Some tips for digital camera

Photography is a very neccessary skills for designers. However, many designers like me are not professional photograph. Therefore, I always try to find some hints and tips from professiona photographer to apply to my work and improve my photos. The first thing I need to consider when taking photograph is exposure (the amount of light). This focuses on f-stop and shutter speed. The rule is that if you increase f-stop then the shutter speed should be decreased correspondingly and vice versa. When you take a photograph of a moving object, such as a car, you should increase the shutter speed to avoid blurring. However, in some cases blurring can create special effects such as iln photos of lights on the street in city.so it depends on your creative thinkings.When you shood a photo, remember to keep pressing the shooting button for a while to focus on the object which you want it to be clear. When this object is clear, you just release the button.Taking photographs with a digital camera has a disavantage. It is the LCD screen make you hard to keep the photo balance because you can't see exactly whether your horizontal line is straight. Therefore, try to avoid to use LCD screen and practice as much as you can until you can keep the horizontal line straight.Another important thing is the resolution of the photo you take. Obviously, the higher resolution the better the image but it also takes more storage. Professional photographers recommend that you should choose the resolution 2048x1536 (3.3megapixels) for 13x19 inches image and 1600x1200 (2.1 megapixels) for 8x10 inches image.
Photography is very important for designers. In the age of digital technology, digital camera is the first choice. I often do practice with my camera when I have time to gain experience. The digital camera allow me to adjust exposure, color and brightness very easily without having so many professional skills. Another important thing is tri-pod because it help me to prevent shake and allow me to take photograph of myself. The cost of tri-pod is not high about 10$ and it can be purchased in any digital shop in Ho Chi Minh city. Most digital cameras allow me to change the time to close the shutter up to about 10 seconds. It is enough for me to run to the place where i want to take a photograph of myself. The most difficult thing is how to take a correct photograph in order not to miss any part of my body. I often use a certain object as a anchorage to solve this problem. For example, when taking photograph in a garden I will choose a tree as anchorage.The most important thing of digital camera is lens. A professional camera always has segregated lens. I also prefer a SLR camera which have is independent on LCD. When choosing a camera, I also have to consider the capability of changing exposure such as f-stop, shutter speed, white balance, panorama photography and macro mode. If you are a professional photographer, macro mode and panorama mode are invaluable. Macro mode is usually used for photos of nature. A correct taken macro photograph can speak more meanings than its content.

Typography pieces

Travelling on the Internet and incidentally catch a collection of compositon and typography. We have just had a exercise about composition and and a little bit typography. I have took the first glance about typography through this exercise. Seeing the professional designers' jobs will be the best way to improve myself. Some typography poster impressed me. Here is a poster named"Number 1" of Paula Scher in 2005:

In this poster, she used a lot of number 1 to create a big number 1. Small number 1 were made from many typefaces. She also gave enough white space around.

"Sundance Channel" is a poster made by Barry Deck in 1998. He has used a rather strange style in this poster. The horizontal sentence "all you have to do is read" almost went out of the poster's margin. In addition, he used big size fonts and color red to emphasize the page address and its content. Information was grouped into blocks to make the poster easy to read. The next is "Cyclon typeface" by Hoefler & Frere-Jones (New York), a advertising company in 2005:

Designers tended to create a balance. They says: "In developing Cyclone, we identified one of the culprits­six letters whose design can dramatically polarize the disposition of a typeface". They want to use addition and alternative of words (it means each word has its own alternative word) to make the typeface either solemn or versatile and flexible. The last poster I show you is "now read this" by John Berry in 2005:

Here he used the left-align text. Texts were arranged into columns so they create a invisible verticle lines. Two columns also made balance. Big words "A", "e"... also made sense although they are difficult for us to understand! Whitespace was also used enough.
You can find more great pieces of design in this page:
www.aiga.org