Fotoviva Art Prints

Jacky Parker lives in Buckinghamshire and discovered her passion for plant and flower photography whilst studying for the Royal Horticultural Societies Diploma in horticulture three years ago. After seeing some of her photographic images we knew she would be perfect for Fotoviva, and we were very happy when she agreed to join the Fotoviva team. She uses a Nikon D200 and macro 105mm lens for close up work and certainly has an eye for that perfect shot.

You can find her first picture in our Flower Pictures section. Plenty more of her superb pictures will be uploaded in the coming weeks so please check back regularly.

What a busy week at Fotoviva! We would like to welcome another new contributor to the Fotoviva team with the arrival of John Woodworth who is a highly regarded landscape and travel photographer from Hertfordshire. His excellent work has been featured in various magazines and is also sold on Royalty Free Stock Photography websites.

We are looking forward to adding more of John’s photographs to the site in the coming months but you can find his first piece titled ‘Orange Flower’ in the macro section and another in the Fine Art Scenes category called ‘Desert Life’.

Here at Fotoviva we would like to welcome photographic contributor Don Tiffney from Lincolnshire. You can find his first poster art / canvas print in our Macro photography section where we showcase his ‘Purple Crocus’ picture.

Don is well known and regarded for his landscape photography from the UK, especially his Scotish landscape images. He works with a Fuji S3 Pro DSLR which is a monster 12mp camera that produces stunning results. Don’s exceptional skills bring out the best from the camera and we are delighted to showcase some of his stunning art work here at Fotoviva. All his prints are available as either giclee canvas art or poster art prints.

This month’s free wallpaper is of our beautiful and contemporary Gerbera Flower photograph which can be downloaded from our wallpaper page from today.

Shoot in RAW
One of the best things I have come across to help perfect your photos is to shoot in the RAW format rather than JPG. Some photographers would disagree and say you should get the shot right first time in camera without post processing on the computer, but I disagree. With RAW you can either make minor adjustments to make it perfect or drastic changes to give your image a different ‘feel’. Most of the pictures on fotoviva are taken in RAW mode.

If you have a point and click camera, chances are you won’t have the RAW option, but if you have a DSLR or bridge camera you should find it under your settings. You will also need a program such as Adobe Photoshop or some other image software that supports RAW files. Photoshop is one of the best and has some great features in the program.

So what is so good about RAW?
When shooting in standard JPG format your camera takes the settings and creates a jpg with them. With RAW your camera takes the settings but does not embed them into a file. It simply says “these are the settings you used, but feel free to change them to suit before finalising to jpg.

You can change the white balance, exposure, contrast, and many more settings. It’s well worth it to get that perfect result. But remember, it’s always best to try and get it as near to perfect as you can in the first place, rather than relying on with RAW settings.

You can find a great tutorial by Adobe here.

Welcome to the Fotoviva blog, the place for photography news, thoughts and updates from the main Fotoviva Photography website. We will also be posting useful tips for improving your photography and Photoshop skills. Check back regularly for the latest news in the world of Fotoviva