Free Stock Photos

If you are looking for some amazing high quality photographs (even if they are not mine!), try www.istockphoto.com. If you use the link below you will get a bunch of free credits.

Newborn baby lightbox

After having a some very popular photos in my first newborn baby lightbox I thought it was long overdue that I setup a new lightbox of the newest addition to my family on istockphoto.

I love this expression on her face at bath time:



...and this one makes me smile as she can be a drama queen at times!



One can never have enough of cute hand and feet shots as they grow up so quickly:



But right now, she's fast asleep and I've got a rare chance to update some photos!

Creating Contact Sheets in Lightroom to Email

I took a few hundred photos last weekend for some friends with their new addition to their family and wanted to send them via email a contact sheet of all the photos so they could take a look before I spent some time editing them.

Lightroom 3 offers a really effective solution for this although it wasn't obvious at first that I could create a soft copy of a contact sheet instead of printing it out that was small enough to email.

The easy way to do it is
1) Select the photos you want to include on your contact sheet
2) Select Print from the menu
3) In the template browser (left hand side), select the contact sheet you want. My preference in this case was the 4 x 5 contact sheet: a good compromise between size of each picture and number of shots per page
4) On the right hand side, scroll all the to the bottom to the Print Job section
5) Where it says "Print to: Printer", click and select "JPEG File"
6) Click Print!

It will create one file per page.

An alternative would be to follow the above steps but write to a PDF file and send it. The only problem I've found with this is the size of the PDF file which is often too large to email.

Diamond

Today, I clocked up 25,000 downloads on iStockphoto, putting me into the 'diamond' category. It's hard to track which exact photo gets the credit but I think it's this take on online gambling:

Royal Flush hanging on a clothes line.

The Needles

It has been a while since my last update but raising children is taking more time than expected and I've got a whole host of photos just sitting waiting to be edited but no time.

But, a recent trip to the Isle of Wight gave me a great opportunity to take a few good shots and I love this one of The Needles glistening in the sun.

The New Toy

First pictures with my lovely new Christmas present: a Canon 5D MK II. I can honestly say it blows me away. For a start, it just feels better than my old 30D. It's almost like going from a point-and-shoot to your first DSLR all over again.

Cambodia Picture on Travel Website

Found this using TinEye (great search engine for any photographers out there wanting to trace their own work or find any usage of a picture) tonight. The picture on the left is one of mine from a fantastic trip to Angkor Wat, Cambodia a few years back.


This is the original: