Cameras Through the Ages

Beginnings

The earliest predecessor of the modern camera was called a "camera obscura", a name which meant "dark chamber" in Latin. It worked on the principle that when light enters a dark box through a tiny hole, an inverted replica of the scene outside is projected on the far wall. The concept of the device dates back as far as 300 B.C, and references to such devices have even been found in the writings of Aristotle. During the 16th and 17th centuries the camera obscura was used largely by artists to improve the accuracy of their portraits. The big question in later centuries was how to make permanent images.

The earliest attempts

In the early 1800's a physicist named Joseph Niepce began trying to find a way to create a permanent image. Later, in the mid 1820's, he stumbled upon a light sensitive substance called bitumen. Excited about his new find, he immediately placed a bitumen coated copper plate inside his camera obscura, and then positioned the device before a window overlooking his estate. After exposing the plate to the light for eight hours, a proud Niepce was rewarded with an extremely blurry image of the trees outside - the world's first photograph.

In 1829, Niepce entered a partnership with an eccentric venture capitalist named Louis Daguerre. Together, they worked to improve the original method of image rendering used by Niepce. However, sadly, before they made very much progress, Niepce passed away. It was left up to Daguerre to continue the work that they started. After a long search for a more appropriate substance for the plate coating, he found, much to his delight, that silver iodine coated plates created a better quality photo than did bitumen. He observed that treating the plate with mercury fumes reduced exposure time dramatically. The mercury caused the amalgamation of the silver producing a bright white coating on all the white areas of the scene. If the plate was then washed with a solution of salt and water, the resulting image was of stunning quality and would not darken with age.

So, on January 7, 1839, Daguerre announced the invention of his photographic device, which he called a daguerreotype, to the public. The daguerreotype was an instant hit. People were frenzied by the high quality of the images produced, and there wasn't a wealthy man in the town who didn't purchase a daguerreotype for the pleasure of photographing his family.

Although the picture quality of a daguerreotype was stunning, and exposure time was only a few minutes, there were several drawbacks to this type of photography. Firstly, the method of developing a photo was extremely toxic and hazardous to the developer, since mercury is poisonous to the human body. Secondly, pictures could not be reproduced. Also, since they were very delicate, daguerreotypes had to be kept in glass cases which made them difficult to view from certain angles. Additionally, the equipment necessary to take a photo was bulky and expensive.

The Kodak

As a young man going on vacation in 1874, George Eastman was convinced by a friend to purchase a daguerreotype to photograph his trip. When Eastman bought the equipment, he found it ridiculously expensive, complicated, and bulky; altogether impossible to carry about easily on his trip. That set him to wondering why cheap, lightweight cameras could not be made easily available to the wider public.

His first task was to replace the silver iodine coated plates. After experimenting with dozens of methods in his kitchen, Eastman found that a thin layer of light sensitive celluloid fastened to a paper backing produced the desired effect. Next, he developed a simple black box-type camera which was small enough to be held. To take a photo, you simply pressed a button which released the shutter and exposed that frame of the film to light. To take another you turned a key to advance the spool of film to the next frame and the camera was ready for use again. After 14 years of research and experiments, George Eastman had realized his dream of creating a small, simple, easy-to-operate camera which could be afforded by the middle class. His cameras, which he called the Kodaks, went on sale in July 1888.

The Kodak met enormous public approval and Eastman became very rich. At the time, to have a film developed, you had to send the entire camera to the Kodak factory in New York. There the film was developed, the camera reloaded with fresh film, and the prints and camera were mailed back to you. This of course meant that meanwhile you were without your camera. Later, professional photographers in major cities were able to develop the film, reducing the time required to reload cameras.

Today

Today, cameras are everywhere. Disposable film cameras, which were invented in 1986, remain very popular with casual photographers today. Modern, point-and-shoot digital cameras are a common device in many homes. Teens shoot pictures of their friends with cell phone cameras. Professional photographers use high resolution SLR cameras to take stunning photos. We can thank the dedication and experimentation of the early inventors mentioned above for the possibility of photography, which is such a common part of our lives today.

Requirements to Become a College Professor

People who enter the education field as a primary or secondary public school teacher must first go through the hoops and develop a certain competency level in education. They pass several education classes, do practice teaching, and pass at least one standardized teaching examination. However, the only requirement to become a college professor is to obtain a post-graduate degree. This does not necessarily even have to be a doctoral-level degree. Many professors have a masters degree in their field.

Many schools now certify their professors to teach courses due to accreditation requirements. The minimum requirement to teach a course is a masters degree and 18 related graduate credit hours. It is interesting that the masters degree can be in a different field as long as there are a minimum of 18 related graduate credit hours.

The level of education required for a professor varies on the type of college. Most major universities and four-year institutions require or at least prefer terminal degrees for their full-time faculty. They may hire well-established professionals who hold a masters degree as adjunct professors but this is usually predicated on need. However, most community colleges and for-profit colleges and universities are willing to hire masters-level professors for full-time positions.

