Follow these 10 steps to enhance your photography skills:

1. Consider the weather. Sunlight can create unwanted shadows on the face, so position yourself such that the light is flattering to your subject. When it’s overcast, your pictures can come out dull and gloomy. In these cases, try to exclude the sky in your shot or take black-and-white photos.
2. Get active. We’re so used to the typical photo being taken at the average height of man. Shots from above or below can create more interest. Show your creativity by kneeling down for a photo at your child or pet’s height, catching a different perspective of a tall building from below or positioning yourself higher than your subject.
3. Go for the close-up. “A picture is worth a thousand words,” right? Often, the detail of a close-up shot can tell more of the story and have much more impact than an overall scene because the subject is often more interesting than the background. Switch to your camera’s macro mode to maximize detail and focus in close-up photos.
4. Try the rule of thirds. You can potentially create more interest in your photo by shifting your subject off to the side instead of centering it, which can be too predictable. To implement the rule of thirds, imagine a tic-tac-toe board over your potential photo (your camera might even have a feature to view the grid). Now, position the most important element off-center at one of the four intersection points.
5. Simplify the background. A busy background can be distracting and take away from the subject of your photo. Whenever possible, bring emphasis to your subject by directing him or her to a plain background. Alternatively, find a subject that’s already framed by a simpler background.
6. Show depth. It’s possible to help the human eye perceive depth and distance in your photo. Just make sure there are objects in the foreground, middle ground and background of the photo. The natural differences in sizes of the objects within the photo will highlight the magnitude of your photographed scene.
7. Know your limits. For most point-and-shoot cameras, the flash only reaches approximately ten feet away. Flip through your manual to learn the exact distance for your camera. This will help you gauge the furthest subjects can be from your camera in dark settings. Subjects too far away from the flash’s range will otherwise appear too dark.
8. Experiment with different settings. Delve into your camera’s menu and test out all the different functions in manual mode. Even with the cheapest point-and-shoot camera, you can often control the color, film speed and exposure. You don’t have to know what all the settings mean because you’ll see the effects yourself.
9. Use flash outdoors. Flash is typically reserved for dark environments, but you should also manually include flash outdoors when it’s really sunny out. Direct sunlight, especially above or behind the subject, can create unattractive shadows on the face that can be softened by your camera’s flash.
10. Enjoy the learning process. Always have your camera ready and recognize the beauty that’s always around you. Don’t be afraid to take tons of imperfect photos, especially when your digital camera allows you to easily delete photos that didn’t turn out the way you wanted them to. Like in any craft, photography skills develop with time, patience and practice.

What other tips do you have for beginner photographers? Please share your experience below…

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As you’d expect, most of the ‘content’ is photos and videos, and most of it is ‘discovered’ by Pinterest Members on the internet and used without the owners express permission.

As you’d expect, a lot of photographers aren’t happy about it. Photographers provide the content, Pinterest users do the publishing, and Pinterest generates some nice advertising income.

The good news is there’s a code that can be added to websites to prevent content being ‘pinned’. We’ve added it to our websites, but if you have your own site and you’d like to prevent this kind of unauthorised use, you should add the following meta tag to the head section of your pages .

<meta name=”pinterest” content=”nopin” />

You can also check to see if any of your images have been ‘pinned’ with the following tool:

http://pinterest.com/source/globaleyeimages.com/

… and replacing globaleyeimages.com with your own domain.

If you find any of your images being used without your permission and you’d like them removed, just fill out the Copyright Complaint Form on Pinterest:

http://pinterest.com/about/copyright/dmca/

Or click on the image, look for the Report Pin link to the right, and then the ‘Is This Your Intellectual Property’ link.

The flip side to all this is, with Pinterest being the fastest growing social network, and already in #3 position (after Facebook and Twitter) perhaps it’s worth looking at how photographers might put it to work?

The big question/problem is how to track whether any interest generated is in fact ‘commercial’, but these days when almost-everyone is a publisher, it follows that almost anyone could be a buyer … so possibly, even a relatively small level of interest on such a massive platform could generate useful leads?

Any thoughts?

The May issue of  New Internationalist has the image of a man’s face superimposed on his hands for a cover of their issue on mental health. It was one of the images/techniques I was particulary impressed with, and a great example of how this material could be used. You can check out the cover shot here -

http://www.newint.org/issues/2012/05/01/

And the Trick Photography and Special Effects package here -

http://wtbp.biz/photos/

I guess it all makes sense – the ‘newer’ buyers do tend to look for images they can drop straight into layouts, so maybe a few digitally enhanced variations of an image could increase it’s sales potential? What do you think?

Here’s a short list of some of my favourites that should be useful for most photographers. They are all Firefox Add-Ons though, so if you currently use a different browser you’ll either look for an equivalent, or make the switch!

TinEye Reverse Image Search

This plugin adds a right-click menu item that allows you to search for an image to find out how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution version. When you submit an image to be searched, TinEye creates a unique and compact digital signature or ‘fingerprint’ for it, then compares this fingerprint to every other image in our index to retrieve matches.

TinEye does not typically find similar images; it finds exact matches including those that have been cropped, edited or resized. For photographers, this allows you to check your own photos and find unauthorized uses. It’s surprisingly accurate and we’ve used it to find a number of images for our photographers.

