If you are frequent player of golf game, you will know that the key to playing a good game is definitely your golf swing. The stroke may look very simple but it takes plenty of time and effort to perfect it. As the professionals put it, the only way to perfect it is through constant practice. Thus, practicing the golf swing may turn out to be the most boring part of the game for some golfers.
Golf swings require upkeep, but most golfers don’t spend nearly enough time on the range reinforcing the good setup fundamentals needed to build a repeatable golf swing. You’ll enjoy the game more if you first spend the time at the range to work on making consistent contact. Bear in mind that it is often the quality that counts, not quantity. Try to find 30 minutes a few times a week to work on reinforcing the fundamentals of grip, ball position, alignment and posture.
For a start, you should not try to correct too many problems at one go. Focus on one or two drills and work closely with your instructor to identify the mistakes. You should also start with shorter clubs and slowly work your way up to your woods. In addition, you have to practice the way you play. That is, add some competitive pressure. For instance, in short game practice, pick nine different shots from around the green and try to hole the ball in as few shots as possible.
Working on your skills need not be limited to a golf course practice range. Your backyard or living room can do very nicely to reinforce fundamentals and develop short game skills. Indoors can be a great place to work on your putting and setup. Swing in front of a mirror to associate what you’re seeing with what you’re feeling. For putting, lay two clubs on the ground parallel to each other and about three inches apart. Without a ball, practice taking your putter back and through on a straight path. You may wish to repeat this for at least 20 times a day, in order to enhance your fundamentals.
These are useful tips that will help to improve your basics golf swing, if you are willing to put in the hours and effort. You will have to motivate yourself to practice consistently by setting a target for the year. If you have the encouragement of a instructor or partner during your training sessions, it differs a lot in your progress.
For more information on the best golf instructors, beginners golf instructions, golf instruction book, golf training aids, tips to improving your golf swing or where to get the best golf equipment, please visit the following website: http://golf-guide.mygeneralknowledge.com/best-golf-instructors.php
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How to photograph jewelry
Copyright (c) 2006 Sasha Petrovich
Photographing jewellery can be tricky, but with a few concepts and budget below US$500 it is possible to achieve near-professional look of the photographs. This guide is intended for absolute beginners. Terminology is simplified, and camera adjustments are discussed with only jewellery in mind.
1. Equipment
1.1 Digital SLR
Biggest spend for near-professional look of jewellery photography is for the digital SLR. This is an absolute must. Second-hand camera will be as good. Camera without many features and without high Mega-Pixel rate will work just as fine. 3 Mega Pixel is more than enough.
Note that what makes the difference is the quality of the optical system, not the number of actual pixels.
Digital SLR will allow you to manually adjust every aspect of the camera. Automatic modes are not appropriate for jewellery.
1.2 Lighting
Avoid using any flashes. Don't use camera's built in flash. Don't buy stand-alone flashes. In fact, don't buy any lighting equipment. Desk lamps 60W-100W will do just fine.
Photo tent will help a lot, but is not mandatory. You get find them for as little as US$20. Terminology varies, so "Photo Tent" will also be called "Light Cube", or "Soft Light Box". Do your searching and find one approx 20" (50cm) in size.
You will need 3 lights. Two matted lights -- soft lights, and one reflector light. Place one matted light left of the area for jewellery, and one to the right. Place reflector light near where the camera is.
Whatever you do, avoid mixing light types. Use only non-fluorescent lights, and isolate your photo 'lab' away from natural light.
1.3 Tripod
To have freedom with many settings that will be a must, we will have to use longer exposures. For longer exposures to achieve maximum sharpness, we'll need a tripod. Our hand shakes too much, when camera runs at exposition 1/2s or 1/5s. Buy a 'tripod' for US$10-$20. You don't need a heavy duty tripod. If your setup will be on a desk, you can chose mini tripod - approx 10" (25cm), and stand tripod on the desk as well, or longer tripod, approx 50" (125cm) and stand it on the floor.
2. Setup
Position the lights as described above. Two desk lamps with soft light (irrelevant if you are using photo tent -- the tent is there to soften the light), and reflector light at the front. I keep the cube open at the front, for easier adjustments and photographs, unless jewellery is highly reflective of the image of me taking photograph.
Uniform background colour is recommended. White background works great. Black background is a little harder to work with. I use one of the white wooden shelves that was sitting in the garrage. Hardware stores will sell these for a few dollars.
Jewellery neck stands look effective only on some pieces, but for most laying on the white surface is the best.
3. Jewelry Arrangement
Spend time arranging jewellery. Clean the jewellery if needed. Polish and remove finger prints. Lay it nicely. For chains, spend time to even out all links and to lay it in a perfect circle. For fashion jewellery this may be a little tricky simply because it's made of various materials and it just doesn't like to sit perfectly on its own. Use blue-tac to fix it where you want it.
4. Taking Photographs
Set your camera to manual. This is where you can adjust all settings yourself. You can leave auto-focus on if you wish, that is about the only setting you can have automatic. Disable camera flash. With static lighting and without using flashes, you can spend time moving the lights until you get perfect setup, before taking shots.
Learn the following 5 camera adjustments: Aperature (f-number), Sensitivity (ISO number), Shutter Speed (Exposure), White Balance, and Focus. These 5 are your bread and butter.
4.1 Aperature
Also known as f-number. This setting widens or narrows the lens, limiting the amount of light that comes into the camera. This directly affects shutter speed, and film sensitivity (since we're using digital camera, film sensitivity is adjustable like anything else).
