Category: Tutorials

When I started an internship at a small nonprofit in the National Press Building, I thought I was on my way up to journalist heaven. I was ready to learn. I was ready to give it my all. But I wasn’t ready to work with Debbie Downer.

Debbie Downer loved to gripe. She could suck all the air out of the room. The worst was when I had to ride the elevator with her. There was no escape. I had to stand there and listen to her go on and on.

She’d say things like:

“This is the way the rest of your life will be. You’ll go to a pointless, soul-sucking job, and at the end of the day, what will you have to show for it? Nothing.”

Hmmm. Not exactly what a young ambitious intern wants to hear.

Debbie Downer also liked to ridicule me. Her favorite phrase was:

“Even a homeless person could do your job.”

Have you ever worked with a Debbie Downer? The only pleasure they get out of their jobs is making other people feel bad. They hate what they do all day long. And they think you must be insanely stupid for not hating work as much as they do.

It may not always be this extreme, but with the economy in low gear, many employees are stuck in jobs despite needing a change of scenery. Working with someone who loathes their job is not such an uncommon occurrence. It can be frustrating to be deflated over and over by someone else’s negative attitude. So how can you deal with a Debbie Downer? Here’s a little advice, straight from the trenches.

Manage Your Expectations

Dealing with Debbie Downer can feel a lot like handling a mean older brother or sister. On some level, they may actually enjoy bringing you down and undermining you. When you’re dealing with someone like that, there probably aren’t any magic words you can say to change their behavior. You can’t just flip a switch and get them to stop.

Try a few different methods to deal with their behavior, and see if anything helps. For example, you could try listening. You could try avoiding them altogether. In my own case, I wish I had defended myself more often. When Debbie Downer said disparaging things about me, I tended to ignore it. It was so embarrassing; I just kind of stuck my head in the sand and hoped the storm would pass by. This tactic allowed her behavior to continue. She thought she could walk all over me, and she was right.

The most important thing is to try not to take it personally. Remember, their behavior isn’t a reflection of you. Debbie Downers are unhappy for a lot of different reasons. It isn’t your responsibility to fix their lives or change their attitudes. All you have to do is (cue: Tim Gunn) “make it work!”

Don’t Jump to Conclusions

You never know…Debbie Downers may change over time. People go through ups and downs, and their behavior and thought patterns won’t always stay the same. Although Debbie Downers may not transform overnight like Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol or as part of a New Year’s resolution, they still have hope. Allow a little room for the unexpected.

Keep in mind that the most disgruntled employees are often the ones who care the most. They probably started out just like you. They were once passionate, creative and hardworking, but somewhere along the way, they came up against some walls. Their frustration just kept brewing and growing until they could no longer manage it appropriately.

Try to avoid judging them as a person or making too many assumptions about how they will behave in the future. Debbie Downers may surprise you. They probably have a lot of wisdom to share. You can still learn from them (even though it may not always be such a fun process).

Find Some Allies

It can be totally draining to deal with someone else’s negativity. To maintain your own sanity, it is essential to find some allies. Looking forward to seeing a friend’s smiling face can keep you going strong even when work is a pain.

Confiding in a trusted friend or loved one can help you cope, but make sure you don’t spend all your free time complaining about the guy who is always complaining. Don’t let work issues bleed into the rest of your life. Make the most of your free time. Intentionally nourish yourself with things that bring you joy. By keeping your own personal life positive, you’ll be less affected by frustrations at the office.

After all, there’s nothing like a Debbie Downer to remind you to let go of the need to please everyone all the time. Don’t base your self-esteem entirely on your career. You are more than an employee or an entrepreneur. So keep your confidence up and look at it as a learning opportunity.

How you surf the web can directly impact how productive you are at work – or in general.  We talked about Safari’s latest iteration recently, but there are plenty of options out there to choose from.

An example of this would be the latest release of Flock, which went into beta testing this past Tuesday.  One of the great aspects of Flock is that you can integrate your social networking profiles from Facebook and Twitter into your browser rather than go to each website or external application.  It now becomes your “one stop shop” to make status updates or check out your latest “tweets” – among other nifty little features.  Its newest version (now built on the open-source Chromium code than previous versions) is only available for Windows right now, but you can sign up at their beta site to find out when it’s going be ready for Mac users.

While Flock may not be everyone’s cup of tea, everyone does have a browser (or browsers) they prefer to use.  What do you use?  Why?  Let us know in the comments.

Today Seth Godin posted his thoughts on the state of the “traditional office.”

I hold the man in pretty high regard (he was listed as one of my examples of “really productive people”), and even took part in this Monday’s Worldwide Linchpin Meetup Day. While not everyone will agree with his ideas, he puts them out there no matter what.

He raises some really great points, including how one can be more productive if they work from wherever one chooses.

So, do you think the traditional office is dead?  Do you think there’s a place for it in today’s society?

In today’s video quick tip, we’ll have a quick (not sponsored) overview of a Mac database manager for MySQL that I came across yesterday, called Querious. As I mention in the screencast, I particularly like this one, because it just works — without being too complicated or overwhelming in the way that PHPMyAdmin might be for some.

