Making Money With Micro Stock Photography Agencies

Micro stock photography agencies supply images for download from their websites. Most of these images are used on websites, although some images may be used in other advertising media and materials.

For the photographer supplying these images, there is a potential source of income, although the amounts may be miniscule, compared to professional rates applicable to professional assignments.

For the amateur, hobby and beginning photographer, the potential income from a micro stock agency may be a substantial amount, especially if the images are of superior quality and are in constant demand by customers of the agency.

Once you know how to sell your images to the stock agencies, you need to know the images the agencies need, to meet their customer demand. For example, they may be looking for landscape images of a certain location.

If the location is near your area, you can go and shoot a few quality images and then present the best images to the agency. If they are accepted, you may be receiving a nice little earner over the next few years.

The hardest part, is creating the images the stock agencies are seeking, to meet the demand of their customers. If you are creating images, where they already have an oversupply, then they may reject your images, even though your images may be of superior quality.

This is why you should seek to find out the type of images the micro stock photography agencies are in dire need, before you make time and effort to shoot the required images.

In this way you will develop a reputation with the agency, as a reliable supplier of quality images and they may request more images from you, giving a potential boost to your source of income. The more of your images are placed in the stock library, the greater potential for a better source of income.

This is why, many photographers are supplying images to micro stock photography agencies.

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Traditional Japanese Modular Origami Designs

The goal of origami is to create a likeness or representation of an object using geometric crease patterns and fascinating folds. Traditionally, this is done without the use of glue or scissors and general only requires one piece of paper.

Modular origami, sometimes also called unit origami, is a relatively new invention in the origami world. This is especially so when you consider that origami has been around for over 1800 years.

There are many other traditional Japanese modular origami designs, including "balls" of folded origami flowers called kusudama, or medicine balls. These designs are typically not integrated and are commonly fixed together with thread.

The term kusudama is rather inaccurately used to describe any three-dimensional unit origami structure resembling a ball. There are also a few modular designs in the Chinese paper folding tradition as well; most notably the pagoda and the lotus, made from joss paper. Joss is paper that is burned in traditional Chinese deity worship.

Although Mitsunobu Sonobe is recognized as the architect behind the Sonobe Module, another origami student who took modular origami a step further is Steve Krimball.

According to origami historians, it was Krimball of the United States who took the Sonobe unit and developed new ways to build with it. The 1970s brought major breakthroughs in the unit origami world, providing the foundation for all models developed thereafter.

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Centuries Old Art Of Japanese Origami

Origami is the centuries old Japanese art of making fascinating folds to pieces of paper, and thus creating incredible representations of many common objects, from something as simple as a Kimono paper form, to complex and highly detailed human forms.

Origami got its name from "ori," which is the Japanese word for fold, and "gami," the Japanese word for paper. Origami, however, did not get its start in Japan. It began in China during the first or second century and then became popular in Japan sometime during the sixth century when paper became more readily available there.

It was in the Edo Period, from 1600 to 1868, that much of what was to become popular traditional Japanese origami developed.

A book called "How to Fold 1000 Cranes" was published in 1797, and was the first tome to contain the written set of instructions for folding a crane. The crane was then and is still today considered a sacred bird in Japan.

It is a Japanese custom that if a person folds one thousand cranes, then they will be granted one wish. Japanese origami became a very popular form of artistic expression; even being depicted in paintings and sculpture.

Japanese origami is an art form that lends itself to intricately complex designs for accomplished artists, as well as simple origami designs that young children can do. It is easy to explain a design by using line diagrams or photos, and can be mastered by anyone willing to learn.

Just as the ancient Japanese and Moorish peoples found creative and useful purposes for their models, so have modern Americans. Origami will also be a part of our future, as origami math geometry Kawasaki theorem education is available.

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Surprise Your Best Friends With Photo Mugs

Photo mugs are ideal personalized gifts for any special occasion. Each photo mug, includes an individual photo and some text.

The photo can be an image of the receiver of your gift and the text may be a favourite saying. For example, one friend may like to drink a cup of delicious coffee every morning, with his family.

You may like to add the text, Good Morning Dad, with his picture on the photo mug. You may like to get photo mugs for the rest of the family with their pictures and text for each family member.

This year, you are sure to surprise with your thoughtful personalized gifts. They will realize the time and effort you put in customizing the gifts, including specific photos and text, relevant to the receiver of each gift.

