So I wanted to create a photo gallery website. After trying a few other photo gallery softwares, ZenPhoto seemed to be the most beautiful, simple and robust of them all. After the site is up and running, I went on to select a theme for the site. The one I like most is from Stopdesign, and it showed the galleries, albums and photos beautifully. So far so good, I thought, and I wanted to browse the site from my iPhone.

Well, Safari browser, being Safari, rendered the pages quite well. However, two problems remained.

1. It did not look as good on the small iPhone screen.
2. I had a few flash videos; and of course, they did not play on iPhone

Looking for a theme customized for iPhone, I found the ZenPhoto iPhone theme. After installation though, the theme refused to work, since the theme was for a previous version of ZenPhoto, and some of the APIs had changed since this theme was released.

Back to the drawing board, I did a few modifications on the theme to make it compatible to the current version of ZenPhoto, and tried to contact the original creator of the theme. I never got any reply. However, a number of ZenPhoto users saw my comment and contacted me for the updated theme since they were facing the same problems as I did. I was happy to share the updated theme. But there were a few other changes I did that was not part of the theme, and therefore I could not share those with the theme files. So I thought to write a post where I speak about about the changes, and also where I can share the theme so that everybody can get a chance to use this nice iPhone theme. Read on for the details. more…

In the last two parts we have discussed about composition and exposure, the two things that are to be kept in mind before and while taking a picture. Now we are going to get into post processing – the step that comes after the picture is taken. Unlike the previous steps, this is not an absolute necessity; but post processing can transform a good picture into a stunning one. This is what can make a picture stand out, and, more often than not, most published pictures are post processed to some extent. more…

(Sorry for the delay in posting the second part in this series. Here’s what I had been doing: http://ubercyber.net/touchTrack.)

We have discussed a little bit about “composition” in photography in the previous article. I tried to keep the discussion absolutely non technical. But now since we are going to get into exposure, a little bit of technical details have to come in.

Before we start talking about exposure, let me discourse about the focal length of a lens. This will be required while describing aperture. The focal length of a lens is, of course, the distance between the inner lens and the film (or sensor for digital cameras) when the lens focuses on a subject at infinity. The higher the focal length goes, the more magnified the image appears when captured by the camera. more…

What makes a good photograph?

Difficult question. To tell you the truth, it is probably impossible to answer, and a truly great photograph can just communicate with the viewer. Great photographers often do not follow any rules. But for beginners in photography (myself included) it is a good idea to understand some basic grammar of the language of photography.

In my admittedly short encounter with the medium, I have come up with some basics of photography that, I believe, if followed could make the fundamentals of decent photography. I call it the Holy Trinity of Trinities in photography.

The Holy Trinity of Trinities

1. Composition
   • Foreground
   • Subject
   • Background
2. Exposure
   • Film Speed or ISO
   • Aperture
   • Shutter Speed
3. Post Processing
   • Cropping
   • Color Correction
   • Special Effects more…