The wonderful site for tricks to make your life easier, Lifehacker, has a great recap of thier useful tips, tools, and downright tricky tricks to make a better foto from 2009.

What’s covered? Check out these direct links:

Position Your Tongue Properly to Look Good in Photos

Take Better Pictures by Treating Your Still Camera Like It’s Video

Avoid Mediocre Portraits with These Tricks

Set Up a High Speed Photography Studio in Your Garage

Create Abstract Light Art by Snapping a Camera-Toss Photo

Be A Better Photographer On Vacation

Take Better Self-Portraits

DIY Tennis Ball Photography Stabilization Unit

Shoot Better Nighttime Pictures

Be More Photogenic by Forgetting About the Camera

Breathe Like a Sniper to Take Better Photos in Low Light

Create a Basic Ring Flash

Use Composition Rules to Take Better Photos

DIY Beauty Dish Enhances Your Portraits

Create Stunning High Dynamic Range (HDR) Photos

Create Studio Quality Photos Using Natural Light

Make a DIY Photography Light Box with K’Nex

Take Great Panoramic Pictures with Any Camera

Take Better Pictures by Studying Studio Layouts

DIY Tilt-Shift Photography Lens

Take Awesome Sunset Photographs

Create a Flash Diffuser Using An Empty Cigarette Packet

Make a DIY Macro Lens from Old Binoculars

Yes, there’s been a lull in blogs, thankfully for all the right reasons. It’s called work.

There’s been a few things I’ve been juggling regarding my world domination foto work. I have a couple of shoots coming up before we enter 2010, and once ‘10 kicks in, there’s a big ol’ project coming up that’s required some extensive work indeed.

I’d like to spill the beans (tell you) what’s coming up, but that would be telling, now wouldn’t it? :-p

Seriously though, I’ll be covering the upcoming work in great detail in seperate blogs over December, I felt it would be a little more…fluid… to do it all at once instead of just snippets as I went.

Just letting you all know I’m still alive (be it by blog or by breath), and, you know, I’m thinking of you all.

Not everyone can rattle off the wide world of tech that comes with carrying a camera. Equally, many keep thier camera fixed on ‘Auto’, since they rarely keep learning texts on hand when out shooting fotos.

Salvation is at hand (literally), as Nikon have released the Learn & Explore app for the iPhone/iPod touch. This free app contains tons of  foto fundamentals and shooting techniques, and covers nearly all you’ll need to know about getting the shot right.

Best off (after the ‘free’ price tag) is that all info applies to all cameras, not just Nikon.

Yet another app to make me drool over the iPhone…

[Nikon Learn & Explore App] via [Lifehacker]

With that, my famous and/or generally shy readers should like this…

Adam Harvey designed this flash-equipped purse which, when the pre-flash of an intruding camera goes off, will fire off it´s own series of flashes, effectively drowning out the intruding shooter´s own camera.

An example via Adam´s project page:

Anti Paparazzi Purse by Adam Harvey (foto via www.ahprojects.com)

The shy subject would need to point the purse towards the offending fotog’, so presuming you’re not too wasted coming out of that so-hip-it-hurts club, shouldn’t be too much hassle. Adam’s also working on accessory-sized pieces, so perhaps soon you’ll be able to combine a broach and earrings with the bag, covering every angle.

Equally of interest is the Blur Anti-paparazzi facial spray, which contain ultra reflective nano-particles, or shiny little bits of dust. Developed by Troika and Kok-Chian Lelong, this unreleased spray will (it seems) lay a fine coating of that shiny dust where applied, and reflect the camera flash as to blank out the captured image.

The effect? See for yourself:

Image via www.We-Make-Money-Not-Art.com

What about cooler, less bulky or (possibly) skin-affecting  technology you say? This Times Online article from 2004 mentions that HP developed an electronic badge that, if the camera plays nice by having the software to support, will use face-scanning tech to simply fuzz out the shy subjects’ face. Further research into if this will ever come to market produced no answers, so wait and see on that I suppose.

I also came across a mention of a cape that would also fuzz out visual recordings, sadly re-finding that link has been Monday’d into not happening. Grrr…

A quick flip side for those celebs who actively want to be surrounded by cameras; Nokia has been long rumoured to be working on a ‘Celebrity Mode’ feature that, via WiFi, sends out a signal to anyone interested that they’d in fact love to have their foto taken at this time. And here I was thinking todays’ cries for attention couldn’t get louder.

As a foto guy who isn’t pap scum (for this is how I consider them), I have absolutely no problem with this field of research. In fact, as I live in a highly-touristed town and happen to own a recumbent bicycle, I don’t exactly love it when people start furiously snapping at your truly trying to relax on a ride through town.

