Taking a photo everyday can be a daunting task, but as I look back over the last few shots I’ve taken for my project365 I am really proud of the results. here are 16 photo project suggestions for your 365!

1. Self portraits

50 f/1.4, 1/30 @ f/2.8, ISO 640.

Give people a glimpse at the artist behind the camera and take a self-portrait. You can do a classic camera-in-hand mirror snap like mine, or get creative and put your camera on a tripod, set a timer, and run in a wheat field. There are so many options for creative shots and the best thing about you being the model is you can take your shot whenever you like and take as long as you want snapping it!

2. Moon shots

Bay Bridge, SF. 5DMKII+ 100mm f/2.8 L, 1/40 at f/8.0, ISO 500.

There are many faces of the moon and almost all of them make for spectacular photos. If you happen to own a long or telephoto lens put it to good use and grab some stunning shots. If not, consider renting one for your dSLR and go on a special nighttime shoot and capture both the moon and stars. You can even share the rental cost between friends and make a fun night of it.

You’d also be surprised at the shots you can get with your camera phone. Just make sure you prop your phone on something stable while you take your shot.

3. Nature Macros

Dew drops on grass.

There is so much beauty out there — leaves in puddles, dew drops on grass, snowflakes on tree branches. Head outside and capture all the little details of nature. Try shooting with a really shallow depth of field (f/2 and lower) to get dreamy artistic shots.

4. Portraits

5DMKII, 85mm f/1.8, 1/200 @ f/2.8, ISO 100.

I am most passionate about taking portraits. From candid street photos shots, to strobe light lit creatives, to magic hour back lit shots, the possibilities are endless. The only problem is you need a subject. If you are blessed with an understanding and patient partner or family member, start practicing taking portraits of them. If you are feeling a bit more bold, you can always head out on the street and try to get some candids of people walking by or even ask strangers to pose for you.

If you are looking to photograph the attractive sort then you can try finding a model through ModelMayhem.com (more tips on photographinc  models here) or pester some of your good-lookin’ Facebook friends. Almost everyone wants a great Facebook profile shots, so offer to give them a nice shot for their time. More tips on taking great portraits.

5. Fun Macros

5DMKII+100 f/2.8, 1/200 at f/4.5, ISO 125 + 430EX  double CTO gel.

During bad weather days, dig around in your house for a fun little toy, keepsake or gadget to snap. You can light your subject with strobes to get a bit more creative, or just position your toy in front of a large day lit window and get great natural light.

6. Musical Performances

Florence + the Machine NYE at the Cosmopolitan, 1/60 at f/3.2, ISO 1600.

Every time you are out at a show grab a shot. Taking photos at concerts was actually how I started working as a photographer and all I had was my little Canon Rebel Xti and the 50mm f/1.4. Often, you aren’t able to bring dSLRs into concerts, so make sure you can before you head out. If you aren’t allowed to bring your gear,  try to grab a shot with your camera phone or small point and shoot.

7. Your City’s Landmarks through the Seasons

Union Square heart, SF. 16-35mm, 1/80 at f/4.0, ISO 4000

Every city has it’s famous landmarks. Set a goal to capture 10 of most interesting over the course of the year, and take a shot of each landmark during the 4 seasons. Imagine a a collection of shots of the same statue during fall, winter, spring and summer seasons. For more variation, you can take a shot during the day, night or sunrise and sunset. It’s always good to have your camera on you whenever you go out in your city, so that if you see a good lighting situation you can grab a quick shot!

8. Bokeh shots

Bokeh shots are always fun to shoot whether you set up little lights behind your subject like I did here or just use what’s in your environment. This is another great project for a rainy day. You can also get great bokeh with street or building lights at night.

9. Architecture & Building shots

The Plaza Hotel, NYC. 5DMKII, 16-35mm f/2.8, 1/125 at f/3.2, ISO 4000.

Head to your local museum, parliament building, or city sites with interesting architecture. A wide angle lens from 15mm to 35mm is ideal for this type of photography. Most kit lenses fit the bill. Obviously a really wide angle like the 16-35mm or even a fish-eye yield the most interesting results. But, if you don’t have a wide angle lens, then focus on capturing the details. Close-ups of pillars, doorways, or statues can make cool shots.

10. Landscapes

Oxbow Bend, Grand Tetons. Xti, 7s at f/, ISO 100.

If you live near nature or are taking a trip out of the city then make sure you take some shots of breathtaking landscapes. Old roads winding through snowy fields, mountains jutting up into cloudy skies, or majestic trees lining a sunken vallies all make great photos. Pay attention to your composition and look for “S” shapes in rivers, paths, and rocks.

11. Raindrops on windows

Rainy day in SF, iPhone4 processed with Camera+.

Raindrops on windows make really cool and interesting shots. You can get really creative with these shots so really stretch your imagination and see what you can create.

12. Food Photos

It may be slightly annoying to your friends and family, but snap a shot of your food before you eat it, especially fancy foods and deserts. Mmm. Chocolates Try to light your shots, either by placing the food in front of a nice bright window, or with speed lights if you have them, or just turn on some ambient light and use a nice low aperture lens like the 50mm f/1.4. If you are in a really dark restaurant you can also try moving the candle light close to your food to get a bit more light.