For example, you may notice the mug your wife uses every day, needs replacing. You can surprise her with a pair of personalized photo mugs.

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Decorating With Photographs Inside Your Family Home

Decorating with photographs on the walls of your home, is one of the better ideas for many homes.

Most of these photos may be images you have taken and hold a pride of place on your walls. They may be images of your family, your garden, pets, vacation, beach and landscapes. All these images tell a story about the family living in this house. Your home sweet home.

You family images may include newborn photos, to adult photos on their wedding day. Maybe even one or two images of you and your girlfriend, before she became your wife.

Images from your honeymoon, romantic getaway and family vacation photos. You may realise, some of the best images are the relaxing images, images of action, rather than stilted portrait images.

Once you take advantage of these tips, you will get a head start on some of your friends, who may use of incorrect decorating methods when placing images on the walls of their home. You can get further ideas by visiting photography studios and see the sample photographs on the walls by professional photographers working in the studio.

Galleries are another source of inspiration, to see how photographs are displayed to make the most of images on a wall. Many professional photographers sell their images through galleries, so if you look around, you will find days when you can look at the way professional images are displayed, to give you ideas to display your images.

You may even include images you have taken of your family with sports, movie stars and other celebrities. This could be the wow factor on your wall. You may even invite the celebrity to your home, to see the pride of place their photo holds on the wall.

These are some of the ideas you can use when decorating with photographs.

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Showing Creative Skills With Animal Origami

Making animal origami structures is something that artists of all skill levels enjoy doing. Animals are a large part of what make up traditional origami, and practically any type of animal can be represented through this paper folding art form.

Cranes are often times associated with origami because traditional Japanese folklore says that creating one thousand cranes will bring prosperity and luck, and some say a wish, to the folder. Although the crane may be one of the most recognized animal figures in origami, there are plenty of other animals you can construct from paper.

Those who have intermediate or advanced animal origami skills can create animals that look very similar to the real thing, and which also have a complex system of origami folds.

It is true that beaks, horns, feet and other animal details can sometimes be harder to create than the main body of the animal. Some more complicated diagrams may even involve folding separate sheets of paper and combining them into one larger animal figure.

Just like when constructing other origami figures, animal origami needs to have carefully aligned edges with crisp creases. Animals have become popular to build when learning origami. They can even be a part of a "scene" with a larger collection or given as a precious gift.

Be sure to display the figures you create on a mantel or shelf so that your children or visitors can delight in your creative skills.

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Animated Origami Techniques On Flash Players

For thousands of years in both China and Japan, the art of origami was passed from generation to generation with little regard for recording the technique for each model with diagrams.

Occasionally, a book would be produced to document a model. Once such book was published in 1797 and was called "How to Fold One Thousand Cranes." In the 1930s, Akira Yoshizawa created a better system of diagramming.

Then, with the advent of the Internet, origami transcended into another dimension. Flash players allow animated origami to reach the masses like it never has before.

So enters animated origami. With traditional animation techniques, cartoons are drawn on layers of acetate sheets with each segment of movement is captured frame by frame onto film.

This process is also used when animating origami diagrams, although the artist will produce sequences of digital drawings with computer software rather than using sheets of acetate and a camera.

The software allows the animator to change the look, size and playback of the origami animation in a way that would have been impossible using traditional methods.

The Internet is continually changing the way people communicate, learn and share ideas. This is especially so with web-based animated origami models.

It helps join the ancient Japanese art form of origami with cutting edge technology and hopefully helps more people discover the joy of this wonderful art form of fascinating folds.

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Improving Your Photos With Better Photography Tips

Better photography tips help to improve the quality of your images. One of the better tips you can use, is to read the camera manual, to take advantage of all the features of your digital camera. Just this tip alone, may help you take better pictures, taking advantage of the knobs and buttons on your camera.

Increasing your knowledge, also helps to improve your photography. You can join a local photography club, to exchange ideas with other photographers, take part in photography courses and go on field trips with members of the photography club.

Some of the members of the photography club are professional photographers, many are amateurs who love photography. Many of the best photographic images, have been taken by amateurs.

Taking advantage of these tips will help to ensure your photos are perfect every time. If they are not perfect, there are plenty of ways to edit your photos with photo editing software.

Almost every new digital camera comes with photo editing software like Adobe Photoshop Elements, which is a cut down version of Adobe Photoshop, the software used by many professional photographers.