I decided to record this video, because I noticed that there are many After Effects artists who don’t know how to deal with interlaced video to be delivered to television. Many of us treat the interlaced feature of the footage as something that has to be removed at once. Don’t de-interlace everything you get. When you deliver something to TV, you can benefit from interlacing.

In this tutorial I try to explain what interlacing really means, why the television works this way, and how we should deal with the interlaced nature of TV. Did you know that progressive footage may sometimes be rejected by the TV station? Why does your footage look a bit different on a TV set, even if it is progressive LCD or plasma? Why do TV shows look different than movies? Is this only because of the color correction? I try to answer those questions. Simple as that. Don’t expect to see any fancy, exiting techniques. Just knowledge that may help you not to make little mistakes.

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Tutorial

Beef up your Illustrator skills while creating an ominous jar of purple ooze. In this tut you will find handy tips and techniques for illustrating glass, chrome and toxic ooze.

Continue reading “Create an Ominous Jar of Purple Ooze”

Playing the same old chords on every song can get pretty tiring and can leave a music career stale in a heartbeat. If you play G – C – D on every song without trying to even embellish it a little bit with interesting chordal work the audience will probably get bored with your guitar playing or production very quickly.

Using chord inversions is an easy way to spice up your chordal playing, and by familiarizing yourself with the different chord shapes on the fretboard you can pull yourself out of that guitar production hole you’ve dug yourself into.

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Theory of Chord Inversions

Basically a chord inversion is the same chord but with the notes inverted. A typical C major chord has the notes C, E and G – C being the root, E being the major third and the G being the perfect fifth. So when I play a typical open C chord strum, we hear the notes C – E – G in quick succession creating that C major chord.

Now, a chord inversion is basically the same chord but with the order of the notes inverted. So if I would play the notes G, C and E it would still be the same C major chord, but an inversion of it.

Since we only have three notes in this particular chord, we can only have three different voicings, which means only two separate inversions. The first voicing being the normal C major chord, with C – E – G, the second substituting the second note in the bass, creating E, G and C and lastly the one I mentioned before, the G, C and E. See how you just shuffle the first note so that it ends up last in line? That’s an easy way to visualize inversions when you have the notes in front of you.

But let’s apply this to the guitar for some fun chordal harmonies.

I’m going to be taking a very basic chord progression you’ve seen a million times before, namely C – F – Am – G, and add some chord inversions to it in order to create a jangly chord harmony on top. This is something you can use when you’re stuck in a rut in your guitar playing.

Harmonizing isn’t only for Metallica solos, it can also be used to create interesting chord parts.

This is what we’ll be playing over.

Download audio file (chords.mp3)

Ignore the drum beat which I directly copied from Ultrabeat, and don’t judge me too much on the guitar sound. This is a theory based tutorial, and not so much focused on the guitar sounds themselves, which are all presets in Logic Pro 9.

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Step 1: Play Some Chord Melodies

As you can hear from the chord progression, it’s about as boring as it can get. One way to add interest is to add some plucked chords underneath. This first example is me playing really simple chord patterns basically following the crunchy chords from the example before.

Download audio file (lead1.mp3)

I’m plucking the chords you see here below:

Except the first one, these chordal plucks are not inversions of these chords. They are just plucked chords going from first note to third to fifth. The first chord is actually a second inversion of C major, but since I was just following the palm muted chords from the first example I played the inversion instead. We’ll get to the other inversion in just a minute.

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Step 2: Double the Chords?

Now, what we could do is double track the plucked chords and pan them to create depth in the track. We would just play the same thing over again and then pan each of them a little off center, resulting in a chorused and doubled sound.

Download audio file (doubledlead.mp3)

Although this could work if we so wanted, it’s still a bit bland and boring. We would rather want extra melodic and harmonic depth to the track which we would achieve by not only doubling the chords played but by playing inversions of the same chords.

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Step 3: Play Some Inversions

One of David Bowie’s guitarists (I can’t remember who, they’ve been quite a few) once said that the best way to play lead was to know five different shapes of A minor. That way, you can always find a way to play a little lead when you’re switching from one shape to the next.

In order to be able to play inversions you must know a few different shapes of all these chords on the fretboard. If you know your way around a few different shapes of the same chord you can easily find and pluck interesting chordal inversions.

In the next sound example I’ve recorded a new chordal lead line over the plucked chords. Since I know that C major also has a barred shape on the 8^th fret, I can play its normal voicing there, harmonizing the C major inversion in the first example. I know that I can create a first inversion of the F chord too by playing the third, fifth and root on the 5^th to 7^th fret and I’m using a first inversion of the A minor chord on the 10^th fret, ending in the 2^nd inversion on the G chord shape all the way up on the 12^th fret.

Download audio file (leadinversion.mp3)

Notice that by playing the inversion, not only do we create a nice harmonic chord part, but by having the last two chord inversions rise from the 10^th to the 12^th fret we create anticipation. Something we could use if we were going from verse to chorus for example, to create momentum and buildup.

