Category: Photography Page 16 of 24

Many of us have gone through the tedious process of scanning our hard copy photographs in order to save them as digital files.

Whether you’re scanning just one to share on social media for #ThrowbackThursday, or going through an entire photo album to preserve the pictures for posterity, the process isn’t exactly seamless. You have to scan the photo, save it on your laptop, and then email it to yourself or share it via social media or a file-sharing site if you want to be able to access it on your other devices.

What does this result in? If you’re like us, it means you have a whole bunch of half-scanned photo albums sitting around.

This isn’t exactly an ideal situation. What would happen if you had a fire or flood? What if an album disappeared into the jumble of stuff in your attic, not to be found until you moved? Indeed, what’s the point of photographs if you never look at them?

At Nixplay, we think your photographs are worth sharing, whether they’re 60-year-old pictures of your grandmother or digital images that you took five minutes ago with your smartphone.

That’s why we think Google’s new app, PhotoScan, is rather cool.

How PhotoScan works

PhotoScan allows you to scan and upload your physical photos with just your smartphone, instead of needing a scanner and laptop. You can see how it works in this short video by Google:

Why scan your old photos?

There are plenty of people who think scanning old photos is a waste of time, or something they just don’t want to do.

Many of us love having these physical photographs – the way they feel, the way they look, the way flipping through a photo album can conjure up so many memories of a specific time. Why would you want to replace that with photos you see on a computer screen?

We agree! Digital versions of your images can never replace the physical copies that you and your family have spent hours of quality time poring over. Instead, think of those digital images as a kind of back-up plan. If something catastrophic happened, and you lost all your family photos, you’d still have the digital images preserved intact.

And here’s something else to think about. What if you wanted to share an old photo with a friend or family member who lived far away, even halfway across the world? You could mail it, of course, but that takes a long time and isn’t always reliable.

Scanning offers advantages in these sorts of cases. For one thing, you get to keep the original, instead of sending it on its own to a destination hundreds or thousands of miles away.

For another, you can share it instantly and in just a few steps. Take this example of sharing a photo using a Nixplay WiFi Cloud digital frame.

1. Use PhotoScan to scan your physical photograph.
2. Upload the image to your camera roll, Google Photos, or a social media app.
3. Open the Nixplay app.
4. Select the app you want to access, and the photos you want to share.
5. Select the people or frames you want to send them to.

And you’re done! That incredible 75-year-old photograph of your grandmother and grandfather on their wedding day is now showing up on the Nixplay Iris you gave them for their anniversary. Won’t that be a lovely surprise?

Preserving your digital photos

Of course, just because you’ve scanned and saved an old photo, that doesn’t mean that it’s truly been preserved.

Just as we all used to save our pictures in physical albums to keep them organized, we’ve got to exercise similar organizational discipline with our digital images. Experts recommend saving your digital pictures to albums, and then saving them on a flash drive (or even saving them on two separate flash drives – one you keep at your home, and another in a safe deposit box or another secure place.

Organizing your digital photos is a whole other undertaking – and when someone comes up with an app to make that easy and instant, we’ll let you know! But for now, we’ve at least got something that makes the first step, scanning, a whole lot easier.

For more on preserving your precious family photos, read our post “The Future of Family Memories.”

Beatrice Bisais

Bea is Nixplay’s Social Media Manager. She enjoys drinking coffee, reading about wars, and writing stories. Send her a message at beatrice.bisais@nixplay.com.

If there’s any food that really lends itself to being photographed, it’s holiday food. Christmas cookies and gingerbread houses, turkeys and cranberry sauce, pumpkin pies and warm apple cider – they’re all so pretty that they almost guarantee good pictures.

But good pictures can always get better. To make your holiday food photos really shine, follow these tips.

Pay attention to lighting.

Pro food photographers know that the difference between a delicious photo and a starkly unappetizing one often comes down just to lighting.

Natural light is almost always best, but unless you’re a pro who’s able to get all your dishes out of the oven at the exact same time, it’s not realistic to expect to use natural light for everything.

Luckily, food shots can look almost as good with artificial light – as long as it’s bright. Kitchen lights are, unfortunately, just about the worst lights available for food photography, but a bright reading lamp or table lamp that you can bring into your kitchen will do the trick.

If you’re really serious about food photography, it’s worth it to invest in a special photographic light.

Take photos as soon as it’s ready.

Food, especially savory food like meats, casseroles, and other cooked foods, look the best when they’re just out of the oven. This is true for a couple of reasons: first, because hot foods look the best when they’re still hot, and second, because you can bet that the food you serve won’t stay untouched for long after it’s hit the table (unless, of course, you’re making it solely for photographic purposes).

In order to make sure you get the shot you want at the right moment, try to set up your scene before the food is ready. If you’re using a tablecloth, make sure it’s laid and ready to go.

If you’re using any festive props, like sprigs of holly or a centerpiece, put it all in place. This will make the few seconds you spend getting the perfect shot much less stressful.

Take the photo as if you’re taking a portrait.

Holiday food, in particular, evokes certain feelings in all of us. It makes us think of celebration, family, warmth, joy, indulgence – the list goes on.

