10 ways to improve a picture without photoshop

Rule of odds

In simple terms, the “rule of odds” is to have an odd number of objects in your photos. It could be a photo of just one object or a group shot of three people. This technique makes the photo more appealing and interesting to the human eye.

Limiting focus

Limiting the focus is an easy way to add focus. It may not be necessary in all photos but is useful whenever you have distracting objects that you want to hide. The most common use of this technique is to blur distracting backgrounds. Blurring the background turns any distracting backgrounds into a pleasing one. You can minimize the depth of field in your photos by using a large aperture (ex. F1.8), zooming in, and using a camera with a larger sensor (ex. full frame DSLR).

Simplification

The best way to improve the center of focus is to create simple looking image. The easiest way to do this is to limit the amount of objects in your photo. You can also use the previous tip to blur out distracting details.

Centering

Centering an object gives the photo balance. Centering works best on simple photos with few objects.

Rule of thirds

This is one of the most effective and popular ways of composing a photo. You can improve your photos compositions simply by using this technique. The “rule of thirds” adds interest to the photo by aligning the subject on one of the four points of an imaginary 3x3 grid in the photo.

Lead room

Lead room is the the space in front of an object. This element is usually used with the rule of thirds to create a more interesting photo. By leaving room in front of the subject, the viewer will see that it has someplace to go.

S curve

S Curve is an imaginary line in a photo that is in the shape of an S. This type of line makes photos look more interesting by additing motion guiding the viewers eye in the shape of an S. S curve can also be used in posing to improve the appearance of the models figure.

Foreground

Most photos have a middleground and a background but very little foreground. You can improve your landscapes photos significantly by including some foreground objects. This is a great technique for creating a sense of scale and making the viewer feel like he/she is in the photo.

Fill the frame

When you think you’re close enough to the subject, try going closer. Fill most of the frame with the subject and you got another composition.

Framing

Here’s a creative way to add a foreground to your photos! Use elements around you to create a picture frame of the subject. This technique is a great way of adding interest and making a photo stand out from the rest.

10 favorite shopping sites

http://www.etsy.com/
http://www.forever21.com/
http://www.papayaclothing.com/shop/
http://www.charlotterusse.com/home/index.jsp
http://www.amazon.com/
http://www.cafepress.com/
http://www.bestbuy.com/ 
http://www.schwans.com/
http://www.wetseal.com/home.jsp
http://www.allaboutdance.com/

10 reasons I lovemy college

1. Close to my house
2. Close to downtown
3. Classes are small
4. Teachers know what they are talking about
5. Works with my work schedule
6. Regionally credited
7. Small and friendly
8. Lots of fund raising and community support
9. Blood drives 
10. Bake sales and student appreciation days

10 favorite quotes

1. "Life isn't always beautiful, but it's  a beautiful ride".
2. "Everything happens for a reason."
3. "If you don't accept me at my worst, you don't deserve me at my best."
4. " If you love someone let them go, If they come back they are yours, if they don't they never were."
5. "In Gods eyes were all the same, someday we will all have perfect wings."
6. "Anyone who thinks of the next war must first think of suicide." 
7. "Real love is trading your pearls for his dog tags." 
8. "Undermine their pompous authority, reject their moral standards, make anarchy and disorder your trademarks. Cause as much chaos and disruption as possible but don’t let them take you ALIVE."
9. "I've only been in love with a beer bottle and a mirror."
10. "I was born with an enormous need for affection, and a terrible need to give it."

 

My 10 favorite artists of all time!

I will give a plethora of artists. 

Ashley Pridgen- A wonderful artist that does a lot of local work. I have purchased a few of her paintings and I really love them

Salvador dali- I love his older work, the before fame pictures. My favorite is The Persistence of Memory

Michelangelo- Painter of the sistine chapel, by far one of my favorite historical sites of all time.

Igor stravinsky- A masterful composer who helped shape music the the 20th century. I have danced to his rite of spring piece. I love how easily he makes music scream hate then pour on love within seconds of each other. 

 Margot fonteyn- One of the most AMAZING ballet dancers I have ever 

Leonardo Da Vinc-  painted the Mona Lisa. One of my top favorite paintings of all time 

Pablo Picasso- The Three Dancers 

Johannes Vermeer- The girl with the pear earring. I love the story behind this picture. I have always found it fascinating.