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Step 4: Add Some Depth

I think it’s sounding pretty cool by now, but we can add a little DAW trick into the mix to create an even thicker sound. By using a similar trick to the one I discussed in the Pan Your Reverb quick tip, we can use pan and delay to create an even thicker chordal part.

Send both the original lead part and the chord inversion to a separate bus each. Now insert a delay on both busses and set it to a doubled feel, with delay at about 100ms and very little feedback. I’m using Logic’s tape delay so I decided to add some modulation to the signal for kicks as well.

Now by using pan controls we can pan the delay of the chordal part closer the inversion and vice-versa. I’m panning the original signals hard left and hard right and then panning the delayed signal about halfway on the opposite side of its source sound. See in the screenshot below how everything is panned across the stereo spectrum.

Now we’ve ended up with a wall of guitar sound, filled with thick chordal harmonies for that melodic effect to your guitar playing. Be sure to lower the volume of the busses otherwise the delay might come off too strong.

Download audio file (leaddoubled.mp3)

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Conclusion

By knowing your way around the fretboard it’s easy to create different chord shapes and inversions to get you out of a rut. Many guitarist play inversion only, leaving it up to the bass to supply the song with the actual chord progression. That way it is easier to focus on the melodic aspects of chord playing, and not get stuck strumming the same old chords over and over again.

Making a living as an illustrator is a dream for many young artists – but it takes more than dreaming to impress potential clients. A successful illustrator needs flare, persistence and a strong portfolio.

Over the years I’ve experimented with various mediums and techniques to establish a broad range of styles. In this article I’d like to share my thoughts and experiences with using multiple illustration styles, as opposed to fixating on just one.

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What is Style?

Style refers to visual vocabulary; such as color, shape, line weight and principles of proportion. It can also refer to the tools/techniques used to create the illustration.

This image uses color and Illustrator’s symbol feature in a creative way – it’s also a style that I’m keen to evolve.

If you’re planning on developing a range of styles, it’s important to be true to yourself and not slavishly copy current trends. My best advice would be to gravitate towards the styles of work you feel most comfortable with and build up a strong portfolio that reflects the commissions you want. Illustrators are often requested to follow current trends – that’s inevitable; just remember though, that by following trends, you’ll never set them!

This commission takes inspiration from the cheesy B movie posters of the 50s.

I’ve had numerous commissions where art directors will place an existing illustration into a design or mock up and ask me to produce something similar for the finished artwork. Through my experience this is common working practice, because art directors are busy people who need to relay their ideas quickly. In cases like this it’s best to “air on the side of caution” and inject as much of your own individual flair as possible, what’s more a good art director will welcome your input.

For these web banner illustrations the art director initially emailed me a selection of styles he liked. These samples were then used as an incentive to generate my own unique style.

It’s also worth noting that the most successful illustrators have what’s known as a signature style. This is similar to how a brand or logo works to make their work instantly recognizable. The repeating circular patterns that are abundant in Scott Hansen’s work are a prime example of a strong signature style.

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Trends Change

Style, like fashion and music are in a constant state of flux; what’s hot in the visual marketplace today maybe considered untrendy tomorrow. Saying that, styles have the habit of re-emerging, albeit being slightly re-invented. Illustration is also a diverse field, so for me it made sense to create a wide variety of styles that could allow for change.

This illustration borrows imagery from “The Son of Man,” by the surrealist painter René Magritte.

I began my career as a traditional designer and admit to being a complete technophobe when the desktop revolution arrived in the mid 80s. I realized I had to embrace this new technology, or find another job. The early Macs were unable to handle large image files. Back then, Photoshop was solely used to scan lores sprinters or position guides and the printer stripped in hires scans at repro stage.

These images recapture some of my traditional hand painted illustration techniques.

Advances in technology now offer us new and exciting methods of producing imagery. The 90s was saturated with what I call “program-led” style – illustrators were producing artwork with a sterile, computer-generated look. What you need to remember is that 100% digital work is very reliant on technique and therefore fairly easy to mimic, that’s probably why in recent years we’ve witnessed a step back, towards a more hand-crafted aesthetic.

This three-color tshirt illustration mixes digital halftone effects with hand-drawn elements.

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Other Applications

Although Photoshop is my primary illustration tool. I also love the way Illustrator and Photoshop work in tandem; for example, pasting Smart Objects from Illustrator into Photoshop and exporting Photoshop paths to Illustrator.

I used a custom perspective grid and the Free Transform Tool to create this map, rather than relying on Illustrator’s built-in 3D effects – which can sometimes affect linework quality.

It also seemed a natural progression for me to explore 3D applications. I currently use Poser, Daz Studio, Bryce and Cinema 4D. I wouldn’t claim to be an expert in the 3D arena, so I make up for any shortcomings with some Photoshop magic!

This illustration was inspired by the 80s airbrush artist Hajime Sorayama.

There are certain styles that I would never attempt, such as a hyper-realistic cut away drawing of a car for example. This is quite a specialized field and best left to the experienced professionals. I can remember being in awe at some of the technical drawing student’s airbrush work back in my collage days.