I use Photoshop every day, in my work, when I need to edit the image, add special effects, create images for websites or even batch processing images for digital albums and photo galleries. I like to use reliable software and Photoshop has never let me down.

There are times when you cannot create the exact image you have in your mind, with your digital camera. This is the time when you edit the image with you photo editing software and adjust the image, till you are satisfied with the results.

It is easy to improve your images with better photography tips.

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Always Back Up Your Photos To Retrieve Your Precious Data

Back up your photos to easily retrieve your lost data, after your hard disk crashes or is attacked by a malicious virus and all your data is deleted. You always need to prepare for emergencies, because once you lose your data, you may lose precious photos for ever.

There are expensive data recovery services, where they may recover some of your data, but some data may not be recoverable from a damaged hard disk. This is why, you need to use at least two options to create data back ups and improve your ability to retrieve your lost data.

One option is to back up some or all of your data to another hard disk, DVD or other storage media. The second option is to use online back up and storage services to back up all of your precious data. Using these two options, helps to ensure you can retrieve your data when your hard disk crashes.

Some web hosting services also offer back up services, to store your backups. Depending on the size of your back up and the type of hosting plan, you may not have to pay extra for backing up your precious files with a web hosting service. This may be an ideal solution, if you have a website with a web hosting service, then you should enquire about backing up and online storage services.

The best back up solution, is to backup all the content of your hard drive, just in case your hard disk crashes and you lose everything. If this happens to you, then you can retrieve your data, from the backing up service.

Burning files onto a another hard drive, external storage disk, online storage, or a DVD, allows you to delete some files you may not need any more and free up some space on your hard disk. Always remember, before you delete any files, always create backups just in case you need those deleted files sometime in the future.

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Finding Trailers To Watch Online Movies

Watch online movies to keep you entertained and open your mind to new ideas. There are movie trailers online for Hollywood films, advertising the movie, to help you make a decision to rush to the theater and watch the complete movie. If you are not sure if you should spend money and effort to watch the newest Hollywood blockbuster, then you can search online for the movie trailer to help you decide.

Another movie option is home movies online, covering a wide range of topics including showing people on vacation, talking a number of topics including politics, home improvements, cooking, gardening and almost any topic you need. If you want to know how to do a simple task at home, you can search for it on YouTube and you will find a number of movie clips, informing you how it is done.

If I want the complete movie, I would rather buy the DVD with all the extras, rather than waiting for long downloads of a complete movie. With the extras, you get shorts and dropped scenes and directors commentary on each scene, while the downloaded movie may give you grief if you download from a pirate site.

Watching online movie trailers is often much more informative, helping you make a decision if you wish to buy the movie on a disc to play in your home theater.

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Finding Sites To Watch Videos Online

Watch videos online for entertainment and increase your skills with online courses. I like to visit online video sites like YouTube to watch funny videos and finding online courses for software I use on my computer.

I even watch videos on gardening, cooking and home improvement. If I need to know how to do a task around the home, I conduct a search for videos on the topic.

Some of the courses may be the complete online course for free, or it may include a couple of videos for free and then you have to run to the site to pay for the rest of the videos. This way the video creator can recoup some of the production costs.

I always like to search what is available on the video topic and then watch some of the free videos, read the offer for the rest of the videos on the website and decide if I wish to pay for the rest of the course.

If I can’t find what I need on YouTube, I enter the search topic on Google and find the videos I need on other sites. But whenever I like to watch videos, my first stop is YouTube.

I sometimes spend hours watching entertaining movie clips on YouTube. I love the ones where they pull some funny stunts, although I try to avoid watching videos where people or animals get hurt. Among the millions of videos, there are some trash videos, most are far better than the funniest home video shows on TV!

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Sports Pictures On My Fan Wall

Sports pictures highlight the athletic prowess of an athlete on the sporting field. I do not have the time to sit for hours on end to capture that one moment where an athlete takes a glorious catch on the athletic field. This is why, I place framed sporting images on the walls of my home, taken by professional photographers of momentous sporting events in history.

These images may include athletes running in Olympic events and winning gold, capturing the best moment of a local hero in a local baseball team and many other sports events. I love seeing people putting a total effort to achieve the unachievable, capturing the moment in a crystal clear image on my wall.

A framed image of superhuman effort, is what I use to motivate myself to make my own achievements in life. When someone tells me it cannot be done, time to give up, I say it is time to make a superhuman effort to achieve the unachievable, just like the athletes in sports pictures.