Although an advanced degree is the only requirement to become a college professor, there are other skills and considerations that will dictate your ability to be successful. Organizational skills are important because a lecture must be organized and structured so that there is an understandable flow of information from the mentor to the class. Also, a current knowledge in your subject is imperative.

It is important to have, or be able to develop, good public speaking skills. Since lectures are the primary way to transfer your knowledge to a class of students, you must be effective with this skill. An effective speaker not only has a great depth and breadth of knowledge of the course material, they must also be passionate about the subject. This excitement is transmitted to the class who become stimulated. This higher level of interest results in a greater mastery of the subject material. Accents are fine as long the class can understand what you are saying. If they cannot understand the professor students become disgruntled and demoralized. The learning process is compromised.

Unfortunately, there are many problems that can stop you from being successful starting out as a professor and barriers that can prevent you from making a steady significant income. Fortunately, there is help for those who are serious about breaking-in and earning big money as a part-time professor teaching both online and onground.

Do You Need a New Website Or a Redesign?

If you have an existing website that looks a little past its best, maybe it is a few years old or it was one you built yourself to learn the techniques involved, you could be thinking about getting a redesign of the site. Before you do you should consider an alternative, it may be better to start again and have a new site built by a professional web design company.

The reason most people consider the redesign option is cost, they assume it will cost more to build a site from the bottom up but this is not always the case, it can cost less to start again.

Trying to see what the old designer did to make a page display the way it does and then working around that is often more time consuming than just creating a new page, a few years ago tables were used to line things up on a page but they were cumbersome and you often had tables nested within each other and this made the HTML look cluttered.

Most new sites now do not use tables instead they opt for CSS or Cascading Style Sheets that line up the text and images on a page, the code behind the page is much cleaner and the pages tend to load much faster, this has the added benefit of being good for the search engines as they can navigate through the page in a more logical fashion.

A good web site designer can use CSS to reproduce or update a website very quickly and as it offers more flexibility than tables you may find that a new look for your website is available at a lower cost than a redesign of the old one.

High Volume Photography - How to Make Real Money in the Photography Industry

If you are trying to hunt down individual wedding customers when you are starting out you will starve. Building a good wedding business takes years if not decades. Even then you are still dependent on the next wedding. If you are really good, word of mouth will keep the business coming, but it is a much harder way to earn a living, especially starting out. If you really love photographing weddings that is great, but if you want to earn a living to support you while you build that business then I suggest high volume photography.

What is High Volume Photography?

High volume photography (referred to from here on as HVP) is simply photographing a high volume of customers at a single location or venue. Think about it, a really good wedding photographer might be able to get $3000 for a wedding, but not starting out. With HVP, you book one account and get 100 customers to come to you and spend $30 each. Both scenarios are worth $3000, but would you rather try and hunt down individual wedding customers and convince them to spend a $3000 with you or would you rather have multiple customers show up at your picture day and spend $30. To me the answer is easy. The most recognizable form of HVP is something everyone has experience with, school portraits. I do not recommend starting out in HVP as a school photographer. School photography is a VERY hard business to break into and it is not a good industry in which to cut your teeth.

Another form of HVP is youth sports photography. I started out as a youth sports photographer. Youth sports photographers can earn a really good living while still relatively new in the industry. Also, there are multiple different options to purchase a franchise or license the brand of a more experienced youth sports photographer such as Legends or MVP Studios. This also comes with their experience and knowledge on how to succeed when you are starting out. They have already made most of the mistakes for you, so learn from someone else. You wouldn't believe the amount of detail necessary to successfully run a single youth sports picture day, much less 10 in one day. It is well worth the money to get the knowledge and brand of a proven youth sports photographer.

The other main form of HVP is event photography. Event photographers also have the benefit of the paying customers coming to you. There are tons of different types of event photographers ranging from corporate event photographers, prom photographers or even Marine Corps Ball photographers. The common denominator being that you show up at a venue and the customers come to you. Now that is my kind of business!

In my next article we will discuss the pros and cons of outdoor and indoor picture days.

Printers Vs Scanners

Printer is an output device that prints text or image on to a physical medium like paper whereas scanner is an input device that scans object so that the image will be displayed and used by the computer. In printing, data is moved from computer to printer. But, in scanning data is transferred from scanner to computer in digital form.

A printer is a peripheral device which is tagged on to a computer locally by means of printer cable or USB cable.But, there are also network printers having its own built-in network interface and thus serving for any computer in the network.Some printers include many functions other than printing like copying, scanning etc. and are called as multifunction printers or all-in-one printers. After giving print command, printing process takes place and at one full swoop, you can do some other work with your computer, as the jobs will be placed in a buffer and executed in order. This simultaneous processing of functions is named as spooling.

