Introduction to Photography

Introduction 

“Photography”, or “Light Drawing”, is essentially a combination of technique and visual observation. Traditional silver halide photography has been replaced by digital photography in almost all the areas of photographic profession. The digital photography industry has seen unprecedented growth in the last few years. This has been primarily due to the availability of high quality electronic imaging devices and fast and affordable computing power and digital storage. 

Developing the ability to make successful photographs must include some basic technical theories and compositional tricks. Learning photography is like learning to write: first you have to shape the letters forming words, then spell, then string together sentences and paragraphs. But individuals who can do all this is no writer until he or she has ideas to express through words. In the same way technical theory to photographer is a means to a visual end, something which allows better control and self-confidence in achieving what you want to say (Langford, 2000).

Principles of Photography: Technical Routines and Creative Choices
First, there are set routines where consistency is all important for example focusing, exposure, processing and final printing.

• Focusing is the process of placing the film- plane or sensor (CCD/CMOS) -on the focal point.
• Exposure is the exact amount of light that should hit the film or sensor to expose it correctly.
• Processing and Printing is a responsible job and essentially a consistent, controlled routine as this gives you the final output.

Second, there are those stages at which creative decisions must be made. These include composition of your subject, lighting and camera handling, as well as editing before final output.

• Composition defines what should be the content of a frame that we see. It also defines what is implied beyond what we see.
• Lighting is a creative way of illuminating the subject to express the texture, form, depth, detail and mood.
• Editing encompasses the processes of altering images as per the requirement before final print out, whether they be digital photographs, traditional analog photographs, or illustrations.

Equipment and functions

Lenses:
The most vital optical element of a camera is lens. The main object of photographic lens design and manufacture is to produce lenses which minimize optical defects (known as aberrations) while increasing resolution and image brightness.

Focal Length:
The focal length of a lens is the distance from its centre to the focal point (where the film is).

Type of Lenses

Normal: a normal lens is a lens that reproduces perspective that generally looks "natural" to a human observer under normal viewing conditions, as compared with lenses with longer or shorter focal lengths than 50 mm.

Wide angle: A wide angle lens is a lens whose angle of view is wider than normal lens that is around 50 mm.

Telephoto: A telephoto lens is a lens whose angle of view is narrower than the normal lens.

Lens Focal Length*	Terminology	Typical Photography
Less than 21 mm	Extreme Wide Angle	Architecture
21-45 mm	Wide Angle	Landscape
45-55 mm	Normal	Street & Documentary
55-135 mm	Medium Telephoto	Portraiture
135-300+ mm	Telephoto	Sports, Bird & Wildlife

Zoom lenses: A lens with variable focal length altered by shifting glass element. It is built into most modern compact cameras which do not allow interchangeable lenses. Good quality zoom lens is optically complex.

Macro lenses: A lens specifically designed for close work and with a long barrel for close focusing, called a macro lens. Some manufacturers call it a micro, which might actually be scientifically more accurate, but can be confusing, since it goes against the established convention. A macro lens might be optimized to provide its best performance at a magnification of 1:1.

Fish Eye Lens: Fisheye lens is a wide-angle lens that takes in an extremely wide, hemispherical image. Originally developed for use in meteorology to study cloud formation and called "whole-sky lenses", fisheye lenses quickly became popular in general photography for their unique, distorted appearance. The picture angle produced by these lenses only measures 180 degrees when measured from corner to corner: these have a 180° diagonal angle of view, while the horizontal and vertical angles of view will be smaller around 147o and 94o respectively . 


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Everything You Need to Know About Digital Marketing - Part 4

What is social media?

The use of a website for connecting with people via the internet to share information, photos and messages. “A marketing person should always ask one key question when beginning to develop a social media strategy i.e. How much chaos can this organization handle?”

What is a social networking website?

• It allows users to
• Create their own profile page.
• Build network of contacts and interact with them
• Post videos, photos, news, etc.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Media

Advantages

Disadvantages

When using social media for marketing products, social media could be easily utilized to create cost effective strategies and campaigns that can create viral results. Social media has the power to drive traffic to your website, blog, articles, etc. Social media is able to bring people together, especially when promoting global products or cause-related campaigns and ideas since it allows people from the different geographical location to meet at a single point and express their views. Social media could be the spark you are looking for to attract attention to your site, product or service. It could also be used to further build loyalty and long-term relations with your audience. Social media marketing could always be a fun and creative method of doing business.

