which roughly states that you’re free to “copy, distribute, display, and perform the work”. Also, I’ve resized all the images to 1024-width before uploading them as it can be a bit hard to get your head around a full 5 MP image. However, if you want the full-resolution version of any images, just ask.

I’ve been enjoying photography ever since buying my digicam and I kept running across articles mentioning “histograms” as an exposure diagnostic. Figuring that maybe it could help me take better pictures, I searched for more information on histograms.

I found a couple tutorials and this tutorial at Photoxels was one of the better ones. I learned that a histogram is essentially just a bar graph of the light present in an image (from “dark” on the left to “bright” on the right). And, while it may seem intuitive that a flat histogram would make for a good photo, it turns out that a hill-shaped curve is actually preferred for most shots.

So, how is this useful? Well, if you’re shooting at an event, you can take a couple test shots beforehand. Then, by loading your camera’s histogram function, you can check the shots and adjust your exposure if needed (such as by exposure compensation or tweaking the ISO). Now that I know how they work, I’ll just have to remember go through those steps the next time I’m taking photos.