This product design is probably the closest thing I’ve done to technical illustration.

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Promote Yourself

I get a steady flow of freelance work from regular clients, so I guess having a varied range of styles has paid off for me. As well as having a strong web presence, I’ve found that sending out regular mailshots also generates new business.

I mail samples that showcase some of my best work to a database of existing and potential clients (this can be costly, but it does pay off when you consider the amount of new business generated), I then make follow up phone calls to check it’s arrived OK and also get feedback. I can remember being totally amazed when one art director thought I was an illustration agency representing different illustrators!

Here’s my “What’s Your Brief” mailer. Unfolded, it measures 32”, so hopefully it will stick in peoples mind and they’ll keep it to hand.

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Final Thoughts

We’re all different, so I’m not saying working in numerous styles is right for everyone, although I firmly believe diversity shows adaptability and dexterity. In fact, the only downside to having a varied portfolio is that some art directors may consider you a “jack of all trades and a master of none” if your work is not polished to a high enough level.

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The Warp feature in Photoshop can be a powerful tool if you know how to use it correctly. In today’s tutorial we will demonstrate how to combine a few stock images to create a magical flaming heart illustration. Let’s get started!

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Resources Used

• Concrete Texture
• Fire
• Aladdin’s Lamp

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Step 1

Create a new document 1920 x 1080. Download the Concrete Texture that we created in our Create Metallic Texture Tutorial some weeks back.

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Step 2

Download Aladdin’s Lamp and place at shown below. Desaturate it using Cmd + Shift + U.

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Step 3

Add a shadow for the lamp. Create a new layer and name it "Lamp Shadow." Using the "Ellipse Marquee Tool" create a selection as shown below.

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Step 4

Right click into selection and select "add feather" with value of "3px" and fill with black.

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Step 5

Move the "lamp shadow" a little bit up and to the right as shown below.

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Step 6

Now before we start adding fire to the lamp, we need references to help things along. Create a new layer on top of all layers and name it "start stroke" and then using "Pen Tool" create a path as shown.

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Step 7

Open the Brush Palette and prepare a brush to use to stroke our path.

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Step 8

Select the "start stroke" layer, grab the pen tool, right click and choose the Stroke path option.

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Step 9

Lower the opacity of the "start stroke" layer to 10% or 20%.

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Step 10

Download the Fire image and open it Photoshop. Open Channels and duplicate the Red Channel.

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Step 11

Go to Image > Adjustment > Curves and apply the settings below.

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Step 12

Now press Cmd and click on this Channel to load a selection or go to Select > Load Selection and press okay.

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Step 13

Now come back to the layer panel and simply copy it and past it into your working document. Name this layer “fire flame”.

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Step 14

Press Cmd + T to scale it down.

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Step 15

Using the lasso tool, create a selection around bottom flame and then press Cmd + Shift + J. This will separate both flames.

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Step 16

For now we need only the bottom flame so hide the top flame for now.

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Step 17

Duplicate the bottom flame layer as a backup and then press Cmd + T to scale it down a little. Press Cmd + T, right click and choose warp.

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Step 18

Now let’s delete some unneeded areas. Using the lasso or pen tool make a selection as shown below. In the coming steps you will have a lot of flames so be sure to name the flames properly so you can recognize them later on.

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Step 19

Duplicate the big flame layer and name it "stroke_flame_2" scale it down and warp it as before.

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Step 20

Again, Duplicate the big flame layer and name it "stroke_flame_3."

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Step 21

Now, let’s reveal the top flame that we hid earlier. Duplicate it and name it "stroke_flame_4." Bring it above all other layers, scale it down a little bit and warp it as shown.

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Step 22

Now that we have successfully created first part of the flame we don’t need the reference stroke that we created earlier. Delete it.

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Step 23

You may have noticed that the middle flame is colored differently than the others. Go ahead and edit it’s saturation as shown below to make look more realistic. To do this go to Image > Adjustment > Hue/Saturation.

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Step 24

Before we start work on the heart all flames and place them into a folder.

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Step 25

Now we are going to start work on the heart. Before we begin, we need to create a reference heart like we did for the flame strokes. You can find a nice heart example in Photoshops’s default custom shapes folder. Create a new layer, name it "heart reference". Pick the heart shape from Photoshop’s custom shapes. Draw it and fill it with white color. Lower its opacity to 10%.

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Step 26

We will use the same technique for the heart as we did for the lamp. Before you begin the process, make sure that you edit the saturation so we don’t run into the same problems as we did in Step 23.

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Step 27

Duplicate the bottom flame and name it "heart_flame_1" and bring it above all other layers. Warp as shown.

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Step 28

Remove unneeded elements and then go to Filter > Liquify and warp flame as shown.

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Step 29

Duplicate the big flame, name it "heart_flame_2" and rotate it, warp it and remove unneeded elements.

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Step 30

Select both "heart_flame_1" and "heart_flame_2" duplicate them by dragging them to the new layer icon at the bottom of layer panel. Transform new duplicated as shown. Select all Heart flames and merge them together.

