If you're reading this then chances are that you're into photography. This is the QJ photography blog after all. With that said, perhaps you may find this little how-to interesting.

Jay Bedingfield posted this little tut on making a homemade muslin photography background on DIYPhotograpy.net. Muslin is a type of finely-woven cotton fabric and is often the cloth of choice for theater sets. With the right colors, it can be used to set the mood of any number of scenes, and with the right lighting, a backdrop of a backdrop painted on muslin can appear or vanish, allowing a set to be transformed almost instantaneously from one setting to another.

Nifty, eh? Y'know, looking at the finished product (see pic on top), we think that even if you're not gonna use it for photography or anything of that sort, it would still make a rather good curtain. Oh, and you can also use pretty much the same technique in making tie-dyed shirts.

For the complete set of instructions over at DIYPhotography.net, click on the 'read' link below.

For everyone who likes to take photos, we all know how lighting can either make or break a picture. Either there's not enough light or there's too much. Either you can't see your subject or... you can't see your subject since it's been taken over the sheer brightness of everything.

So, for cases like these, we need proper lighting paraphernalia. Unfortunately, the said paraphernalia are not exactly cheap, so let's just make one! Using good, thick cardboard, a pair of scissors, some glue, and bits of Velcro and silk, we can all make our own soft box.

For the uninitiated, a soft box is an accessory whose purpose is to properly diffuse light on your subject. This way, your subject still remains well-lighted without having to appear so harsh in your photos.

Over at diyphotography.net are complete directions on how to create the soft box, as well as a pattern that you can download and print out so that you can use it as a guide once you get to making your own. Once you've made one, you can then easily mount it on your camera-flash for those professional-looking shots.

Click on Read for the DIY directions.

So here's the situation.

Your really hot pen-pal in Europe has finally sent his or her picture to you and is now asking you to send one of your own as well. Knowing that that old prom pic just won't do, you take your digicam and pose as only a model would, then you download all the shots into your computer. Just as you were about to send off those pictures, something catches your eye: the lack of a hairline.

In the words of Douglas Adams: Don't Panic!

That's because David Nigel has prepared a step-by-step tutorial to help those in a... not-so-hairy situation. By creating a simple custom brush in Photoshop 7, which is pretty much composed of a few squiggly lines, one can create convincing hair and fur effects for those emergency touch-ups. He has also included directions and tips on how to blend the effect with your photo to make it look as convincing and as real as possible.

So, with that problem out of the way, things should be fine. Well, at least until the time that you and your pen-pal decide to meet up, that is.

Click on Read for the step-by-step procedures.

As we all know, digital cameras have already replaced the old film-type cameras. After all, you can take as many shots as you want with a digicam and not worry about wasting film, you can print your own photos at home, and - more often than not - a digicam also doubles as a video camera and a portable USB flash drive, all in one package. Plus, digicams are very pretty.

However, with all the features that we want and all the convenience and hipness they promise, digicams are not cheap either. So if you're about to go out and pick yourself your own cam, you might first want to stop for a minute or two since there are certain things that you might want to know about before forking over your hard-earned cash.

Over at Camera2Photo.com, a guide of 25 essential tips have been compiled to help the casual (and maybe even the pro) photographer pick out the perfect digital camera. Tips that have been included range from how to gauge the price of your selection as compared to its features, warnings to not get wowed by the megapixels that a model supposedly sports, as well as why one should consider optical zoom over a camera's digital zoom capability.

This is one set of rules to follow since it may possibly save you or someone you know either lots of money or from the heartache that is caused by buyer's guilt. Check out the rules by checking out the link below.

As digital cameras get smaller and smaller, it gets also gets harder and harder to get a stable grip on it while taking pictures. The image comes out blurred because of shaky hands, or because your camera's so tiny. It becomes especially hard when you try to take pictures of you and your friends when you're all laughing and there's no surface to put it on so it can't be put on timer mode. Here, we suggest two very simple ways through which you can capture that perfect Kodak moment minus the blurs:

1) Hold your compact camera in a stable way. How? 

DON'T

If you hold the camera this way, one of your fingers will tend to slip off the camera and into the front, thus covering a part of the lens. The dark spot on the lower left corner is caused by the finger covering a part of the lens)

DO:

Instead of using only the tips of your thumb and index finger to hold the camera in place, bend also your middle fingers in both sides of the camera so that it becomes stable on all four sides.


2) Don't breathe while you're taking the shot. I'm not kidding. Notice how your arms and shoulders rise as you breathe in? THAT is why the captured image will tend to come out blurred if you take a breath at the exact moment that you press the shutter. Also, do not 'tap' the shutter. Instead, press it gently so that as your finger exerts downward force on the camera, its angle is not altered.

These are VERY simple tips on taking pictures, in fact, you don't even need us to tell you about this, but the sad reality is that a lot of people still forget them when capturing images. Just remember not to take too long when pressing the shutter (remember you're not supposed to breathe) lest you run out of air and die.