The wrong online brand strategy could put you at a viral social disadvantage and may even damage your reputation, i.e, when you make a mistake offline, a few will know but when you make a mistake in front of hundreds or thousands of you online audience, most of them will know! Using social media for marketing and advertising could be more time consuming than companies expect. In order to get social media’s full effect, you need to understand how it works, when and how to use it and which channels to focus on depending on your end goal of using social media. Social media can have a negative influence on worker productivity. Employees may waste valuable time using social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter. They can also use social media to attack the company’s reputation! When social media is used excessively or in the wrong way, it could have serious detrimental outcomes on both mental and even physical health of individuals.

Major Social Media Channels

• Facebook - 200+ million active users
• Twitter - mainly for consumers and corporations
• Youtube - customise your own channel, helps in brand awareness and reputation building.

“Twitter is a great place to tell the world what you are thinking before you have had a chance to even think about it” - Chris Pirillo (Blogger)
“If I tell my facebook friends about your Brand, its not because I like your brand, but rather because I like my friends” - Mike Arauz (Strategy Director, Undercurrent)

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EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT DIGITAL MARKETING - PART 3

Search Engine Optimization or SEO
It is wisely said that "If your business cant be found on the search engines, you basically don't exist."

What is SEO?

Marketing tactics to get high natural search rankings in search engines for keywords that are important to your business. It helps significantly to increase targeted traffic to your website.

Who are the Search Engine Players?

• Google: 88.8%
• Bing: 6.2%
• Yahoo: 3.4%
• Ask.com: 1.2%
• Others: 0.4%

Search Engine's Goals and Objectives

1. Accumulate large index (database) of web documents to search
2. Provide highly relevant results to users (even better than competitors)
3. Generate revenue via paid advertising and related business ventures that typically leverage large amount of traffic.

Anatomy of a Search Engine:

• Search Box on the Top
• Just below the search box and on the right side of the page, there is sponsored listings or PPC
• Below sponsored listings is organic results or SERPs. (search engine result pages)

How do Search Engines Work?

• Spider "crawls" the web to find new documents i.e. Web pages typically by following hyperlinks from websites already in the database.
• Then search engine indexes the content (text, HTML codes) in these documents by adding it to their huge databases and periodically updates this content.
• After this, search engine searches its own database when user enters in a search to find related documents.
• Finally search engine ranks resulting documents using an algorithm that assigns various weights to various ranking factors keeping the most relevant on the top.

Google Query Life Cycle

• Query comes
• It goes into Google web servers
• The google web servers then indexes their database servers
• Google then document these servers
• And finally it goes to the Google user.

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About Us


DGMC is supported by its parent body Rajasthani Sammelan which has been in the field of education for the past 60 years. The educational body supports and facilitates learning activity for approximately 14000 students from primary to post-graduation.

Today’s young media generation is highly equipped with technology that enables them to imagine, visualize and innovate. This is an important reason for the large amount of eminent independent production across various media portals. Youngsters, dedicated to hard work have managed to create wonders with their innovative way of communication.

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT DIGITAL MARKETING - PART 2

Tools and Channels of Digital Marketing
Marketing has changed quite a bit since the Internet became a new channel to reach prospects and customers. While old school channels like television, radio, magazines, etc. are still important to marketing plans and strategies, inbound marketing is also extremely important. In the years that marketers have taken over the Internet, some vital lessons have been learned. There are different tactics, practices, results, and tons of curve balls in the game of Digital Marketing.

Along with these, there are some amazing marketing tools that can help make reaching your audience, creating online marketing campaigns, engaging with customers, and measuring results, a lot easier.

Here is a list of essential digital marketing tools that are sure to help in your overall marketing goals.Website

A well designed website is one of the most primary tool of digital marketing. Before creating a website, it is important for you to ask yourself these questions:

• Why you need a website?
• What will be your domain name? Who will be your hosting provider?
• What will be your logo look like?
• What kind of content you will cover in your website?

A website is important which can be a brand itself of your company and will add credibility of your organization. It is important for you to keep in mind these points:

There should be a logical roadmap i.e. Your vision should be clear for creating a website. Keep it simple, sober with minimum usage of flash.

Crucial Information

You should cover all important information about your business. Take any XYZ restaurant, for example —  "everyone wants music and in their giant 'about' page," the basic things like the menu, contact information and directions should be integral. 

