The cover image is the first thing your Facebook friends see when accesing your profile (timeline) page. It is also one of the key elements that you can customize to make your profile page stand out.
To create a cover image on your own you will need to create a image that is 850 by 350 pixels in size. Anything smaller or larger will be adjusted to this size (either by crop or stretch) so it’s best if you create it in the optimal size from the first time. You will also need to take into account that the profile photo will be overlayed over the bottom left corner of your cover photo so don’t place there any important elements (text, key images) otherwise it might be covered by the profile image. For a more creative effect you can make the profile image integrated in the cover photo.
If you don’t want to create the cover photo on your own, you can pick one that is already made from the thousands of Facebook cover photos available online on sites like Alegri Facebook Covers.
Here are a few nice examples:
City lights at night
Sunrise from the airplane cover image
Holding Earth
Windows trough landscapes
Photographing star trails
Night sky can give a lot of opportunities to take wonderful images. One of them is photographing the trails caused by the apparent movement of the stars on the sky due to the Earth rotation around its axis.
The image below gives an example of star trail photography, being taken in front of a hotel during a weekend at seaside.
Water drops photos
This weekend I have been playing with water, trying to get some good water drop photos for the collection. My setup was composed of a large tray with water, a wirelesses triggered flash on a tripod, the Nikon D90 camera and most importantly a plastic bag with water and a hole that was suspended above the tray to generate water drops in the same area of the tray (so I could focus once and then take multiple shots).
You can see below a few of the results, I will add them to the collection very soon:
Sky has fascinated people from the dawns of civilization so it is no wonder that there are a lot of people today still passionate about astronomy, that spend the nights gazing at the stars. If you like observing the sky and don’t have a fancy telescope, but you do have a DSLR camera, here are a couple of tips on how you can use it to get nice pictures of the stars.
As holidays are approaching here is a quick tutorial on how to create a blurred out of focus lights background for your project.
1) Create a new file with a black background and the needed size;
2) Add a transparent layer on top of the background;
3) Add a new layer on top of the transparent layer and fill it up with a colored gradient. Right click on it (the gradient layer in Layers panel) and select Create Clipping Mask;
4) Go to the transparent layer and with a brush of the needed shape paint the lights using white. The colors of the above gradient layer will apply to the lights.
If you want to make the background more colored than black you can apply steps 3 and 4 to it also, but painting with a thicker or irregular brush and with less transparency.
Enjoy!
Star Christmas tree
Start with a blank square document. It is important for the document to be square in order to generate the correct shaped star.
Select the needed colors for the star (foreground and background).
In the top menu go to Filter->Sketch->Halftone Pattern. Make contrast max (50) and Pattern Type to line. Make sure the size you choose is large.
Again in top menu go to Image -> Rotate Canavas -> 90CW (clockwise) and then crop the image to a square if it is not already square.
Now it’s time to make the stripes a star. To do that go to Filter -> Distort -> Polar coordinates (select Rectangular to polar).
Depending of the use you can appy more effects, for example I used two masks to create the fade.
