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

One of the features of the timeline is the large image, called cover, that is located at the top of the users profile page.

You can now get interesting Facebook covers from my personal photo collection on this website.
A large part of the images I offer for free on this site are now made available in the perfect size for becoming your Facebook cover image.

Enjoy!

Star trails (15 min exposure, f5.6, 17mm, ISO200)

What do you need to photograph star trails:

• DSLR camera;
• remote control or cable  release for the shutter;
• tripod;
• wide lens;
• fully charged camera battery.

The key of capturing the star trails is of course long exposure. Depending on  how long do you want  the trails  to be, the exposure time can e between 15 minutes to several hours. It is important that the sky is as dark as possible, with no moon and no light pollution as you find in a city for example. Also the other settings of the camera should be adjusted to eliminate the background light during the long exposure.

To keep  the camera shutter open for  so long you will need to enter in bulb mode, where you can start and stop the exposure using a remote control.  Check your camera manual on how to activate bulb mode and use the remote control to start and stop  the exposure. It is very important that your battery is fully charged so it doesn’t discharge completely during the exposure. Also if you have a long exposure noise reduction function  on the camera, processing time is usually greater than the exposure time so if you don’t like to wait, make sure you disable that function from the camera menu prior to taking the shot.

Lytro

Click anywhere in the picture to change the focus point.

You  can see below a few of the results, I will add them to the collection very soon:

What lens is the best?

Here it depends on what you want to photograph. If you want to take pictures of the galaxies, stars or the moon a 200mm or more telephoto lens is needed. A wide lens can be used to get more panoramic images of the sky. The faster the lens the better. Regarding the aperture, a  f/2.8 lens is always better than a f/5.6 as it allows more light to enter the camera in the same amount of time.

What can I photograph?

If you don’t have a telephoto lens, you probably won’t be able to zoom too much on the objects, but you can still catch panoramic images of the constellations, meteor showers, or astronomical events like lunar eclipses or comets. You can also try taking a wide image of the sky using a long exposure (try 30 seconds or more using ISO 400 or 800 at 18mm) to catch the star trails produced by the movement of the Earth (the apparent movement of the stars.)

The phases of a lunar eclipse captured from my balcony with a kit 18-55mm lens and a Nikon D40. The image is made using multiple exposures equal time apart, then stacked together in an image editing software.

As a word of advice do not try to photograph solar eclipse (or the sun directly) using your camera, without special equipment, as the brightness of the sun can destroy both your camera and your eyes, even if you just look a brief moment in the sun directly.

If you own a 200mm or more zoom lens, you can start by photographing the moon. As it is quite bright you can take photos of it at 200mm even without a tripod, but one will come in handy for sure. You can take shots of the moon in  it’s different stages of the lunar cycle, and spot the larger craters on it’s surface.

Full moon at 200mm taken with a Nikon D40 and a 55-200mm VR lens.

Other things you can try capture are the planets, don’t expect to see too much detail trough a normal lens,  but in some cases a 200mm lens can be enough so you can spot the moons of Jupiter.

Jupiter with 4 of it's moons (2.5 sec exposure@200mm ISO 1600 - Nikon D40, 55-200mm VR))

Galaxies, star clusters and nebula’s can be also photographed if you have a sensitive sensor (that allows high ISO) and a fast telephoto lens (e.g. f/2.8), although to get some details you will need to take multiple long exposures and then stack them manually or using software like DeepSkyStacker. The reason for stacking is that, without having a tracking mount that follows the earths movement, you cannot take longer than 3 or 4 seconds long exposures until the stars apparent motion on the sky leave you with trails in the image. So you need to stack a lot of shorter exposures to get as much light detail as possible. For the faintest of objects you may need hundreds of exposures.
The brightest and easiest to catch deep sky objects are the Andromeda galaxy and the Orion Nebulae. Both are visible to the naked eye with a size similar to a star, but large part of their surface on the sky is faint so you can catch it only trough a long exposure / stacking, or by using a telescope.

To see the current position of the celestial objects you can use one of the free sky maps available on the internet. I personally found the best to be Microsoft WorldWide Telescope. You can set your city position as well as go back and forward to a certain date in sky to observe the sky as it was at that date.

1)

Corroded paint surface

2)

Rust texture with weld marks

3)

Rusty red

4)

Metalic beam with rivets

5)

Concrete covered in plants

6)

Scratched blue metal

6)

Dented and rusty metal plate

7)

Red and yellow rusty metal

8)

Metal camo

9)

Rust forming on the surface of a metal sheet

10 )

Yellow paint

11)

Multicolored balloon

12)

Blue painted metal grunge

13)

Corroded painted metal

14)

Yellow painted metal sheet

15)

Red metal sheet with rust and scratches

It is said that a image is worth a thousand words, this is why I am sure a large majority of the people reading this needed a image to use in their day to day life to express something. No matter if you work in design, web, marketing or any other industry field, you had a moment when you needed a certain image for your work projects, presentations or just to decorate your wall.

If you are low on cash and cannot afford buying images from stock agencies, there are quite a few websites that offer free photos. One of them is of course our main site 4 Free Photos, but if you cannot find what you are looking for there we put together for you a useful list of other free stock photos sites that will be constantly updated. We hope that you will find it useful.

Free photos and public domain images sites directory.

Webmasters: If you have a website that you will like to add to our  free photos sites directory please add a link back to that page and let us know. We will do our best to add it in our directory.

As this year’s holiday season is approaching, I have uploaded a couple of new Xmas themed free images. They will be appearing on the site in the next couple of days so stay tuned.

You can see all the free Christmas related photos on our site in the collection we prepared here.

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!