 

10 favorite recipe sites

http://www.cupcakerecipes.com/
They have some really nice cupcakes that I never would think of. 

http://allrecipes.com/
Look up Chick Casserole!

http://www.recipe.com 
I am new to this site, they have some good steak and lean meat ideas.


http://www.efooddepot.com/recipes/Salad and 3bean stew is awesome!



http://www.epicurious.com/recipesmenus
I have only used a dessert casserole from here but it was good, the directions are simple.

http://www.food.com/
A simple site but has good info and diet ideas


http://www.easy-kids-recipes.com/
A lot of fun and easy things that you can do with kids.

http://www.foodnetwork.com/30-minute-meals/index.html
 Comes with a video!!!!

http://busycooks.about.com/od/dinnerrecipes/a/30minuterecipes.htm
 Fast and easy meal site. I havent used it yet but my mom enjoys it

http://dietrecipe.org/
Best place for diet info

10 skills I would like to develope in the near future

1. Better photoshop skills
2. Management skills
3. Typography 
4. Better page layout skills
5. Photography 
6. Social media marketing 
7. Better skills in illustrator
8. Flash
9. Learn bridge
10. Master dreamweaver

10 ways to use the web to promote your business

1. Expand Your Network

Using Twitter, you can join topic groups related to your business and career and gain valuable information from scanning others’ tweets. Your company will gain new customers and potential partners. Do a search for keywords related to your product on Twitter Search and then follow the users.
Anyone can use Twitter to build a personal brand. Your customers and prospective clients will perceive you as an approachable social personality. Twitter is designed to establish consistent and deeper relationships for future benefits.

2. Share Expertise To Build Credibility

If you hold free workshops, seminars or web meetings; let people know that it’s starting soon, how to participate and join in by tweeting about it. You can also link to your presentations and videos. Twitter can help direct people’s attention to your events.

Offer solutions to those who are struggling with something in your field of expertise. Share your ideas internally in a very efficient manner and broadcast links and headlines that can drive traffic to your website.

3. Highlight What’s Special

Twitter allows you to share the latest news and events related to your business in 140 characters. Set up a Twitter feed for the specific purpose of notifying customers when new products come in. You can use this free platform to inform event participants and highlight what’s special. Sharing valuable information and useful tips helps you build a strong web presence and gain visibility on the Internet.

4. Look For Leads On Twitter

Twitter can be used to direct traffic to your websites. You can share information that is useful for prospective clients or employers to enhance your reputation. Avoid hard-sell tactics: focus on building relationships. Don’t be afraid to take full advantage of Twitter and gather information about what customers, competitors and others are saying about your business.
Don’t think of what you can get, but rather what you can learn and what you can offer. Use free applications like Mr. Tweet to check your profile and finds relevant connections for you.

5. Communicate With Employees

Twitter is a great collaboration tool, which can be successfully used to save time and money. Forget about sending endless emails and calls – you can rather release short tweets to your team members describing what you have to say. Share what you’re doing so people learn about the type of work you do.

6. Run Special Deals & Promotions

Offer incentives to those who follow you on Twitter. You can give them free coupons, discounts, package deals and samples. Twitter is a great way to create interest and secure attendees.

Social networking is excellent for those who want to promote products, services and ideas directly to a target audience. Twitter marketing is a task that involves two-way audience engagement.

7. Receive Customer Complaints

By accepting customer complaints in the open, other consumers can see what kind of company you really are. Twitter allows you to respond quickly to shut down any impending service or complaint received. Communicate effectively with each of your clients and ask for their honest opinion. Make your goals public to compel you to reach them.

8. Interact With Your Competition

You can read the tweets of your competitors daily and stay in touch with them. Although this rarely happens in the real world, Twitter has changed it all. This free platform allows you to follow companies, experts, leaders and competitors in your industry. It’s not enough to monitor the latest projects released by your competitors. Tracking their mistakes is even more useful, because you can analyze their moves and see what exactly went wrong.

9. Organize A Local Tweetup

Twitter can help you organize meetups. All you have to do is to send a message announcing the time and place of the meeting. It’s an informal and effective way of planning a meeting. You can get in touch with vendors, suppliers and other people with whom you can form partnerships.

10. Create Brand Loyalty

With Twitter, you can always stay in touch with your followers. All these people are potential customers, so you must help them get used to your products and services. Participate actively to conversations and tweet constantly. This way, increasingly more people will find out about your business, while you will gain loyal clients.
Using Twitter for business, you can convert conversations into actions. A fresh and interesting personality attracts followers. Share information that is helpful for potential customers or employers to gain recognition.
Do you use Twitter for your business? Have you any Twitter tips to effectively reach out to your customers and business partners? Share them in the comments.

10 reasons to hire a professional designer

1. A Web Site is Your Online Representative

Would you build your brick and mortar shop and do all of the signs and interior decorating yourself? Most of us would not; we would hire professionals to give us the best image possible. Your web site acts as your business card and/or online shop. It acts as a direct representative of you and your business. If your web site doesn’t have the professional image you need, you are losing customers.

2. Professionalism

When you hire a professional designer, not only do they know how to give you a beautiful image, but also how to give you the image that’s right for your business and industry. A skilled designer should know the ins and outs of marketing as well as creativity. An effective web site should be unique,  be pleasant on the eye, have clear and easy navigation, load efficiently, and work properly in all the major browsers.

