Tag Archives: Photography Tips

High Quality Royalty Free Stock Photos

Getting your hands on quality images is pretty easy to do, there’s lots of stock photography providers if you’re willing to pay for them. If however you’re working on a tight budget or bootstrapping, supply is much more limited, and generally the quality of free images is poor, unless you’re happy with cheesy amateurish photos. I would recommend avoiding the use of poor quality imagery with any of your work as this reflects poorly on you and your business.

So if you’re looking for images for a blog post, or presentation and you don’t want to pay a penny, i have some good news for you. Below are six sites that provide high quality royalty free photos for FREE, check them out for yourself. The image at the top of this blog post is from one of the sites, so you get a sense of what’s on offer.

Pixabay is site I stumbled upon, try to download a couple of images, the higher resolution images require you to create an account, but the lower resolution images 1920 x 1280 can be downloaded without an account. Some of the images are very good. Images are “Free for commercial use” and “No attribution required”.

Pixabay website screen grab, mike turner photography

Gratisography – free use as you please, high resolution pictures for personal and commercial projects. Just click on your selection and download the high resolution version. New pictures added weekly. No copyright restrictions.

gratisography-stock-photos

ISO Republic stock photography provides high quality, free photos for creatives covering architecture, nature, people, textrues, urban and more. It’s aimed at designers and developers who don’t have the budget for quality photos.

ISO republic

Magdeleine is a photo gallery for your inspiration. Magdeleine offer a daily pick and feature high resolution pictures

magdeleine stock photos

New Old Stock – Vintage photos from the public archives free of known copyright restrictions

old stock photos

PicJumbo – Totally free photos for your commercial and personal work. Only limitations include redistributing and selling

pic jumbo stock photos

Stocksnap.io – Beautiful free stock photos with hundreds added weekly. No attribution required either.

stock snap stock photos

Gutenberg,org – Public domain – offers over 49,000 free ebooks: choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online. Many of which are free from copyright (in USA). As public domain you can repackage this content in any number of ways to create your own products (check copyright law in your country first)

ulib.org Public domain with lots of free content

StockSnap  – they offer beautiful, high quality stock photos for just about any use you can think of.

Pexels – Pexels provides high quality and completely free stock photos. All photos are nicely tagged, searchable and also easy to discover through our discover pages.

Unsplash – Probably the best known of the free stock sites.

Burst – Burst was launched by Shopify to help new businesses find quality images for their marketing.

Foodiesfeed – Looking for high quality, mouth watering food photography, Foodiesfeed is where it’s at.

kaboompics – Kaboompics is one of the most popular sources of free images for lifestyle, interior design and specialised bloggers in World.

Paper sizes

paper sizes from A0-A8

This handy illustration shows all the paper sizes from A0 to A8 and their dimensions in mm. I often find myself surfing the net to find such an illustration, so thought I would do one for myself. Hope you find it useful.

Description mm inches
A0 1189 X 841 46.86 X 33.11
A1 841 X 594 33.11 X 23.39
A2 594 X 420 23.39 X 16.54
A3 420 X 297 16.54 X 11.69
A4 297 X 210 11.69 X 8.27
A5 210 X 148 8.27 X 5.83
A6 148 X 105 5.83 X 4.13
A7 105 X 74 4.13 X 2.91
A8 74 X 52 2.91 X 2.05
A9 52 X 37 2.05 x 1.46
A10 37 x 26 1.46 x 1.02

Focal Length effect on photographs

Focal Length has a dramatic effect on photographs. The whole image is transformed. When you shoot at wide angle the elements in the image are spaced out not just in terms of field of view (from side to side), but also from front to back with foreground and background elements looking to have more distance between them. As you increase your focal length, the field of view is narrowed and the elements in the background appear to move closer to the foreground elements. Check out the video above and the images below to see how each of the focal lengths impacts the look of the photos.

This illustration is taken from the same distance for each shot.

focal length effect on photos
Each photo taken from same camera position, just adjusting the focal length for each.

In the second illustration I have changed camera position with each shot to try to frame the subject the same in each photograph. It shows dramatically how the background creeps up on the subject with each increase in focal length. I have moved from approx 1 feet from the subject, in the first photo to about 30 feet away in the last photo to be able to give the subject the same framing.

focal length effect on photos
Camera position altered for each photo so that the subject is framed the same in each.

A long focal length is ideal for zooming in on distant subjects so that they appear to be closer to the camera position. Short focal lengths are best for getting more of the scene into the photograph, or if you are unable to move back to get more of the scene in with a longer focal length.

Hope you enjoyed the information in this post. There are lots of similar posts throughout the site if you want to check out more. Thanks for taking time out to visit us. I also undertake one to one tutorials at my studio in Warrington and have more online tutorials. Subscribe to my “learn photography newsletter for more info” below.

Camera Metering Modes

Your DSLR camera has a built in light meter that helps you work out the correct exposure.

when you point your camera at something to take a picture your camera meter calculated the exposure.

Most DSLR cameras have a number of metering modes you can use that are something like this…

Evaluative metering mode

This is a general-purpose metering mode suited for portraits and even backlit subjects. The camera sets the exposure automatically to suit the scene your pointing your lens at.

Partial metering mode

Effective when the background is much brighter than the subject due to backlighting etc. Partial metering covers about 9.4% of the viewfinder at the center.

Spot metering mode

This is for metering a specific spot of the subject or scene. The metering is weighted at the center covering about 2.3% of the viewfinder area. When spot metering is set, the spot metering circle will be displayed in the viewfinder.

Center-weighted average metering mode

The metering is weighted at the center and then averaging for the entire scene.

Hope you enjoyed the information in this post. There are lots of similar posts throughout the site if you want to check out more. Thanks for taking time out to visit us. I also undertake one to one tutorials at my studio in Warrington and have more online tutorials. Subscribe to my “learn photography newsletter for more info” below.

New ONline Video Photography Tutorials for Beginners

I have just completed my online video photography tutorials for beginners, which covers the  basics and is aimed at anyone who has just purchased an DSLR camera and wants to better understand it. I have done lots of one to one tutorials at my studio in Lowton and in doing so have come to understand what people generally want when they get themselves a new camera.

So I have crafted a number of video photography tutorials that take viewers through each stage of the learning process so that they have a clear path to their goal of getting more from their camera and to understand the important aspects of photography so they get consistent results and basically know what they’re doing, rather than relying on the camera to work it out for them.

I have started the video course at just £15 for 2 months access. The videos take less than an hour to get through but have all the information packed into short videos that can be returned to again and again over the two month access period.

Check out the sales page here where you can purchase the tutorials and get a link and access password.

I am also on hand to answer any questions you have once you’re inside.