Photography info for writers
Kodak has some great tips for those who are just getting started in photography. Learn things such as:
How to use your flash
How to frame things for a good shot
How to focus well
And more…
A great place to start for beginners. Don’t cheat yourself out of making some extra money from your articles. If you don’t know how to do take good photos to accompany your work, now is the time to get started! These basic tips are easy to navigate and will get you on the right road.
The Luminous Landscape is a good place to go for the lowdown on photography. You can browse the categories endlessly and find information on everything from “how to photograph car races” to “bullfight photography”. Too specific? Well don’t panic….there are some great basics as well. There are more than 3,000 pages of product reviews, tutorials, travel articles and photographs here, so you are bound to find something that can help you out. If you are a freelancer who hopes to do photos this is a super place to get started.
Do you have questions about digital photography that you can’t find an answer to? Check out Digital Photography Review (commonly known as dpreview to insiders), a totally amazing resource for everything related to cameras. Read the forums or post a question. Help is just a click away!
Outdoor Photographer is a terrific magazine that can help you understand how to take better outdoor photos, learn about equipment and keep you in the loop as to what is going on in photography. If you do a lot of travel writing or plan on taking your own pictures for articles to accompany your text, you have to really be committed to staying with the curve of technology if you want to be competitive. This is a good way to do that and stretch yourself a bit in the process.
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One of the best tools a freelance writer can own is a good digital camera. Supplying your own images for an article can make you more marketable, and any steady reader of this blog knows we are digital camera evangelists here. Writers who don’t take their own photos wind up cheating themselves out of the extra cash you often get for supplying images together with the story.
“Which camera should I buy?” Naturally this is the first question non-photographers always ask. There are two basic kinds of cameras; the point-and-shoot (P&S) variety and digital SLRs. SLR stands for “single lens reflex” and this basically means that what you see what you look in the viewfinder is the exact image the lens sees.
I strongly advise writers not to buy the cheap P&S model. For professional use, even as a beginner, P&S cameras are too limited and you will grow out of them as soon as you learn the difference between what an indoor shot with no flash looks like at 100 ISO vs. 800 ISO. What does THAT mean? We’ll save that for another article.
by Catherine L. Tully
I provide photography for many of the articles that I write, and this has not only been fun, but has been a nice addition to my income as well. I won’t pretend the learning curve isn’t fairly steep, but I will say that it is worth a writer’s while to head on down the road to learning some things about photography. Having a few ideas in mind of what you don’t want to do is a great way to begin… Continue reading 5 Photography Mistakes To Avoid