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Step 31

Go to Filter > Liquify , and use the warp tool to create some variations.

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Step 32

Now let’s work on the inside of the hear. I already made an image that you can use here. Download it here and paste it into your working document as shown.

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Step 33

Now you can delete the hear reference layer.

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Step 34

Select the "inside heart" layer and go to Filter > Liquify. Warp the edges as shown.

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Step 35

The heart is almost done. Select "heart flame" and "inside heart" layer and rotate them as shown.

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Step 36

Merge "heart_flame" and "inside heart" and name the new layer "big heart". Duplicate it and name it "mini heart." Scale it down using the transform tool (Cmd + T) and place it as shown.

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Step 37

Duplicate "stroke_flame_1" layer and bring it above all other layers to create a trail.

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Step 38

You may have noticed that both the trails look a bit unrealistic. To fix this, open the Liquify filter and fix them as shown.

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Step 39

Select the big heart’s trail layer which is "stroke_flame_1" and repeat Step 38.

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Step 40

Okay we are done with warping/distortion, now it’s time to paint. Create a new layer above the lamp layer, name it "lamp light" and go to Layer > Create Clipping Mask.

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Step 41

Apply the following brush settings: Size: 3px, Roundness: 0px, Opacity: 40px, Flow: 30%, Color: ff8a00.

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Step 42

Start painting on lamp’s edges as shown.

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Step 43

Change the brush settings as follows Size: 100px, Opactiy: 20%, Flow: 10%.

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Step 44

Create a layer below lamp. Call it "lamp glow". Select transparent gradient tool, color: ff8a00.

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Step 45

Add a little glow behind the flames, this will make it look more realistic. So Merge all the flames together and name them "magic flame" but before merging them backup your document. You may need to edit flames individually in future.

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Step 46

Duplicate "magic flame" and name it "magic glow". With "magic glow" selected, Go to filter Blur > Gussian Blur > 10px. Lower its opacity to 60%.

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Step 47

Create a new layer above all other layers and name it "Magic Love." Go to Image > Apply Image.

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Conclusion

Once you have everything in one layer, Go to Filter > Shapern > Shapern. You are done!

With Microsoft ending its support of Windows XP very soon (and the fallout from the recent Help Centre flaw being broadcast all over the web), PC users are either looking to Windows 7 or sticking with XP “support free” as this transition takes place.  Because we know no one is using Vista, right?

Mac users have been “treated” to a new operating system approximately every two years now.  Linux users are having new “distros” developed at a breakneck pace as it gains popularity – but it is still has the smallest market share out there.  (I’m unaware of any standalone productivity applications developed for the OS – web applications seem to be the only option.  If any of our readers know of any, please enlighten me!)

With support ending for what was likely the most widely-used operating system, it brings to the forefront the following:

What OS do you use and why?

Let us know in the comments.

Throughout this three-part series, you will learn how to create a website using the latest in web design techniques (HTML5 & CSS3). This series is aimed at those with minimal knowledge of web design. Become a Premium member.

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Join Net Premium

For those unfamiliar, the family of TUTS sites runs a premium membership service. For $9 per month, you gain access to exclusive premium tutorials, screencasts, and freebies from Nettuts+, Psdtuts+, Aetuts+, Audiotuts+, Vectortuts+!, and CgTuts+. For the price of a pizza, you’ll learn from some of the best minds in the business. Become a Premium member.

Last year, around this time, we posted an enlightening list of twenty web development video screencasts from around the web. Today, the same tradition continues, a bit expanded with some presentations from the web world.

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1. Infinite Carousel

Remy Sharp from jQuery for Designers teaches you how to make an infinite sliding carousel, much like the one that used to be featured on Apple’s website.

The tutorial itself is forty minutes long, but is also available in article form on the website.

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2. Choosing the Right CSS Framework

SitePoint CTO, Kevin Yank, presented this talk at Web Directions South 2009 in Sydney, Australia. In this session, the landscape of CSS frameworks was surveyed.

There are a number of different approaches, and some are better than others. Choose the right framework and youíll save yourself a lot of work. Choose the wrong one, and youíll find your projects weighed down by restrictive assumptions and masses of code that you don’t understand. When it comes to CSS frameworks, making the right choice is everything. By the end of this session, you might just decide that the right framework for you is no framework at all.

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3. Styling an Individual article in WordPress

As many of you might know, the “individual article style” movement is becoming more and more popular these days in the blogosphere. Starting with an excellent designer and primarily influenced by print design, this is one of the most exciting features to be widely deployed in blogs.

In the screencast, Chris Coyier from CSS Tricks, discusses how to replicate a similar art style in WordPress and takes you through the process of making one of his styled blog posts.

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4. Six Things Every jQuery Developer Must Know

Elijah Manor, a developer for Sommet Group, shares some great tips for jQuery developers in this hour-long video presentation you should definitely check out.

Note: Although all the facts from the presentation are well explained, you should still have at least a basic understanding of jQuery and JavaScript before watching. We recommend learning from ThemeForest’s jQuery basics screencast series.