3. Saving Time

Hiring a professional web designer instead of making the web site yourself will save you a lot of time, energy, and frustration. There is a large learning curve in order to make effective web sites and there are many aspects to web development much beyond learning HTML which makes it a full time job. A professional web developers is skilled and up-to-date in several areas including Marketing, SEO, Communication,  HTML, CSS, Photo Optimization, Search Engine Optimization, Java Script,  and possibly several other languages like Flash, PHP and others.

4. Getting Ahead of the Competition

As you may well know, competition is as fierce in the internet as it is in the physical world. If your competitors have a web presence before you do, they are already a step ahead of you. But, if you launch a new web site that is more effective than theirs, you will have the extra edge. Not only does a well-built web site give a good first impression, it also will give your customers a reason to trust your business over that of your competitors.

5. Uniqueness and Customization

There are about 56,000,000 web sites on the internet as of November 2004 according to netscape.com. How are you going to make yours stand out? Buying a nice template can be a quick and cheap solution, but you may risk having your web site look like several others. Furthermore,  many features that you may require for your web site including contact forms, galleries, forums, and other special scripts are simply not available with pre-made templates. If you have a web site built with a pre-made template and in the future you want to expand it, you may have to rebuild the whole site again to include the added features that you need.

6. Communicating Your Message

A professional web designer is experienced in knowing how to properly communicate your message. They are skilled at marketing and are concerned, above all, with how to effectively communicate your message by organizing your information in a digestible manner as well as communicating your message through the use of colors, fonts, shapes,  layouts, and more to convey the message you want to represent for your business.

7. Attention

A nice web site designed by a professional designer will bring attention to your business. Not only does a nice web site attract new customers, it will also bring professional attention from your peers or potential advertisers that you may be in search of. Word-of-mouth and good referrals are some of the most powerful marketing tools there are.

8. Search Engine Optimization

One of the most important factors about a web site is its presence in the search engines. It is useless to have the nicest web site in the world if it doesn’t have a good presence in the search engine listings. Good search engine ranking are important because they are usually the number one way potential customers will find you on the internet. They also act as a free and effective advertising tool. A professional web designer will know how to develop your web site to make it fair decently in search engine listings by building it search engine-friendly from the bottom up. This is the most effective and ethical way to insure top rankings for your web site.

9. Browser Compatibility

Browser incompatibility occurs when a web site doesn’t show the same way or appears “broken” to site visitors on different browsers. The reason for this is that different browsers (Internet Explorer,  Netscape, Mozilla, Safari, etc.) have different standards for displaying web pages. What looks perfectly fine in one browser may show up as a jumbled mess in another. Professional web designers are skilled at knowing how to make web sites display properly on a variety of browsers. A good web designer will test and construct your web site across browsers,  insuring that the majority of people on different browsers can see your web site the way it should be.

10. Making the Difference between Personal and Commercial Web Sites

There is a huge difference between a home page and a professional web site. It can take years of experience to learn how to build an effective commercial web site and it is something that is best left to an expert. Having a professional web site will provide you with a sense security in your business that no home-made web site can do. Your web site will be something that thousands of people around the world may view every day.  Make sure your web site shows what you want the world to see; a high-quality, clean, accessible, professional, and top ranking business.

10 pit falls to avoid in web design

#1 Beware of Mandating Certain Plugins

#2 Watch Your Resolution

#3 Organized Clutter

 #4 Inconsistency

 #5 Clipart-centric Design

#6 Misaligned Overflowing Text

#7 Poor Alignment

#8 Ad Clutter

#9 A Lack of Breathing Room

#10 Failing to Leverage Your Talent

 

10 ways to make your site look better

1. Image gallery with hover box preview

2. Style A-to-Z index like BBC

3. Alert Box

4. CSS Sliding Sprite Window

5. Gradient text effect using CSS purely

6. Creating a sliding image gallery

7. Round corner in CSS

8. Pure CSS Line Graph

 9. Pure CSS Accordion Effect

10. CSS rollover buttons

 

 

Things you do/do not want on your website.

Things you do/do not want on your website.

1. You do not want to put flashing or moving objects all over the page.
2. You want to use text and background colors that compliment each other and make it easy on the reader.
3. You do not want to use a background that has to much going on. It is a distraction and makes text hard to read.
4. You want to use good spacing and keep everything the same (dont switch from left to center to right).
5. If you have to put a warning on your page for people who are epileptic, its probably not a good idea.
6. Stay on topic. If your site is about puppies talk about puppies not the color of your shoes.
7. Keep the site accessible to everyone! Add tag to all images and aides for all people with disabilities that might hinder them from viewing the site.
8. Don't use so many images that it takes a long time to load.
9. Keep the site age appropriate.
10. Make sure the over all color scheme of the site complimentary of he text and images you use.