Printers are generally classified into two types namely impact and non-impact printers. In impact printers, there will be a contact between the paper and the printing mechanism. Dot-matrix printers, character printers, line printers, Daisy-wheel printers, thermal printers etc. come under this category. In dot-matrix, there will be series of pins which strike on the inked ribbon to produce image on the paper. In character printer, there will be series of bars having the characters on them, which then strike on the inked ribbon to generate characters on the paper. Daisy wheel printer makes use of a metal or plastic wheel and it can print characters alone. Calculators, fax machines include thermal printers. Line printers are always sooner. These impact printers are toppled by the spanking non-impact printers, wherein there won't be any direct contact between the paper and the mechanism. Inkjet and laser printers of this type revolutionized color printing. In inkjet, the head will have tiny nozzles which spurt out ink droplets to produce image on the paper.

Scanners are hardware appliances which analyze the text or image, then capture and process them so that the data converted into digital form will be procured and displayed by the computer. Scanner can convert different levels of analog voltage into digital form. Scanners incorporate optical character recognition software that captures text or image. CCD array, an array of tiny light sensitive diodes, is the focal component of scanner. These diodes or photosites amend photons into electrical charges. Each photosite is light-sensitive and turn out charges accordingly. Various filters, lenses are present in scanners. Scanner can be attached to a printer and you can make copies of the object you scanned. If it is attached to your pc via USB cable, you can have scanned images on your pc. Flatbed scanner is the simple and rife one. In sheet-fed scanner, the object to be scanned is moved, since the scan head is hard and fast. Handheld scanners need the user to move them to capture images. Drum scanners use photomultiplier tube technology to ensnare astonishingly large images and are used in publishing industries.

Mono-chrome printers produce images in one color and by and large it is black. Color printer produces colored images. Scanners normally open the door to RGB data from the array. The data will be processed and sent to computer. Banking on the scanning array characteristics, the color depth varies. The resolution is measured in pixels per inch.

Printers are omnipresent these days. They are used in offices, schools, colleges, hospitals, companies, shops etc. They are outstripped so much that it can be directly attached to digital cameras etc. 3D Scanners are used in industrial design, gaming, test and measurement, orthodontics etc. Planetary scanners are used to scan books, large documents etc. Scanners are also used in photography, bio-medical research etc.

How to Organize a Stellar Film Festival

The Campus MovieFest is the largest student film festival in the world. More than 30 colleges and universities play host to this event and the participants are provided with free equipment for a week to create a five-minute short film. The equipment includes an Apple computer, Final Cut Pro software and a video camera. However, every student film festival is not established for the same purpose.

Organizing a Student Film Festival: The Good News

If you are organizing a student film festival, the good news is that its success is judged according to the extent to which it fulfills its goals. Thus, the planning of the event starts with you and your idea. You need a concrete plan for engaging guest speakers, building public relations, researching, programming and preparing films.

Organizing a Student Film Festival: Vital Tips

Here are some tips that can help you in the process of organizing your film festival.

1. Secure the venue at least six months in advance. This is because the PR work that would be conducted and invitations that would go out should specify the venue for your film fest to be deemed credible.

2. Focus on the idea behind your event when planning. Depending upon the genre or the film maker or the issue that you want to pursue in your event, various parameters will change radically.

3. Budgeting is one of the most important factors that govern the working of your festival. Make specific monetary allocations for the various elements that you plan to spend your funds on. While soliciting sponsors it is helpful to keep in mind that some of the essentials, such as food, stationary, poster printing and beverages, can be arranged as gifts from a corporate.

4. Arrange for at least one extra copy of the films to be screened, should there be any physical damage to the prints.

5. Keep a tab on the timing of your event and ensure that it does not clash with other events that could impact the attendance of the audience you are expecting.

6. Make proper arrangements for receiving the VIPs you invite. Showcase the involvement of the people to attract the right kind of audience as well as sponsorship.

7. Build a reliable team of volunteers and organize them in a way that your group leads can communicate and keep in touch throughout the event.

Rule of Thirds Composition in Photography

There are lots of rules to follow in taking stunning photographs. One of them is the Rule of Thirds. As one begins his journey into digital photography, following such rules will make some impact into your photographs. It is taught that in general, when the subject is positioned using the rule of thirds, it will be much more pleasant to the viewer of the image.

It is easy to visualize this rules of thirds. Lets say for example you have a rectangular piece of paper, and you draw two vertical and horizontal lines with equal spaces in between the lines. The points where the line intersects is the point where you want the subject in your photograph be placed. Visualize this lines in your viewfinder, place your subject in either of the four points, and there you have it. You have just followed this rule.

Let us say we are shooting landscapes. If the sea looks awesomely beautiful, make that sea occupy 2/3 of your image, place that horizon on the first horizontal line. Likewise, if you think the clouds are most stunning, bring that horizon to the bottom line. And if for example you find a boat in the shore line, and you think that is worth taking, position that boat in either of the two bottom intersecting points. For people image or portraits, always try to focus the eyes, and bring that eyes to either one of the two upper intersections.

Beginning your journey into digital photography as a beginner is fun and exiting. Following rules are essential, specially the rule of thirds. But it is always not compulsory. Snap a few shots if you like, if you think breaking the rules will be better than following it, go ahead and do so. After all your work will show your artistic side.