After pressure from my family, I have decided to create a fan wall, of sports pictures I have taken of sporting heroes with my family members. When we go to sporting events, we like to take images with my digital camera, with some of my heroes. Most of the images are surrounded with sports picture frames and signed by the athletes themselves.

Many visitors to my home, like to look at the sports images on the wall, and ask me about the newest images. I have thousands of images, many of them in photo albums and I have put my best ones and the ones most requested by family members, up on the fan wall of my home.

I am grateful for the athletes who participate in my images, most of them know me by name, so they can trust me and know that I may include their images on my fan wall. Some of them have even come to my home, to view all my sports pictures.

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Better Personalized Gift Ideas With A Portrait From Photo

Portrait from photo is a popular option these days. There are many artists who can create a fascinating portrait from photos. All you need is to supply a series of images and indicate the look of the final portrait to the artist, settle on an estimated price, before you commission the work.

As an example, you may be looking to provide a portrait to your wife on your wedding anniversary. You can take a few images in her favourite environment, telling a story about her life.

She may be a high powered executive, so you can look at taking images in her office. You may even take images of her away from the office, when she is not under the pressure of having to make executive decisions, in a more relaxing environment, at home or on vacation.

In another example, a portrait may be a surprise gift to your father. You may have taken an image of him in his favourite environment and used that image for a portrait to be created. The portrait can be given on Christmas Day to show your appreciation of the efforts he has made to help you through your life.

If you are looking for ideas to create a portrait from photos, you need to look at the story of the person in the photo. For example, if the person is a gardener, and loves to work in the garden every day, then you should take a number of images of him in his garden. His image should dominate the photo, but still able to see aspects of his garden, when the eye wonders to other parts of the photo.

To get more ideas, you should look at professional work from portrait photographers, where you can see the ideas they use to create portraits to satisfy the customer. You can find many of these images online and in photography books.

Using these ideas, you can include your own ideas to create interesting images to use when creating a portrait from photo.

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Teaching Haute Couture In Fashion Schools

Not many people know that the term "haute couture" has a very specific legal meaning. Fashion design programs undoubtedly teach what it's supposed to mean, but for the general public outside the fashion schools, it simply means "high fashion."

In their minds, and in increasingly general usage, it refers to fashion designed for the very wealthy or those with a lot of prestige. And the designers and houses that create these fashions are described with the same term.

That's why a school like the Academy of Couture Art (ACA) in West Hollywood, California, is unique among American fashion schools. This institution is the only French haute couture academy in the United States, having been granted the right to use that description by the official Parisian governing body itself.

The members of the faculty are designers who regularly create their own collections and present them in Paris, and the fashion programs offered by the school adhere to the more strict definitions of haute couture. The school aims to blend the European couture style into the fashion system of the United States.

However worthy the goal of the Chambre Syndicale, the ACA, and other couture fashion schools, the "haute couture" genie may have escaped the bottle and might not be forced back in at this point.

The phrase has now been used so often to describe fashion programs and designs catering to the wealthy that it's likely not possible to return it to its original legal meaning.

The work of the ACA will undoubtedly be viewed as haute couture in the minds of the public, but so will the work of other designers and schools that aren't strictly entitled to the designation.

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Online Degree Courses For Fashion Designing

It probably sounds ludicrous even to imagine that anyone could get a degree in fashion designing through an online program, when you think of what's involved, such as designing patterns, cutting and sewing fabric, using models, and so on.

It seems like a very tactile thing, and unless there's some kind of virtual reality course now available, it simply can't be done on the internet. The only real way to get a fashion design degree is to attend a traditional fashion school. Isn't that right?

Even a fashion merchandising course can be studied by online means quite easily. The business end of the fashion industry involves mostly theory and accounting, which don't usually require that the student be on a campus to learn.

So if you are interested in the industry, but want to concentrate more on the business and merchandising side rather than the actual fashion designing, an online program could be ideal for you. It's probably less expensive, and you might be able to remain at a full-time job while you're doing the courses.

It might take a bit of tweaking to launch your fashion design career through online programs. You will undoubtedly still need to arrange some in-person internships at a studio somewhere, since that simply can't be done online.

You might also have the added expense of getting your own industrial sewing machine, which would otherwise have been provided on campus. But much of your fashion designing course can indeed be handled through the internet.

If it would save you money and you could get a reputable degree by this method, it should be one of the options you consider.

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