In today’s lens saturated times, someone having a problem with thier shot taken (famous or not) should have an easy way to stop this. It’s called the right of privacy, a right that certainly isn’t as guaranteed as it once was.

Final note; A reminder that NONE of these products are yet available to buy, although Adam’s says on his site that a limited batch of bags will be available soon. Until these or other tech solutions come to market, it’s a hand to the camera and a reminder to keep those knickers on. Have you seen what pops up on Facebook?

Have you done as I have and just recieved/downloaded Windows 7 to get your PC working properly after suffering Vista for the last 2 years?

Good, because Win7 fixes a lot of things Vista got wrong, although they forgot something for us foto folk: RAW support when browsing files in Windows itself. By this I mean opening a folder and seeing the picture directly, not a generic icon.

Thankfully, Fast Picture Viewer is a wee little freeware program that fixes this, adding proper image preview of RAW foto files. This will a preview image to your RAWs within Windows, without having to fire up Adobe Bridge or other such RAW browsers.

I’m probably going overboard mentioning Win 7 so much, as it also works for Vista and XP.

What can I say, the delivery man brought me a Windoze version that works!

[Fast Picture Viewer]

Think what you will regarding Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace prize, but in my book the real highlight of this year’s round awards was honouring Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith with the Nobel Prize for Physics, given for thier invention of the CCD camera sensor.

For the non-technical, the CCD sensor is essentially what replaced film inside the camera to be able to make a direct digital recording of the image the camera captured.

Invented 40 years ago, it only came into general use over the last 10-15 years, being the heart of any digital camera. Now being slowly replaced with CMOS sensors (which offer vast improvements on image noise and power consumption), it was still THE fundamental stepping stone towards getting digital image recording to market.

Interesting footnote: While it may have taken 20 odd years to get to general use, the basic technical concept was devised in about.. 1 hour. Threated by employer Bell Labs with a funding cut, Boyle and Smith sketched out the idea on a blackboard in that fateful 60 minutes, devising a solid enough concept that they were both saved from funding cuts as well as being set up to work on the idea fully.

Check out this Wired.com article for more.

While the last couple of site builds (versions) were functioning and able, a good amount of user feedback (and visitor statistics) indicated that further work was necessary. Also on my end, I was unhappy with much of how things were working both as a contributer and reader, so that sealed the deal on renovations.

So what’s a boy to do? I basically spent the summer learning about website design, Wordpress (the ‘instant’ blog system powering this site), and scouring the Web for tips and fixes on how to build a better website. I modestly hope I’ve succeeded…

Although there’s definately still more features and areas to be added over the first couple of weeks of October, the main chunk of work is finished.

Biggest changes include:

• Serious design cleanup and fixing of layout issues.
• Fixed comments so leaving a few words could not be easier (via Facebook, Twitter, etc).
• Moving away from serving (getting) my fotos on flickr.
• Setting up NextGEN Gallery as my main foto viewer.
• Adding NextGEN widgets for ‘10 Random Fotos’ as well as ‘6 Recent Fotos’. Neat huh?
• Major overhaul of the Foto Sets, again thanks to NextGEN.
• Search box now (mostly) supports foto searches by tags.
• Easier to find me via Facebook, flickr, other social networks.
• Pulled many old Foto blogs/posts since they don’t fit in the new flow of things.

With all that done, you’d think I’d be kicking back and firing up my Playstation for some overdue Wipeout, no? I wish!

Still to come:

• A ‘QuickTour’ area for those who simply wish a express view of my main works.
• Reboot of the ‘Tibetans in India’ project form my visit to India in early ‘09.
• Foto Shop. A place to buy foto prints for your very own.
• Foto and words, foto and words, fotos and words…
• A very special mini-project in 2010.

Back to work for me, I think we can all agree those ’still to come’ features deserve some virtual sweat n’ push.

It gives me a serious amount of joy to share this fact:

Up until today, my website has often upset me.

Not the reaching out through the Web, the content itself, or the basics of what the site *did* (and how it did it), but the fact that limitations in my web-making skills and flickr were starting to add up.

(Spoiler: That time is over now.)

So, over summer I hit the books and learned a few things, reasearched my mind to breaking point finding the best system to interate fotos into the site, and lost many a night to getting it all to work together and play nice.

Ta Da.

Since it’s 4am and I would very much like sleep now, I just wanted to have a late-night ‘yay’ and say thanks once more to all peoples who check in often, hope you dig the changes.

There’s still more to come and a few bugs to fix, but over the weekend I’ll starting up with overdue blogging, as well as putting all the Foto Sets online.