Tired of having to go to the photo store each time you want your pictures developed? Too poor to own your own dark room? Do you still use a dot-matrix printer? Ran out of photo paper for that urgent portfolio?

Solve it all using over-the-counter blueprint paper and glass cleaner (Windex in this case).

Nope, we haven't quite completely flipped out yet as the process that we are about to tell you about is completely plausible, you can try it right after reading this article.

The process requires you to suspend the sensitive side of your blueprint paper over a pan of glass cleaner. The person who originally came up with this idea used a styrofoam lid as his pan, and a cake cooling rack to put his paper on so that the glass cleaner fumes will still go straight into the blueprint paper.

True, your pictures aren't exactly going to be in full-color, but you do get them in this really funky monotone purple. Very vintage!

These days, thanks to Photoshop, any guy can photoshop his head on Collin Farrell's body and pass it as genuine. But trick photography isn't a new art form. The article "How To Make Incredible Pictures" was printed back in September 1955, before the time of Photoshop and Farrell. But what the people lack in technology then, they made up with creativity.

Making the photo of a boy holding up the oversized fish or the woman smelling a rose bigger than Gary Bonds took more than a few clicks of a mouse. In a nutshell, the finished product are composite photos. The boy and the woman were photographed pretending to hold the whale, er, fish or smelling the giant flower, respectively. The fish and the rose were added later manually (you do remember what "manually" means, right?) by cropping pics of fish and rose and putting them in place on the previous photographs. A third picture was taken to create the amazing photographs.

Crude and amateurish by today's standards. But less pathetic than guys with fake Collin Farrell bods.

One of the most challenging aspects in photography is capturing motion: may it be a top spinning in frenzy, or a ballerina doing  an Arabesque, clicking away at the exact time with your subject positioned the very way you want is such a daunting task.

Now, you might want to capture motion in varying degrees, like freezing a car about to crash at stand-still, or a baseball player going for a run with the background all blurry. PictureCorrect.com offers some surefire techniques you can use to come up with awesome results.

• Freezing the Motion - remember the "car about to crash" example mentioned earlier? No? Well what if you want to capture an eagle about to swoop a snake on film? Of course, you'd want the image perfectly clear, no blurry parts whatsoever. To get that, just set your shutter speed to 1/300th of a second. To freeze an object that's moving really fast, just set your shutter speed at 1/1000th of a second or faster.
  

•  Motion Blur of the Whole Scene - If you want to blur EVERYTHING (the foreground, the background, the works), you should opt for slower shutter speed, like 1/100th of a second.

• Motion Blur of the Background With a Clear Subject - many photographers regard this as a very hard technique. Take note, hard, but not impossible. Set your camera to a slower shutter speed, and move the camera at the same rate as the moving object. As said earlier, it's rather tricky and might require loads of film (if you're into manual cameras), patience and well, practice BUT it can be done.

• Motion Blur of the Subject - If you want your subject all blurry, but your background really clear, just set your camera at a very long shutter speed. Oh, and a tripod is needed here too. What you do is set your camera on your tripod, set the self-timer (it's around ten seconds, approximately). According to PictureCorrect, "By setting the self-timer the camera automatically takes the photo after somewhere around 10 seconds so you don't have to hold it."

Having just come from watching films at an independent film festival, I got the urge to write about this project. A camera dolly is a specialized piece of film equipment that looks like a little car. The camera is mounted to the dolly and the camera operator and camera assistant usually ride on it to operate the camera. The dolly is operated by a dolly grip who is a dedicated technician trained in its use.

If you want professional-looking equipment on the cheap, then just follow this step-by-step instruction on the pdf file up for download. Who knows this may be your first step to becoming the greatest filmmaker of all time.

Download: [How to Make a Camera Dolly]

One may see Kurtis Kronk as a creative person, but he himself admits that he is not one. But it does not take an artist to be a great photographer, right? And Kronk's work-related start with the camera has led to a lasting relationship.

Kronk painted his first date with photography: a challenging quest for setting up "a very cheap studio" while trying to decipher manual camera settings. From then on, he never left manual photography. Many may ask why Kronk let himself be stuck with modifying camera settings manually when the camera has an automatic mode that takes pictures 'just fine'. Kronk provides a nice answer, "It is certainly possible to get a nice photo just snapping away in automatic mode, but more often than not what you’ll end up with is a snapshot rather than an expressive photograph."

Indeed, the images that a camera's automatic settings may capture are not always as dramatic or as expressive as the ones captured by settings that you yourself set. With that said, Kronk decided to release a manual that will provide beginners (or automatic settings veterans) a good starting point on embarking on manual photography.

The manual that Kronk has released is just an introduction to manual settings and focuses on Shutter Speed, Aperture, and ISO sensitivity. More tips on manual settings may come our way in the following days. But for now, read the manual (by clicking on the link below) and who knows, with the info Kronk has provided you may already start churning out great photos. Snap away!