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5. Why ExpressionEngine is Great for Designers

As said before, Jason Santa Maria is one of the original movers of implementing some elements from print design to the web. What many don’t know is that his own site is actually developed around ExpressionEngine, an excellent CMS.

Jonathan’s presentation provides great examples of some sites and design companies that are using ExpressionEngine. He then provides an excellent walkthrough of all the features and power that the CMS has.

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6. ASP.NET from Scratch

In case you missed it, Jeremy McPeak started an ASP.NET series here on Nettuts+ several months ago, teaching you how to code from an absolute zero.

So far we’ve covered the installation, making a simple contact form, some C# basics, SQL server and master pages, but you can expect more tutorials coming in the future; so stay tuned!

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7. 18-part WordPress Series

The former Themeforest blog still has some great stuff on it. One of them is this eighteen-part tutorial series on how to build a complete WordPress site.

This is a must-watch for every beginning WordPress developer, since everything from installation to slicing and coding a website is covered. (And even you, experienced developers, could use a reminder – right? )

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8. WordPress Security Tips

Along with a great article, Brad Williams provides a video presentation of some of the best WordPress tricks you can do to aid your on line security. Be sure to read thoroughly, because this might just be the best thing to happen to your WordPress installation in years!

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9. The Future of HTML 5

Bruce Lawson gave this talk at FOWA London 2009 about the HTML 5 (originally called “Web Applications 1.0″) specification and its implementation in modern browsers.

He claims that it is “a pimped-up version of HTML 4,” and also shows you a couple of cool demos which embrace its power to the fullest.

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10. How to Design a Portfolio Site

In this two-part series, designer Elliot Jay Stocks discusses the process involved around building his own portfolio, and also shares some useful tips on designing portfolios in general.

The first part is mostly oriented around design, while Elliot reviews the HTML, CSS and PHP (for WordPress) in the second part.

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I hope you found this list helpful, since I tried to encorporate a bit of everything. Do you think any other videos deserve to be here? I’d love to talk with you in the comments.

Today, we have another Active Premium tutorial exclusively available to Premium members. If you fancy delving deep into Bitmaps and Displacement Maps, then you’ll love this tutorial; Adam Jackett’s first for Activetuts+.

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Quick Preview

Below is a demonstration of the various effects this Premium Tutorial will teach you to execute (TV static, clouds, heat haze and waving flag):

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This Premium Tutorial is Filled with Creative Tips

Learn how to use bitmap noise to create and animate effects like TV static, clouds, a waving flag, and heat haze. Using the BitmapData class we’ll be looking at the noise and perlinNoise functions to generate the effects, then with the DisplacementMapFilter class we’ll create the wave effects.

One thing we’re going to do is keep things reusable. I prefer writing classes with the intent that I’ll be using them again in the future, whether I know I will or not. There have been countless times where I’ve needed something that I’d already written and simply needed to import the class and tweak some settings. In this tutorial we’ll end up writing some classes that get used in other classes. We’re not extending these classes, just using instances of them, you’ll see what I mean when you check out the tut..

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Professional and Detailed Instructions Inside

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Today we’ll be walking through the concept of exposure, right from the beginning. This article won’t befuddle you with complicated numbers and jargon, but it will help you feel more confident with your photography and understand a core concept that’s a vital piece of the photography jigsaw.

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Preface

I believe there are three different types of photographers: technical, artistic, and those that have good artistic vision and combines technical knowledge to achieve that vision. None is right or wrong. All are just different in approach and execution.

The first photographer I ever mentored was an amazingly artistic woman. She had a knack for seeing things like no-one had ever seen. She was also a voracious learner and she asked me for help on the technical side of things to make herself better.

I started spouting all the numbers, all the theories, and all the science. The response? “Whoa, My mind doesn’t think that way”. And she was right. People who are very artistic think differently, their brains compute things differently than someone that thinks more analytically and scientifically.

I needed to change my teaching methods to fit the way she thinks. So that is what I will do with this article – explain the technology without the math and numbers and theories.

By the way, that student is now one of the top portrait photographers in her state (heck, I think everywhere) and I couldn’t be more proud of her. She inspires me every day.

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The Triangle of Exposure

There are three main ingredients to good exposure: Aperture, Shutter Speed, and ISO. Okay, yes I said no math, but I will use a bit of geometry to illustrate the effect that the three components of exposure have on each other. I am certainly not the first to think of this as a triangle but I do think it is the best representation

Think of a perfect exposure as a perfect triangle – all the angles are equal, all the sides are equal. Now if you change just one part of that exposure or triangle, it is no longer perfect so you will need to change another point of the exposure or triangle an equal but opposite amount to make that triangle and therefore the exposure perfect again

As you can see, all the elements of exposure have an effect on the others – so with that in mind we need to know the hows and whys of all the different elements to best understand how to get both a good exposure and the desired results in our photographs.

Now you may ask; “Why do we need to have all different settings for exposure. Why isn’t there just one?” Well, in the last century on almost all of the point and shoot cameras, that’s the way it was. The aperture was fixed, as was the shutter speed and – even though you could buy film that was different ISOs – there was usually only one recommended for that particular camera. But it was very limiting.