13. Pet Portraits

Leo’s Ozzie, Xti, 1/100 at f/4.0, ISO 100.

Pets are often easier to shoot than most people. Plus, they whine less and can be bribed with snacks. Here are some tips to get great pet photos.

14. Sports & Action shots

CFL Felions, 5DMKII, 15mm f/2.8, 1/25, f/5.6, IS0 320.

Whether you are at at a World Series showdown or a little league game, there are amazing sports photos just waiting to be taken. Freeze the action with a fast shutter speed and a long telephoto, take a tilt-shift of the entire stadium, or snap a fish-eye shot of the distracting cheerleaders at the game like I did If you can’t make it to the Superbowl, head to a local sporting event or even down the street to the nearest park. I’m sure you can find some impromptu soccer match for some great action shots.

15. Sunsets

iPhone 4, edited in Camera+.

From cityscapes to silhouetted figures in front of a sandy horizon line, everything looks magical at sunset. What’s great about sunsets is that every camera can capture the magic . I shot the above photo with my iPhone.

16. Night shots

Golden Gate, 16-35mm, 10s @ f5.0, 1SO 100.

Grab your tripod and shutter release and head out into the night to take some stunning night photos. Take long 15s exposures of cars whizzing by creating trails of light, or ghost-like movement of people walking by dark buildings, or bright neon city signs. If you plan on doing regular night photography, you might want to invest in a small headlamp or LED flashlight to hemp you find your camera buttons in the dark.

Hope that this list helps keep you motivated and inspired to keep snapping a daily photo. Not every photo has to be a masterpiece. Remember to take photos that remind you of your daily life and the little things that make you smile.

We hear all the time why we need to be on every social website there is. But why? What is the big reason behind it? Well, follow me and I will give you 10 reasons why you, a student should use social media to your advantage and most important how to use it.
If you are a student most likely your goal is to get your work out there for possible employers to see your work and hire you. So follow this easy 10 steps and I guarantee you will be on the eyes of a few employers.
WARNING: Social Media takes work and you must put work and time into it in order to get the exposure you desire. But believe me, at the end of the day it will be worth it.
1.    Get  a website
The first thing you need to do is create a home in the internet world. In order to do this you must create a website.  It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, full of flash but you must have the following.
a.    A welcome page
b.    A section for your portfolio pieces
c.    A contact page

2.    Show you work
This is probably one of the most important items you need to do. Showing your work will give you the exposure that you need for future employers to see a sneak peak of what you are capable of.  There are many websites out there that offer this services, flash albums, music, etc but the simplest one to use is flickr and the best part is that is free. Make sure you have a link from your website to all websites where you have posted your work.

3.    Show your site to the world
It is useless to have your work on a website if no one can find your website and your work. In order to do this you must promote your site.  There are many ways you can do this and we can spend hours and hours talking about it. If you want more information you can read about SEO. But here are 3 mayor things you need to make sure your site has.
1.    Your website should have a meta tags. These are a  title page, keywords, and a description. This all needs to be written in the header section  of the page. Work with your web designer in order to add these items to the code of each page.
2.    Once you have your website ready and it has the meta tags added, submit your website to google and yahoo. All other search engines grab the content from these search engines so there is no need to spend time or money submitting your website to other search engines.

4.    Promote your work
Well, we took care of the technical stuff, now is time for the good stuff; Promotion. This is where your personality needs to come out. Share your website with everyone; put it on your email tag, business card, etc… everywhere you go you need to start sharing you website. Ahh very important put it on your resume.

5.    Get a twitter account
Twitter is the simplest way to get started to promote your work, you don’t have to get a blog, you don’t have to tell them what you did for the day but just do this 3 things and you will get started with twitter in no time.
1.    Every time you create a new design, upload it to your website and share the link with your twitter followers. Don’t have any followers? Visit my website and learn how to start building your list.
2.    Follow other designers, learn about new techniques they share and comment on other people’s designs.
3.    Share anything related to your field with your twitter followers, it doesn’t always have to be about what you create but if you find a good resource, article or image, go ahead, share it.

6.    Network with other artists
By being involved with twitter you automatically will start networking with other designer. You can get great business connections through there and possibly, very possibly get a few freelance jobs there.

7.    Comment on other blogs and forums
Visit your favorite blogs and start commenting on posts. But more important than posting is to make sure you leave a signature. A signature is your website, your blog, anything where they can get more information about you and your work.

8.    Subscribe to contests
Another way to start spreading your art is to participate in contest. You don’t have to start with the first prize $50, 000 all expenses paid trip around the world type of contests, but you can start with small contests, some don’t event have first cash prizes but what you are looking for is to say “I participated”, or even better “I won” and during your contest, invite your twitter followers and facebook friends to participate in the voting. This way you are sharing your art with friends and others. The more exposure you get the better people will remember you which could bring more opportunities and even a dream job.