When you take your food photos, try to think of the image as a portrait. Food can’t pose, of course, but you can certainly bring out its emotional qualities through your choice of background, props, camera angle, and more.

Christmas cookies, for example, remind many of us of the magic of our childhood Christmas seasons. Get that feeling in your picture by including your Christmas tree in the background, or placing the cookies on a bright holiday plate next to a vibrant centerpiece.

Spend time on your plating.

That stray crumb may not catch your notice when you’re just looking at your food, but it’ll stand out like a sore thumb in your photograph.

Borrow a tip from the pros and use Q-tips to pick up crumbs and stray food particles, and make sure to wipe up any splatters – even ones that you don’t think will show up – with paper towels.

Use low angles as well as more conventional ones.

Much food photography is taken from straight overhead, and for good reason. This angle creates great pictures – but it’s far from the only one you should be using.

Try placing your camera directly on the table and shooting a “fork’s eye view,” as it’s called. Other options are shooting from above with the food at a tilt, shooting your food straight on and centered in the frame, or zoomed way in. All will give you interesting images that go beyond the typical ones you often see.

And don’t forget to show off your food photography by adding it to your holiday playlist on your Nixplay WiFi Cloud Digital Frame! For more ideas on creating great holiday photos, read our post “4 Tips for Making Your Holiday Photos Even Better.”

Beatrice Bisais

Bea is Nixplay’s Social Media Manager. She enjoys drinking coffee, reading about wars, and writing stories. Send her a message at beatrice.bisais@nixplay.com.

You’ve probably heard it a hundred times, or even said it yourself. “Get my good side.” Most of us probably just think of it as a joke and allow ourselves to be photographed on whatever side we happen to be facing at the moment. Still, there are people who will change positions in a photo because they swear that they have a good side—and they won’t be caught dead posing with their “bad side” facing the camera. But how much truth is there to that? Do people really have a good side and a bad side?

Well, it turns out your position-changing friend may actually be onto something. Even the best looking people don’t have perfectly symmetrical faces, so there are always going to be very slight differences in the photos you take from each side. Many people know this already, but don’t use that knowledge when it comes to photos. If you look in the mirror, you might notice that when you smile, one corner of your mouth moves upward a little more, or one of your eyes closes slightly less. This is pretty normal, and though most people don’t really notice it, you do because you look at your face so often.

But that’s not all. It turns out that most people are perceived more favorably when they are photographed from the left side. A study found that people overwhelmingly prefer to look at the left side of other people’s faces in photographs. That even held true when the left side was mirrored to look like it was the right side. The study found that people’s left side tended to exhibit “a greater intensity of emotion.”

So you’re most likely going to look best photographed from your left, but that’s not 100% certain. Some people may legitimately look better from their right, so don’t give up hope if you think your right side is your best.

What you can do is check out your old photos and decide which side you think suits you best, and get some opinions from trusted friends. You probably have quite a few pictures from either side if you haven’t given it any thought until now. You can also hold a piece of paper up to cover half of your face while looking in the mirror. The side with the most upturned features (mouth, cheeks, eyebrows) is probably your “good” side.

So is your friend being a little dramatic when she moves to another position before you take a picture? Probably, but it does seem that she’s technically right about being photographed from a certain side.

No matter what side you’re standing on when a picture is taken, the best way to display it is always with a wifi cloud frame from Nixplay. Enjoy crystal clear picture quality for all your photos—not just those selfies from the left. Check out our selection of frames today and find the perfect one for you!

Beatrice Bisais

Bea is Nixplay’s Social Media Manager. She enjoys drinking coffee, reading about wars, and writing stories. Send her a message at beatrice.bisais@nixplay.com.

That special time of year is upon us once again, when families gather together to celebrate love, spend quality time with each other, eat delicious meals and…take lots and lots of photos together.

If there’s one season when even the most reluctant photographers among us pull out our smartphones and snap a few images, it’s during the holidays. There’s something so special about seeing everyone together, especially if you have family members who live far away.

To make sure you get the best pictures from this special time, here are some tips for making your holiday photos even better.

1. Start out with some standard poses to get everyone comfortable.

Whether it’s a professional photographer or you behind the camera, one of the best ways to get a good portrait of your family is to start with some standard poses.

You know the type: everyone bunches together or puts their arms around each other, and smiles on the count of three. These could very well end up being boring photos – in fact, they probably will be – but there’s a good reason to include them.

Most people feel a little insecure when they’re being photographed, and it can take a couple of minutes to loosen them up. By starting with poses that everyone expects, you give your subjects a moment to get cozy together and start talking and laughing, which is when you’ll get the really good shots.

One last note: make sure to take lots of photos to up your chances of having at least one great shot of everyone.

2. Allow for movement and playfulness.

Portraits don’t have to be posed. Especially when you’ve got kids in the family that you want to photograph, a candid portrait often says a lot more than one where everyone’s looking at the camera.

After you’ve shot the standard posed portrait, keep your camera handy while your family mills around on their way back to whatever it is they were doing. This can be a wonderful way to get some candid shots.

