Whether you’re barbecuing, watching the fireworks display, having a picnic or staying in, here’s hoping you stay cool, take lots of pictures and make tons of memories. If you’re going to take photos of the fireworks this year, you’ll want to pick an ideal spot, choose a wide-angle lens and keep your hand steady. For more tips check out BudgetTravel. Their article on Fireworks Photography is sure to bring out the professional photographer in you. In honor of tomorrow’s special holiday, we at Tiny Prints want to wish you all a safe, fun 4th of July.

I am a fan of the Food Network with Giada De Laurentiis and Rachael Ray being my two favorite cooking celebs! That’s why when I heard that Giada was pregnant, I was curious to find out more about her baby. Doing a little research online, I discovered some really cool information about her baby shower that took place early this February. The Today show threw her a fancy get together including what else but a fabulous menu of braised duck pot pie and squash coconut soup. Yum!

A great idea at her shower you might want try is including an adorable childhood picture of the guest of honor (a photo of Giada as a child is shown below). You can check out the website yourself on MSNBC. But here are a few pictures from their website.

Giada’s baby shower
Source: http://allday.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/02/28/712450.aspx

By guest blogger: Rich Bucich

This is the second installment of tips to help you take better photographs of babies.
If you read my last post, hopefully you have a greater understanding of how your camera’s auto-focus works and the impact of good light on achieving a sharp, clear photograph. There’s much more to the equation however, and understanding the settings on your camera will give you a distinct advantage.

Good light provides a faster shutter speed for the camera. The faster the shutter speed, the more the movement will be frozen and “camera shake” will be minimized. In poor lighting, your camera will try to speed up the shutter speed by adjusting settings which may degrade the quality of your photo.

The camera will likely take the following steps to speed up the shutter:

• The camera will open the aperture (AKA f/stop) - this will let more light through the lens but will also require much more accurate focusing. The area achieving sharp focus may be very narrow, i.e. tip of nose is sharp, eyes out of focus. The term is called “depth of field.”

• The camera may increase the ISO* - a higher ISO will allow for faster shutter speeds but can severely degrade the quality of the photo. For best results with “point & shoot” type cameras, keep the ISO at 200** or below. Digital SLR camera will be much more tolerant in this regard, often being able to shoot in excess of 800 ISO with acceptable results.

• The camera may turn on the flash - the flash is your friend, but automatic settings will often create harsh shadows or over-exposed areas if too close to your subject.

*ISO stands for International Standards Organization and is essentially a measurement of light sensitivity.
**Higher ISOs settings may be required under extreme low light situations such as parties and events where shutter speed needs to be maximized. In these cases, the additional sharpness may trump any graininess. We don’t recommend high ISOs in baby photography because the skin tone can be severely degraded.

If manual settings are overwhelming, you will have a huge increase in your photo success rate if you just focus on providing as much diffused ambient light as possible.

Our Tiny Prints website also has many effective tips with examples which may be helpful as well. Please register and post a comment if you have any questions.