Since those camera were set up for an average scene, you either shot a normal daylight scene or (if you popped on a flash) an indoor scene. Forget about shooting a natural light sunset or night shot. Forget about stopping action of a race car. You were stuck with what you had.

Now we want to be more artistic in our photos and we want more control over what we shoot. So to achieve that artistic and technical control, we need to know about the different settings we can use and why we use them.

So let’s start with Aperture

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Aperture

Aperture is a circular opening (somewhat) in our lens that is adjustable from a very small circle to almost as large as the lens itself. We adjust it to let more or less light hit the digital sensor or film. Think of window blinds as your aperture, and the wall in your room opposite the blinds is your sensor or film. As we open the blinds, more light comes through and we can see the wall behind us get brighter and brighter

Likewise, as we open up the aperture on our lens, we get more light on our sensor or film.

The opening of our lens or Aperture is expressed in f stops and here is a very typical range of f stops:

You may say; now wait a minute, why do the largest openings have the smallest numbers? Well, think of it this way; imagine the number as the bottom number of a fraction. So if we have f 4 that would be 1/4 and f8 would be 1/8 and 1/4 is larger than 1/8. Okay? Okay.

The Aperture numbers I have above represent “Whole Steps” of light from one to the next. What is a whole step? A whole step represents the doubling or halving of the light through the lens. So f1.4 will let in twice as much light as f2.0. f2.0 twice as much light as f2.8 or we can also say that f2.8 is half as much light as f2.0.

On your lens, you may see numbers in between the numbers above. Those represent either 1/3 or ? stops (depending on your camera model) so we can fine tune beyond just whole stops.

So we have all these different apertures available to let in different amounts of light. Why should I care and why should choose one over the other? This is where the artist side comes in – to help make those decisions. The following are different artistic styles we can use and the different parts of an image that Aperture effects.

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Depth of Field

When we look at an image, there is a part that is in perfect focus and then there are parts that begin to be out of the range of focus. You can have a small Depth of Field (DOF) where only your subject is in focus, or you can have a deep Depth of Field where practically everything is in focus – or really anywhere in between.

Depth of field is determined by three things; aperture (f stop), distance to your subject, and lens focal length (50mm, 200m etc), with Aperture having a profound effect on DOF. Let’s see what an image looks like just varying the aperture and leaving alone the other two parts:

Photographers that shoot portraits usually use larger apertures (low numbers) for a shallow DOF to highlight and isolate their subjects. Landscape photographers usually use small apertures to have a very deep DOF, all the way from the foreground to the background.

As usual, there are exceptions to these rules and that is ruled by the photographer’s artistic ideas and vision.

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Shooting in Low Light

As we saw with the window blinds example, opening up our aperture allows more light to hit our sensor or film. So when shooting in low light, it may help to open up your aperture to make it easier on our other two sides of the exposure triangle which I will explain more later in those sections on Shutter speed and ISO.

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Shutter Speed

Shutter speed controls how long the light comes through our aperture to our digital sensor or film. The longer the time, the more light will hit their surface. That is technically what shutter speed does.

Artistically, shutter speed controls motion. Whether we want to freeze motion or show motion, shutter speed is the portion of exposure that will control that aspect.

Shutter speeds are expressed in fraction of a second 1/8, 1/125, 1/1000 etc. but in most modern digital cameras you may not see the 1/ expressed (but they still are fraction). You most likely see the above expressed as 8, 125, 1000 etc.

The first consideration we have to think about is: can we hand-hold the camera at this shutter speed and not have the slight movement of the camera show up in our image making it blurry or less sharp? Most people are able to hand hold a camera in the range of 1/60th to 1/200th with a normal lens on. When you use telephoto lenses you may need to use a faster shutter speed.

A common rule of thumb these days is to take your focal length of your lens and shoot at least as fast as that. If you have a 300mm telephoto lens, your minimum shutter speed should be 300 (1/300 or 1/320 as is common) If you cannot hand-hold, you must use a tripod.

Beyond that we can now make an artistic judgment – do we want to stop action, or show movement? And this is a judgment you need to make. Sometimes we may want to freeze our subject and keep it sharp and clear. Other times we want some blur on the subject to give the viewer the impression that the object is moving or is at speed.

In this image of the trolley downtown, in the first example we used a high shutter speed to stop the trolley as it moved past the buildings (which may be what we want). But does the viewer really know if the trolley was moving past or just stopped at the station?

In the second example we slowed the shutter speed way down to .3 (3/10th) of a second. Now the viewer can tell that the trolley is moving at speed past the building.

Again this is the decision you have to make. What do you want to convey? Other examples of using a high shutter speed to stop action:

Stopping the flight of a jet as it flies by, or a car at high speed. Freezing the swing of the bat of a baseball player, a high diver in mid arc above the water. Again you would use a high shutter speed to freeze the movement or action.

In the image below, a slow shutter speed was used (on a tripod) to silken the water and show motion. The same can be done for a waterfall, an ocean or a fountain.