This setting is responsible for the 'focal lenght'. With high f-number eg f/22 or f/11, when taking jewellery photographs, parts that are close to camera will be focused as well as parts that are further away. With low f-number, eg f/2, only the focused part will be in-focus, and parts of jewellery that are further apart or closer to the camera will become fuzzy. Use this setting as it suits you. You may want to create certain effect, but if you don't, keep this setting to f/11. Overdoing this setting will limit the light coming into the camera, and you'll have to make sacrifices elsewhere to compensate.
4.2 Sensitivity
Also known as ISO number. This used to be film property, and expressed in numbers like ISO200, ISO400, ISO800 etc. The higher the number, more sensitive the film, less light it needs, and thus more expensive. In Digital SLR's this is merely just a setting, but the higher the number, more noise camera will capture. The more light you have, you can go lower with this number. For our limited lighting, ISO800 or ISO1600 will be fine, but try not to use ISO3200 -- it adds visible noise.
4.3 Shutter Speed
Also known as exposure, it is a measure of time camera will be taking the light. When photographing moving objects, you would want this fairly short: 1/200 or or 1/400. However, we're taking static objects, and with the tripod camera is static as well. This gives us flexibility in going as low as 1/30 or 1/10, or even 1/2. Value 1/2 means that camera takes light from the object for half a second. If anything moves during that half a second, photograph will be blurred.
Adjust shutter speed freely until you get desirable effect. In fact, when taking photographs of jewellery against white background, you will want photos over-exposed. Over-exposure should affect only the white background, where small imperfections of white surface will vanish into pure white. If your camera has light meter, it will display a warning that you have too much light, number 2 or 2.5 could be flashing in your viewfinder. This is good :-).
If your background is black, you'll want it under-exposed. This will keep the black background black, remove some imperfections, but leave the jewellery just fine.
4.4 White Balance
With different colours present in every light source, our eyes naturally adjust to what white is. Cameras try to do the same and for general photography are quite good at it. However, for jewellery, you'll want to try all manual pre-sets yourself and chose best result. If everything fails, manually adjust white balance, until it's good. You won't need to keep changing this setting from one jewellery piece to another.
4.5 Focus
Jewellery is static. It's easy to use manual focus, but auto-focus seems to work just as fine. If camera keeps focusing on the incorrect part, just switch to manual, and away you go. For most applications, auto-focus will be fine though.
4.6 Taking photographs
Take enough photographs for each peace. Use camera built-in display as a guide only. Colors and brightness will look slightly different on the computer screen. You can adjust some of it afterwards, but try to take a perfect shot in the first place.
5. Post-Processing
Restrain youself from using too many features of the photo editing software. All you need to do is manually adjust Brightness and Contrast, and perhaps use 'Sharpen' feature. Don't apply any automatic adjustments, as these will get confused with too much white in the photo, or too much black.
Crop to the area you want to keep, save in internet-friendly format (eg 400x300) and you've got a near-professional photograph. Reuse the same photograph for 'zoom-in' crops. You won't be making images larger, instead you'll be cropping from your original, adjusting and saving.
Digital camera with 6 mega pixels or more will preserve enough of the detail for zoom-in's. If not happy, re-take photos of the detail.
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Sasha Petrovich works for Phaze 3 Gallery as technical consultant, including photographing all the jewellery for printed and online material. View his works at Phaze 3 Gallery website www.phaze3.com.au
Fantasy cricket: test your cricketing knowledge!
Many of us dream and aim for many things in our life, but it is not always that all our wishes are fulfilled. So how would you like to fulfill at least one of your dreams? If you are a cricket fan, you are simply going to love this. You cannot claim to be a true cricket fan if you have never dreamt of selecting your ideal dream team. Every other day, we see our team losing a match and start mumbling our disapproval about the team’s combination. In fact, all cricket fans feel that they are the ones, who can best understand the game and also select the best combination for playing a match.
Life gives very little chance to an individual to realize their dreams and so no one must ever let go this opportunity. Fantasy cricket is one such chance provided to cricket fans to realize their dream of selecting their own team. What is more important is, not only can you select your own dream team, but you can actually see them live in action. One more thing, you can choose players from several countries to represent your team. So your team can consist of leading players from all over the world and play in the field at the same time.
The concept of fantasy cricket is to play a virtual game of cricket. This game can be played online on any site that provides fans with the chance of playing the game. Playing the game is very simple. Whenever an international tournament gets underway, fans can log on to the site and play the game of fantasy cricket. The names of players who are playing in that particular tournament will be listed and points are allotted to them. The points are allotted based on several factors. The form of the player is taken care and also some of the previous performance of the player is taken into consideration before allotting the points.
Each player will be allotted a sum total of certain points within which they have to build the team. So, this means that the sum total of all the selected players cannot exceed the total allotted budget points. It is here that the actual knowledge of the cricket fan and his selection skills are put to test. So, if someone is really serious about this and wants to select his dream team, he can very easily do so. Find out how much you actually know about your favorite game and your favorite players.
Winning a game of fantasy cricket depends on the way your selected player performs on the field. So if you have selected a batsman who does not perform very well in the field during the course of the tournament, you could end up losing the game. So be very careful while selecting the members of your dream team. Never get swayed by reputation and big names while selecting your team. Go strictly by merit, as only merit will help you in successfully playing and winning fantasy cricket.
Ella Wilson is a cricket fanatic. She simply loves the game and tries to catch live action no matter where she is.At Stickiewicket she works on Online cricket score,live cricket score, Fantasy Cricket and Cricket News among other things.You can see her works at www.stickiewicket.com