Another good tip is to ask the family members you’re photographing to do something together before you start shooting. Have the parents sit down and play with the kids, or ask your siblings to have a conversation with each other. As your subjects forget about the camera, you’ll see them relax back into themselves – and that’s an important element of any good photo.

3. Look for emotion, rather than perfection.

This tip comes from Babble contributor and photographer Me Ra Koh, who photographs families all across the country. When you’re taking holiday family photos, what you’re trying to capture is the warmth and love that are present. You don’t need a perfect composition, or even perfect focus, to do that.

When deciding which shots to keep, pay careful attention to any photos that show who your family really is, even if the shots feature some imperfections. If you can feel the love shining out at you, that photo is a keeper.

4. Photograph from a kid’s eye view.

The stars of holiday photos are almost always the kids. After all, the joy that appears on their faces as they decorate cookies, open presents, or play with friends and family is a beautiful, magical thing.

To really capture their perspective, get down on the floor and shoot from their eye level. You’ll find that you get pictures that are not only more intimate, but also more interesting.

Of course, all the family holiday photos in the world won’t do you much good if you don’t have a way to display them. A Nixplay Iris digital WiFi frame will let you show off as many photos as you like – you can even send them directly to the frame from your smartphone by using the Nixplay app.

Browse our Nixplay Iris colors, as well as our other digital frames, in the Nixplay Store.

Beatrice Bisais

Bea is Nixplay’s Social Media Manager. She enjoys drinking coffee, reading about wars, and writing stories. Send her a message at beatrice.bisais@nixplay.com.

Less than a generation ago, parents would spend hours compiling physical photographs of their families into thick photo albums. Depending on how crafty a mom or dad was, the album might be painstakingly organized and annotated, with notes dating every image – or, at the other extreme, a collection of random images jumbled together that you needed a guide (like mom or dad) to explain.

But these albums are gradually becoming a thing of the past. Like so much of the rest of our lives nowadays, our photographs mainly live online or on our various devices.

This has led to an issue that’s become common among everyone from college kids to grandparents: an overabundance of pictures.

When you’ve got a smartphone with a camera on you from morning till night, taking a photo is almost too easy. Parents have literally thousands of pictures of their children; frequent travelers have endless strings of photos from their trips; and grandparents find themselves bombarded with photos of their grandkids via email, text, and social media.

How do we navigate this new digital landscape without drowning in our own pictures?

Digital tools to preserve digital photos

As digital photography has become better, easier, and more popular, all kinds of tools have popped up to help people organize their images.

Online photo hosting sites let you get your pictures off your camera or laptop and into the cloud, organized into virtual albums.

Digital wi-fi cloud frames like the Nixplay Iris and the Nixplay Seed let you organize and display your images in playlists. You can even send pictures to the frame from anywhere in the world.

But this could be just the beginning of how our own photographic preservation techniques are changing, according to the NPR article “In the Digital Age, the Family Photo Album Fades Away. While many of us may still feel nostalgic for physical family photo albums, it’s likely that our children won’t have that same association.

They will have lived their entire lives in the digital age, when taking a picture means snapping a photo on a smartphone and being able to see it or share it immediately afterward. They’re used to scrolling through virtual albums on hard drives, phones, and social media sites. For them, a “family album” is more likely to be a hard drive that gets pulled out at holiday gatherings, or passed down from grandparents.

The NPR article quotes Clifford Lynch of the Coalition for Networked Information on the way generational preferences and technology are changing the way we archive our pictures.

According to Lynch, children today will likely expect to be able to watch themselves grow up through digital albums and online. Physical photo books may document specific events, like a baby’s first year or a college graduation; however, the sheer volume of images that we all have now will make the kind of family albums that we held on to in the past impractical.

Becoming your own personal photo archivist

Admittedly, keeping track of your digital photos can be a lot harder than throwing all your hard copy photos into a shoebox.

This is because we split our pictures up onto so many devices, and so many platforms – you may have pictures on your phone, your Facebook and Instagram accounts, a cloud service like Google Drive, and a computer, just to name a few.

The first step, then, is to put all these photos together. The best way to do this is to use two external hard drives, one as an original and the other as a copy that you store with a family member or in another safe place away from your house. This way, you won’t lose all your pictures if disaster strikes your home.

Since you want to be able to actually see and enjoy your photos, too, a digital frame can be a perfect counterpart to your photo hard drive. With the Nixplay app, you can create photo playlists to serve as mini-albums.

There are all kinds of approaches you can take. If you have kids, consider creating a special playlist for each child, as a kind of digital baby book.

If you’re an avid traveler, divide your playlists up by trip, or by region of the world.

If you’re giving a digital frame as a gift, try creating playlists that document important moments you’ve spent together.

The family album may be slowly becoming a thing of the past, but that doesn’t mean your photos are doomed to be hidden away on a hard drive forever. To find the Nixplay digital frame that fits your family, read our post “The Right Digital Frame for Every Type of Family.”

Beatrice Bisais

Bea is Nixplay’s Social Media Manager. She enjoys drinking coffee, reading about wars, and writing stories. Send her a message at beatrice.bisais@nixplay.com.