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ISO

ISO is the sensitivity to light of the sensor or film. The higher the sensitivity, the less time (shutter speed) or the less amount of light (aperture) needs to hit the sensor for the correct exposure. It is adjustable in most cameras, in a range of about 200 to 1600. High end cameras can go way beyond that.

We use ISO to help us achieve what we want to do with the other two sides of exposure; Aperture and Shutter Speed. You may ask; Why don’t we just use the most sensitive one and forget about it? Well because the downside of higher ISO is that it increases the noise or grain in our images. This can sometimes make the image look so bad that it becomes unusable (or at least un-printable at a decent size).

So our objective is to use the lowest ISO possible, but balancing that to what we want to achieve.

Shooting outdoors on sunny or even slightly overcast days we can use ISO 100 or 200 with ease. On heavy overcast days we may need to change our ISO to 400. Especially if we use a small aperture (letting in less light) for shooting a deep depth of field landscape shot, while still being able to maintain a shutter speed that we can safely handhold without a tripod.

As we move indoors to a brightly lit room we may need to move up to ISO 800 – 1600 to take natural light photos without the need for using our flash. As we move to dimly lit rooms or street scenes, we may need to move up to ISO 3200 or higher (remembering again that not all cameras can shoot at these higher ISO without excessive noise).

Here are some close-ups crops to see the effects of ISO noise in an Image.

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Putting It All Together for the Perfect Exposure

What is a perfect exposure?

Well technically, every scene we shoot has a dynamic range. The dynamic range is the difference between the brightest part of that scene and the darkest part. Our sensor or film has a dynamic range too (technically it’s exposure latitude – but we’re picking hairs).

What we hope to accomplish is to capture that dynamic range of the scene into our image. So that the brightest part of the image (say the sky) is not blown out and devoid of detail, and the darkest part (shadows or foreground dark areas) are not lost into noise.

Sometimes the dynamic range of a scene can exceed the dynamic range of our camera, so we have to make a choice of what part we want to have the best exposure. Usually with digital it is best to have the brightest areas in good exposure and not blown out. But it can depend on the situation.

If we are shooting a portrait, we want our subject to be perfectly exposed even if that mean that another part of the image my not be. Some times that is a sacrifice we have to make, if we cannot change the conditions of the shoot nor have the option of supplementing the lighting.

This first image is overexposed. There is good light on the rocks but the sky and clouds are missing detail because of overexposure.

This image is underexposed. Great detail in the sky but the foreground is dark and all the detail is lost to noise there in the rocks.

This image is exposed pretty well in a difficult high dynamic range lighting situation. There is great detail and color in the sky and you can make out all the rocks and foreground areas completely.

The truth is, while there may be technically a good exposure, you may use exposure artistically too and purposely blow out areas or choose a darker mood to an image. You can let your artistic eye lead the way when you need to.

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The Exposure Triangle in Practice

Now that we have a basic understanding of the three elements of exposure. Let’s examine how we might use them and see the interaction between them.

Let’s say we wanted to shoot an automobile race and we want to stop the action. It’s a bright sunny day so we are going to use ISO100. We want to stop the action of the car going by us very fast, so we choose 1/1000 of a second shutter speed – but with that shutter speed according to our meter in our camera that would give us an aperture of 5.6.

So we know from what we learned about aperture, that may give us a shallow depth of field and there are other race cars we want to be within reasonable focus. So how could we fix this? We can’t change our shutter speed, so we turn to the other part of our trio; ISO.

If we move our ISO up two stops to 400, we can then make out aperture two stops smaller and get the depth of field we need plus the shutter speed we need to stop the action.

We still have our camera set the same, but while we are at the races we spot a beautiful classic car in the parking lot. We want to isolate it from the ugly background so we decide that we now need a shallow depth of field. So we open our lens up to f4 on our 200mm lens.

This gives us great separation and DOF but that drives our shutter speed up to 1/6000th of a second! This would be OK – we are hand holding our camera, not stopping any action – but we want this to be a great shot worthy of a very large print.

So why don’t we lower our ISO two steps to ISO 100, That brings our shutter speed down two stops to a still fast 1/1600 but because we lowered our ISO we will have much less noise in our image to be printed large.

Remember back in the section on aperture I posted a picture shot at night on the street. I had my aperture at f8. Now I knew that it would be low light so I boosted my ISO to 3200 but I then had a shutter speed of 1/8th of a second – too slow to hand hold. But, I was also without a tripod.

Since the scene was flat and no real depth to it (and I didn’t need to worry about DOF), I opened my aperture to f2.8 that allowed me to put my shutter speed at 1/60 at which I could very easily hand hold.

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Conclusion

Notice something? For every action we take one way in stops, we make an equal but opposite adjustment in stops on another part of the exposure triangle. When we let more light in one place, we control it in another place to give us the perfect exposure.

Exposure and the three elements of it; Aperture, Shutter Speed and ISO, can be a very complicated and full of science subject. But I hope I have given you some of the basics and in a way that is easy to understand so that you may use your camera more efficiently. Better still, I hope I have allowed you to take your art to the next level because of the technical understanding.