Post By: Amy Chokshi

Blog cosmetics play an important role in setting your tone and style as a blogger.  When the images and wallpaper on your blog are in alignment with your content, writing style, and tone, it creates dedicated and strong following.  One of the most important aspects of blogging is to find your voice.  Once that happens, everything else takes care of itself automatically.

Beautiful and inspiring photographs are not as difficult as most bloggers conceive them to be.  Simple photographs of flowers in your garden or some abstract object in your home make ideal complements to your blog by giving it a meaning.  Life’s small details that capture beauty and simplicity of day-to-day life create resonance and bonding with your readers.

Here are the 7 most important lessons on how to take stunning photographs to beautify your blog with inspiring images to create a strong and dedicated following:

Lighting: Natural lighting works best for most settings.  Indoor lights create dark images and look unnatural.  When taking photographs outdoors, make sure you avoid glare.  If it is too sunny when you are taking the photographs, you may need to use flash to fill in the shadows with the camera’s flash light and soften the contrast between the shaded and sunny portions of photograph.  In some settings, you may be able to exploit the light to show off texture and shapes.

Sharpness and Blur: Your camera’s shutter time is critically important to capture beautiful photographs of moving objects.  Set your camera to shutter priority so that the shutter times can be controlled directly.  For the camera’s that don’t have shutter priority option, you may change the shutter times to appropriately meet your needs.  Experiment with programmed settings for different shutter times to see which fits best.  If you set your shutter times to very long, you may be able to capture abstract colors of moving objects.

Zoom & Focus: Photo’s that are zoomed into the subject are much more interesting and reveal subtle details of the subject.  Zoomed in pictures capture the moment in its true authenticity.  Similarly, when taking photographs of landscapes, it is best to set your lens to wide angle.  If you don’t have a camera with adjustable lens, consider setting your camera mode to Landscape mode.  Most of the cameras have a zoom range of 3x to 5x.  In digital SLR camera’s, it is possible to extend this zoom range by getting wide-angle adaptors or telephoto adaptors.  If you want to extend the range of your camera to wider angel, consider getting a wide-angle adaptor.  Contrary to that, if you like telephotos, you may want to get a camera that has lens with telephoto extender.

Quality & Effects: To get one quality shot, you have to take several shots.  Most expert photographers take 30 to 40 photographs just to capture one awe-inspiring moment.  Especially with digital cameras, there is no reason to not take many pictures.  Effects play an important role in portraying the character of the subject.  For instance, when taking photograph of indoor fountains with sufficient lighting, using long exposures, i.e. 1/30 of a second gives a milky effect to water in the fountain, whereas using short exposure gives a frozen effect to water.

Accessories: A tripod is a must-have if you plan on taking your hobby to the next level.  It helps you you’re your camera steady and improve the focus of your picture.  Tripods are fairly inexpensive and absolutely worth for their cost.

Photo Editing: Learning the basics of Photoshop can take you far when it comes to embellishing your images with frames and other artistic details.  It also helps you in re-sizing your images.  If you are not too savvy when it comes to using graphics related applications, consider Picnik.com – It’s one of the most user friendly photo editing web-based tools.

Copyright Infringement: If is important to protect your photographs from copyright infringement.   Although watermarking is one of the most popular ways to avoid anyone from copying your pictures, doing so distorts the beauty of your photographs.   One of the best ways to stop people from copying your images is to prevent downloads using tables based design or doing a JavaScript right click disable.  Regardless of how many protections you put in place, someone will figure out a way to steal your image. So it’s best to copyright your images.

Following these 7 steps should get you started on the path of creating stunning images for your blog or websites.  The best part of using personally created images is that they will add a personal touch to your blog and thereby strengthen the bond between you and your followers.