… And that’s not counting both my last project on TIbetans in India, nor some very special stuff in future.

“For one reason or another, we can’t pay for for usage and you sign away on reprints, but we offer a printed credit of my name or (sometimes) website for exposure and portfolio building.”

Now, to be sure, this is a oft-discussed topic in the photo world, and there are levels to each argument as valid as they are absurd. I think most would agree this is also something that is weaved tightly into photography’s history from day one (the easily copied aspect of fotos making the lost ‘limited/one-off’ factor reflected into value), and as the digital thunder into our cameras continues as it is, the paycheck numbers are indeed getting smaller, if there at all.

Just as before for us foto-jockeys, when you start off as a ‘professional’ photographer (you not only live and die by the captured moment but seriously dedicate your working life towards it), the fotographer starting off in business can’t just blindly say no, as the offer of exposure can be gold in those starving early days.

Being in the earlier stages of my foto career (the trade-off of a 5 year vinyl/music addiction, oh well…), these offers of printing without paying are something I struggled with, and to make sense of it let me offer the two recent situations I went through:

• Request#1: A group of 3 writers with a small “taking a humorous look at travel” book of fotos and essays request a foto for their book. While they cannot pay, they are happy to offer a printed credit at the back ‘Photos by:’ credit section. Included shortly afterward is a release for publishing.
• Reply: I write back and accept (being a smaller, non-corporate project they easily qualify), and after a couple of emails requesting details on placing and usage (cover foto, half-page inset?) and requiring copyright clearance/payment for future reprints, was ignored and I presume dropped for print.

• Request#2: After seeing a foto from my Egypt collection on flickr, I get an offer for print from a media hot/not video website +paid+ service that prints 6 magazines yearly for clients. “Unfortunately we have no budget for photos” they say. It should also be noted that they charge 1000€ yearly for their services, and in balance point out those clients are in media so the exposure is certainly worth a thought.
• Reply: While this one was somewhat tricky (you don’t have money for fotos… for a media trade mag???), I was certainly interested in exposure to further my work, and therefore offered this: Free use, but in exchange clear credit for the foto (see below), a six-month pass to their site’s content (as I presume they’re seeing my work value, it’s a similar service/product share/give) as I’m studying video more, and a copy of the magazine. I put this in a polite email, it was never answered, nor the call I made to their UK office politely asking for a reply, for which I’m still awaiting…

Foremost, what shocked me about these times was the general apathy and lack of professional courtesy in communication and reply. It was pitiful to put it politely, and I’m still sort of in shock about that aspect. Even if you’re not interested, take a moment to say so. Rude.

After that, what I noticed in these cases was this: As long as I said yes, I was in the good books. If I raised an issue to assert that the freebie was within a (I thought) reasonable limit, I was dumped without so much as a thanks.

What’s going on? Am I that rude or naive in my “(I thought)” polite-and-businesslike emails? Is it the tide of fotos that Joe&Jane Public are giving out that’s breeding these habits? Are the issues I raise that out to lunch???

At the end of the day, I humbly say that I in fact feel quite secure in my decisions. Why? While I certainly am happy to help myself and others out by giving a ‘freebie’ (I am certainly somewhat Socialist), what I hope I did that may have shut me out was protect the interests of my works, as well as hold it to a relative value based on my time and costs. Things may be changing in fundamental ways in Fotoworld, but blindly asking me (for I don’t know you, stranger) for one of my hard-earned fotos for gratis, and without much detail saying how I’ll get all sorts of exposure out of it.

Cameras cost money. Lenses cost (a lot) of money. Travel costs, computers/programs for editing, my rent, the time I put towards my fotos instead of other work… It all costs m-o-n-e-y…. And while I feel for you on tight budgets for fotos (more than you’ll ever know), please keep in mind that I have bills to pay and that you contributing *as you can* is how I get out to take those shots.

A parting word from Harlan Ellison on the matter, even if it is a loud one…

…And the irony of course being that I’m not paying him for this…[/lang_en]

As I submitted some images recently, I searched out a way to apply a sharpen effect to my shots in Photoshop, but unlike Pshops’ sharpen or even smart sharpen tool

(under filters for you noobies), I wanted something I could go back to and modify later, perhaps if I applyed a curve that would require this step back in sharpness.

A Google and further linking later, a High pass option I dig, courtesy of Creative Bits:

1. Duplicate the layer you want to sharpen.
2. Go to Filter>Other>High Pass
3. Enter a radius of 1-10, click OK
4. On your layers palette, set the blending mode to Hard Light
5. Drop the layer opacity until you find the strength you like

Many thanks to elbandito for this handy workaround! =°)