9.    Join other Social Networks
You have been working with twitter for a while now, so browse around and subscribe to other social networks, a few of my favorites are Stumble upon, Reddit and linked in.
10.    Contact Job Recruiters
After a while that you have been working on promoting your work you are ready to start looking for a job. find a few recruiters that are online, contact them through twitter, send them your website and show them your portfolio. Request an interview and just network around, I guaranteed you something will show up.

As I continue with my Project365 and I learn different photo techniques and Photoshop things to do to the photos I will share them with you. Today, I took a simple photo I took with my point and shoot Canon and created an interesting photo as you can see here on the left.

Adding the reflection of clouds to sunglasses is actually a very simple and easy project to do.

STEP ONE

Open the original photo in Photoshop

The way this photo was taken we can assume that I am looking straight into the sky so what we expect to see on the sunglass reflection are clouds. You can actually use anything in the reflection, you can use palm trees, the ocean, an interesting animal, etc..

STEP TWO

Open up the picture in photoshop that you are going to use for the reflection.

Once you have both photos open in Photoshop copy the sky photo as a layer into the sunglasses photo and put it behind your sunglasses photo.

Remember to make copies of your files and work on those, never work on original photos because if you do something wrong while experimenting and want to go back to the original you will always have the original untouched and can start over at any time.

STEP 3

What we need to do now is create a mask covering the lense of the glasses so the sky photo shows in the back. To do this just add a mask to the sunglasses photos

To add a vector mask make sure you are selecting the photo you want the mask to be created, then click on the option “add vector mask” which looks like a rectangle with a circle inside, it is the option right next to the fx button.

Once the mask has been created, select the mask and erase the lense.

after erasing the mask your photo should look like this. I like to use a soft brush when erasing so when we add the sky photo behind it it sorta blends into the edges of the lens.

STEP 4

Now that you erased the lens, and the sky or clouds image is behind the original photo you should be able to see it coming through the glasses. You can move around and position the photo to fit your desired look.

Your final result should look something similar to this.

STEP 5

Adding the final touches. Right now, it looks very  harsh and because my sunglasses are purple I wanted the sky reflection to have a tint of purple, so it could actually look like they sky from above is reflecting on the glasses.

So what I did was created a purple rectangle and lower its opacity to around 30% just to give the sky a tint of purple.

Here you could see how I moved the sky photo to fit better behind the sunglasses and where I added the purple rectancle.

On this photo I clicked on the layers menu the little eye next to the sunglasses photo so you could see how I had my photos.

so after the tint we are done, you can use any color depending on the color of your sunglasses.

your final result should look something similar to this.

I hope this tutorial helped you, feel free to leave me some feedback or a link to your reflection image.

until next time, ciao for now!!

Lately I’ve been looking a lot of photographs on flickr, and doing this I found out an interesting project that’s been going on. Its called 365 Days or Project365 and what it is is that you take one picture a day for a whole year. Each day you upload your picture to  flickr and share it with others. Why would you do this? well its a way to let you get use to photography as a every day thing, as well as it helps you challenge your creativity and your photography teachnincal skills. After a few days you have to start thining out of the box and create new things, challenge yourself to become better and experiment new things.  It’s a project you do for you, not for anyone else, there is no price, no competition but a fun learning experience.

Day 2.2…. had two favorites on day 2

I’m really looking forward to doing this and sharing this with all of you. Although I’ve been doing it for only 3 days I’ve been getting very frustrated and realizing that is not as easy as everyone else makes it look.

There are two types of projects that I found. The first one called 365 Days is about you being the photographer as well as the subject, and wow! let me tell you that is one hard task! specially because I’m a beginner photographer so a lot of frustration comes out.

The second project is called Project 365 and this is about you being the photographer but not the subject so it a little easier and there is more room to do things.

I like portrait photography therefore I decided to stick to 365 days project. I upload the photos to the other project as well but I’m mainly doing self portraits. I usually can’t stick to long term projects, I start very active and then I slowly move away from them and leave them unfinished behind. I’m hoping that even if I don’t complete the 365 days I at least do it long enough where I can try new things and learn new techniques.

I am using a a few tools for inspiration, first I  look at other Flickr memebers images and get inspire by their use of colors, their poses, or even their titles. Another tool I will use is a book about portrat photography technique that I purchase from DIY photography, It has pages over pages about how to take better portraits.

So here are Day1 , Day 2 and Day 3 photographs:

Day 1

Day 2

“Life’s not about waiting for the storms to pass…It’s about learning to dance in the rain.” ~ Vivian Greene

Day 3

if you want to follow my project365 you can do so by subscribing to my blog (box on the right hand side) or you can get instant notification when I upload my photos on twitter at @amecoli or visti my flickr project365 page and leave a comment!

Thanks for sharing this project with me, if you are doing a project365 leave a comment with your URL so we can check out your photos, if you are not doing a project but have ideas on how I can take some pics or how to edit the photos please leave a comment, as I said before, this is a learning experience so everyone’s feedback is very much appreciated!!