Correct contact information

How many times do you visit a website and think 'how hard is to contact this company?' Have a number, email, address and a contact form easily accessible and visible,". It makes a difference because there's nothing more frustrating than being unable to get in touch with a needed business or service.

Clear navigation

A map is useless without a legend and a website is useless without clear navigation. Make sure you use easy-to-understand and logical names for the various pages of your site — contact, about, FAQ, etc. Being clever or cryptic will just be a turnoff for users. When developing your navigation strategy, you should consider a call to action. What is it that you want people to do on your site? Place an order? Email for a quote? Become a member? Come to your brick-and-mortar store? Call to speak with a customer service rep? Make your goals clear and obvious.

Security

If you're selling anything online, you need to put some effort into securing your site with an SSL certificate. The SSL will encrypt communications between you and your clients (i.e. a credit card number, Social Security number), which will allay their fears of providing such information, since there's so much identity theft on the web.

Social Media Integration

There are a lot of social platforms out there, and you should promote your presence on them on your website like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare. Integrating these platforms into your website will help boost your SEO, improve your business' footprint on the social web and build your following across numerous social platforms.

A mobile ready platform

Smartphones and tablets are driving an increasing amount of web traffic, and the numbers are only going to grow as mobile devices become cheaper and more mainstream. Andy Chu, director of Bing for Mobile, says 70% of task completion happens within one hour on mobile sites, meaning that people are often browsing on the web with intent — they're looking to do something, buy something or go somewhere. If someone searches for a restaurant on his smartphone, he's likely to eat at that restaurant within the hour, says Chu. So your website better be readable on handheld devices.

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About Us

DGMC is supported by its parent body Rajasthani Sammelan which has been in the field of education for the past 60 years. The educational body supports and facilitates learning activity for approximately 14000 students from primary to post-graduation.

Today’s young media generation is highly equipped with technology that enables them to imagine, visualize and innovate. This is an important reason for the large amount of eminent independent production across various media portals. Youngsters, dedicated to hard work have managed to create wonders with their innovative way of communication.

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT DIGITAL MARKETING - PART 1

Introduction to Digital Marketing
“A website must be supported with marketing and advertising if it is to become a true business channel” – Sam Saltis (Founder & CEO @ bwired)

What is the Marketing Process?

• Attraction
• Conversion
• Retention

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital Marketing is the advancement of your organization or brand using one or more of the various digital channels, such as email, cellular phones and social networks.

The Digital Landscape

• What are your goals?
• What do you want?
• What are your needs?
• What you can afford?
• Who are your consumers?

Students? Adults? Children? Corporates ? It can be anyone of these or maybe all of them.

Why has Digital Marketing become so popular?

The key drivers are:

• Relationship Building
It is one of the most powerful weapons for the long term retention. You can create long term values with effective relationship building. Maintaining regular communication with your clients is aided efficiently through digital channels. For example: Amazon emails suggesting products you may like if you simply subscribe on their website.

• Measurability
Digital Marketing offers substantial opportunities to measure everything, starting from ROI to engagement and behaviour. There are two classifications of measurements: Quantitative and qualitative. 

Quantitative measurements can be easily counted, measured or weighed. Qualitative measurements cannot be easily measured and are more sensory, behavioral, and even emotional. While quantitative items are easy to measure, the qualitative takes more effort and analysis. The key to success is to find a way to correlate the immeasurable with the measurable. 

In digital marketing, there are quantitative measurements (views, clicks, volume i.e. Number of likes and tweets, time) and qualitative (complaints, feedback from surveys). With the help of Google Analytics you can check various number of things for your website. Like how many people clicked your site, how many bounced back, how many visited your site again and so on.

• Cost
Heightened by downturn, usage of digital channels is highly cost effective. 

Let us understand this with an example:
Mr Ajay has been appointed for promoting a National Art Exhibition. So he identified around 4000 people within a 50 miles radius fitting into predefined criteria. He worked with designers to create invites. Then he got those invites printed for all the 4000 people. He hired a person who stuffed those invites in an envelope and also got it posted to those people. It involved transportation as well as other overhead costs. 

After this was done, he noticed that only 65 people responded to his invites out of 4000 and out of this 65, 10 people said they won’t be able to attend the exhibition. 

He asked himself a few questions
- Why so low response?
- How many actually received the invites or how many looked at the invite?
- How many wanted some more information?
- How many actually saw it and read and decided to come? 