Who stole my pictures?

I found this one after I started on this article, so I haven’t tested it yet, but it appears to take it a bit further and looks for copies of your images using several image search services : Yandex.ru, Tineye.com, Google.com, Baidu.com and Cydral.com

Lazarus: Form Recovery

Never lose anything you type into a web form again! Lazarus securely auto-saves all forms as you type, so after a crash, server timeout, or whatever, you can go back to the form, right click, “recover form”, and breathe a sigh of relief. This is a major bonus when you’re making photo submissions, articles & blog posts and more.

QuickWiki

Quick lookup in Wiktionary and Wikipedia, without the need to open a new tab. Very handy when you’re writing image captions and want to check spellings etc – just right-click a word while shift / ctrl / alt is pressed.

TinyURL Generator

An extension to silently generate a TinyURL for your current page at the click of a button. Very handy if you’re sending out long & complicated links to Clients – less chance of it breaking in email-transit!

Amazon S3 Organizer(S3Fox)

Amazon S3 storage is incredibly cheap and super reliable for backups or transferring image files to buyers and a lot of photographers are using it now. This add-on helps you organize/manage/store your files on Amazon S3 from within your browser without logging in through Amazon every time.

Abduction! – Webpage Screenshots Screen Capture

Adds a right click option to take screen shots of an entire web page or just part of a web page to save as an image. This is often the easiest way to troubleshoot websites you use – take a capture and send it to support – and it’s great if you want to add screenshots to your print portfolio or your websites. Lots of possibilities…

ImageTweak: zoom/rotate images and videos!

A no-clutter image viewer for Firefox that allows you to zoom, rotate and display images/videos against a custom background. I use this regularly in any web design work… to decide the result I want before I open Photoshop – but ImageTweak is a must-have for anyone publishing photos online.

Xmarks Sync

This is probably the add-on I’ve been using the longest, and the one I couldn’t live without. It keeps your bookmarks and open tabs backed up and synchronized across multiple computers and browsers.

If I find a site I want to revisit on one computer, it’s immediately available on any other computer I use. If you work on multiple machines – work, home, mobile, tablet, iphone – this is priceless!

On those rare occasions I try to beat my bookmarks into some sort of order, they get sorted simultaneously on all my computers.

And a couple of times now when I’ve had the dreaded blue screen to computer death, I’ve had full access to all my bookmarks on the new machine within minutes.

Email This!

Email This! will send your recipient the link, title, & highlighted text of the page you are viewing using GMail, Google Apps GMail, Yahoo, and Stand-Alone Mail Clients like Outlook Express, Thunderbird, & More! I mostly use this as a quick and easy way to send myself reminders, but it’s also handy for sharing photos and lightboxes with your prospects!

AddThis

AddThis for Firefox is the best add-on to make sharing and bookmarking simple. Have all your favorite web 2.0 social networking, bookmarking, blogging, and e-mail services at your fingertips. Share any page, anytime, with anyone. This is something every photographer should be doing constantly – just remember to ‘share’ other people’s content as well as your own!

Rainbow Color Tools

This is probably more for people doing web development, but could be useful if you’re doing any kind of design work. It’s a simple color picker and eyedropper, plus it lets you save colors and trying out colors combos with drag and drop.

Read It Later

Save pages to read later with just one click. When you have time, access your reading list from any computer or phone, even without an internet connection! I installed this one a week before a short trip earlier this year, planning to do some reading while waiting at airports etc – and now I use it constantly!

Best part is, when I go back to the saved webpages, I find I read the important pages more carefully and there’s a lot of stuff I previously would have spent time reading that I now just delete! I guess it depends how much time you spend on line, but for me this a majopr boost to productivity!

Tile Tabs

This is handy if you find yourself publishing the same content on multiple websites or social media accounts and you want to simplify the process. This add-on displays browser tabs as tiles, so you can see multiple open windows at once – and cut and paste from one to the other without going back and forth between tabs.

Google Shortcuts – All Google Services at a glance

This last one is particularly useful if you use a variety of Google services regularly. Ifg you only use Gmail it’s probably not worth it, but if you’re constantly logging into Calendar, Analytics, Adsense, YouTube, Blogger etc etc, this is a sanity-saver. Definitely not for everyone but those who can benefit will know!

OK, that’s my photographer’s list. There are others I use for web design and development projects, and still more that I use for all the SEO and website promotion work we do here, so I guess the main takeaway is, ‘go looking and see what you find’ –

There’s countless developers out there all working on their own add-ons, so the list is changing constantly, and many of the new add-ons you’ll find are improvements on exiting add-ons that have already proved popular.

This lot are all free, although some have commercial upgrades available. None of the functionality described here requires any upgrades though!

My final suggestion is to only install one at a time.Install it, activate and test if for a day or so before you add the next. I’ve never had any troubles with any of these but there have been others that didn’t play so nice, so please take it slow. Any trouble just disable the last installed add-on and you should be right.

Have I missed any?

If there’s a Firefox Add-on you find particularly useful, please add a comment below. You won’t be able to add a link, so make sure you mention it’s correct name.