Note: It’s a travel day for me today, so enjoy this post from the archives on portrait photography - one of the first articles that made it on the Cheapshooter site.

What is the most photographed subject in the world? People. Everyone is a portrait photographer, from the budding amateur with the point-and-shoot digital camera to the most advanced professional shooting photographs for the biggest magazines in the world. No matter who you are or where you are, there’s always demand for good portrait photography.

It’s unfair that portrait photography isn’t usually considered to be particularly difficult. All you do is get someone in front of the camera and click the shutter, right? Wrong. The masters of portrait photography construct their photo down to the tiniest detail and the smallest ray of light. Everything in the frame is accounted for and controlled, making the resulting photograph something more similar to a painting than a typical photo. Portrait photography is an exacting art that takes years to master, along with thousands of dollars of studio equipment, lenses and cameras.

Why should we care? The vast majority of photographers – me included – will never have the budget or time necessary to truly master portrait photographer. But it’s important to remember that portrait photography is an art to be respected. Like anything else, there’s technique and skill involved that can take a portrait from the mundane to something that can truly be treasured.

Here are nine simple techniques to help take your portrait photography to the next level without costing you a dime more than you’ve already spent. If you have nearly any digital camera that has come out in the last few years, you have more than enough to shoot great portrait photography. Start putting these 11 techniques into practice, and you’ll see an immediate difference in your results.
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Thanks to all our visitors who made this a great first week on Cheapshooter.com.  I’ve got some great ideas for next week, so make sure you are subscribed to our feed so you don’t miss a thing.

Here were our post popular photography articles for the week, in case you missed it

• Nine Easy Ways to Improve Your Portrait Photography (and they don’t cost a dime…)
• Free Online Photo Editors Grow Into Their Own
• eBay + Misspellings = Bargain Photography
• Do-It-Yourself PVC Lightbox

Have a great Sunday, everyone, and we’ll see you back here early tomorrow with some new ideas.

Getting the sky right in a photograph is hard. Even with the exposure set exactly right, harsh lighting can result in a sky that is blown out and boring. The solution has long been to use a polarizer, which increases the contrast in the sky. But these filters are expensive, and many cheaper digital cameras cannot even support their use. Instead of breaking out your wallet to spring for an expensive filter, here’s Photoshop to the rescue. I’ll take you through how to enhance your skies and simulate the effect of a polarizer in this latest Photoshop video tutorial. Watch it after the jump, and click here to see our first Photoshop video tutorial if you missed it earlier this week. Read the rest of this entry »

Online photo editors are making fine-tuning photos possible without any software at all.

Adobe Photoshop isn’t the only option for every photographer in every situation. With licenses running hundreds of dollars, Photoshop is an expensive investment for nearly any photographer, and sometimes all a photo needs is a few tweaks.

Enter the online photo editors. Over the past year, a number of different tools have popped up online, offering convenience and a surprisingly rich feature set without costing a dime. With online photo editors, uploading, editing and saving are all handled through a browser, eliminating the need for any downloads. Can these online photo editors match the power of Photoshop? No, and they don’t try. But they do what they are meant to do - offer photographers the means to perform a few common tweaks to a batch of photos from any computer anywhere in the world. And some have convinient options that the Photoshop jockey can only dream of.

Here are the top three online photo editors that I’ve used in the past.

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The Joint Photographic Experts Group - namesake of the JPEG file - announced today that they would consider adopting Microsoft’s HD Photo Technology into a new format, tentatively titled JPEG XR.

The new JPEG format promises to offer improvements in the way digital cameras record date, according to Microsoft representatives. These benefits would have the most effect in the low-end camera market, with budget digital cameras and picture phones able to take better photos without requiring heavier or more expensive hardware.

“Higher compression efficiency offers faster wireless uploads for longer battery life and an enhanced dynamic range that will help improve photographs taken in low-light conditions with a mobile phone or digital camera that does not offer sufficient flash assistance,” said Lance Howarth, general manager of the Media Processing Division at ARM Holdings PLC, a group which designs many of the processing components inside camera phones and lower-end digital cameras.

It doesn’t seem like the effects will be felt as much in the digital-SLR market, although better dynamic range would be a plus. But it would be nice to get better results from budget digital cameras. JPEG will vote on the new standard by October 2007, with implementation coming at least a year later.

Click here for the full press release and be prepared for some Microsoft hype. Think the new JPEG standard will make any difference or is this all just smoke and mirrors?