He was not happy that after such a hard work and spending so much, only 55 people attended the exhibition. Had he been done the same inviting via Digital Marketing, considering email marketing as an option, he would have saved a lot and response would have been much better. How? Please check below.

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About Us

DGMC is supported by its parent body Rajasthani Sammelan which has been in the field of education for the past 60 years. The educational body supports and facilitates learning activity for approximately 14000 students from primary to post-graduation.

Today’s young media generation is highly equipped with technology that enables them to imagine, visualize and innovate. This is an important reason for the large amount of eminent independent production across various media portals. Youngsters, dedicated to hard work have managed to create wonders with their innovative way of communication.

INTRODUCTION TO TYPOGRAPHY

Introduction
Typography plays a big role in graphic design and can be one of the hardest things to get right. My aim here is to introduce some of the basics and the most common areas of typography that will be important in your graphics design work.

Typography plays a big role in graphic design and many designers are very passionate or opinionated about it. For this reason it is a very hot topic in design circles.

Developing your own skills in typography will take time and it can be one of the hardest things to get right. It is best to get a solid understanding of the basics as soon as possible in your education and career. However, it is a complex subject with a massive amount of detail which cannot be explained in just one article. So my aim here is to introduce some of the basics and the most common areas of typography that will be important in your design work.

So what is Typography?
Typography is an art form that has been around for hundreds of years. Words and text are all around us every day in almost everything we do. In every piece of type you see, somebody has considered how the letters, sentences and paragraphs will look in order for it to be read by us, or make us feel a certain way when we look at it. Sometimes it is done well, others not. Often it is us graphic designers who are the ones deciding how it will look, in our brochures, our logos, our websites and so on. The better we are at this, the more effective our designs will be.

Good typography comes from paying attention to tiny details as this can make the difference between graphic design work that is just acceptable or really good. There is more to it than just choosing fonts and making copy look good though – it is also about making things legible and readable (some of most basic functions of good typography) as well as making layouts look good in an aesthetic way.

Typographic basics
The following is an explanation of some common areas of typography. Learn More About Typography in Our Graphics Designing Course

Typeface or font?
Let’s get this one cleared up straight away! Designers are often unsure of the difference between these two, as they are both well used terms for the same thing. Actually, a typeface is a family of fonts (such as Helvetica Regular, Helvetica Italic, Helvetica Bold, Helvetica Black, etc.) but a font is one weight or style within a typeface family (such as Helvetica Regular).

Typeface classifications
There are many different classifications and sub-classification of typefaces, but the most common two types you will hear of are: Serif – these typefaces are the more traditional ones. They are distinguished by a short line or finishing stroke on the end of character strokes and stems (shown in the anatomy diagram below) and; Sans-serif – as the name suggests, these are distinguished by their lack of any Serifs. They only became popular in the nineteenth century and are considered modern as a result.

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Global Viewers!

Media  (TV, video, games, Internet, music, mobile phones) has brought about a substantial change in the experience of youth in our society. These changes leave many parents unprepared for the challenge on how to regulate their child’s behaviour and language with such technologies. These changes at times can have such drastic impacts that the complete behaviour pattern is changed.

The use of abusive language amongst the youth is a byproduct of films and television. The youth is being exposed to so much violence and abusive language in the form of names of films, songs or publicity of dialogues that leave an impact in the mind of the youth. The youth uses abusive language not only as trend but also because it is understood easily and thus leads to group acceptability.

The influence of western culture can be traced from the attitudes and behaviour of young adults. This varies from food habits, fashion statements, acceptance of violent behavior to sexual orientation. The emergence of music channels in the line of MTV has created significant changes in youth‘s language and their music preferences. Soap operas, movies and now days- the reality shows -made the youth increasingly aware of fashion and trends.  At present at least two among the five soap operas in Hindi as well as regional channels deal with the issue of premarital and extra-marital sex. Heavy viewing of foreign television programmes leads to the acceptance of western sexual norms like dating, live-in relationships. The present generation of young people, unlike their predecessors, lives in an increasingly globalizing world that is being transformed by a wide range of technological innovations. Language isn't just about communication; there is a strong cultural, social, political and emotional charge to it. The language of youth has changed, and now, television content must adapt to keep up with the younger generations' new interests and ways of communicating.

Arati Kamath 

www.dgmcms.org.in

Arati Kamath is a core faculty member of DGMC.