I recently stumbled upon this plugin for Photoshop and Paint shop Pro. Its called Virtual photographer and has some pretty interesting filters you can apply to your photos. Maybe Im behind the times but Id never heard of it before. I'll be trying it out over the next few days. Looks like it might be fun.

The photoblog of Advocate Messenger chief photographer Clay Jackson is well worth checking out:

http://www.amnews.com/clay/

Here are a few particular posts that struck me:

• last splash
• rodeo at Boyle County Fair
• Sheep show at Garrard County Fair.
• Tobacco farmer from Casey County
• Sunset at Garrard County fair
• severe storm in Lincoln County

Just found this new blog on digital photography... not much there yet but looks promising as far as keeping up with stuff.

http://digitalphotography.weblogsinc.com/

The traditional purist answer to the question "I'm starting out in photography, what camera should I buy?" seems to be "buy a manual SLR (e.g. Nikon FM2) and a 50mm prime lens" and learn to do everything manually.

I'm curious as to how many of you were introduced to photography via this route. What equipment did you use, and how did you find the learning experience? How do you feel it made you a better photographer? Similarly, I'd like to ask the very same questions of those of you, whom like myself took the opposite approach of purchasing a zoom auto-everything digital camera. Would you recommend different approaches for different 'types' of people?

I'd be quite interested at examining the photos of the two different "camps" to determine if there were any discernable differences.

I recently received this in an email. What kind of advice can we offer here? I would suspect that many people have similar questions.

I’d like to ask for your help.

I am working on a project to accumulate and present “Images of Sustainability”. The project is to be sponsored by the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association for their annual Building Energy conference in Boston. The plan is to invite people to share images that evoke the meaning, purpose, and living examples of the principle of “sustainability.” The appeal will begin within the member community but will encourage open participation. The accumulated images will be viewable on the site setup for the project, will hopefully inspire people to think about and submit their own images, and will be displayed as a slide show in a special room at the conference.

I am looking for the appropriate resource to receive and present the images. An administered photoblog seems appropriate. While most photoblogs seem to be personal, this would be a community project.

We are looking to create a site with these features:

• Display single images from categorized galleries
• Display text describing image and source
• Provide simple navigational tools
• Provide visitors the opportunity to comment – and list comments
• Archive images in categorized galleries viewable as thumbnails (at least hundreds – potentially thousands – if the project is successful and we continue to let it run)
• Feature to allow image sequences to run as slide shows
• “About” Page describing the Project and its Sponsors (with links)
• “Submit” Page describing the guidelines for submitting images with link to submission Page
• “Submission” form that includes required fields (are these e-mailed to an administrator to review and post – or is there a backstage area on the site that allows for that?)
• Splash page with Images of Sustainability movie
• Sidebar columns for navigation and sponsor listings
• Perhaps a banner for prime sponsor and Project logo
• Editable look and feel (we have a professional designer working on most conference content)
• Administration privileges assignable to more than one person
• Creative Commons link for those who need to control use of their work (we will appeal for the charitable donation of images by professionals).

I would appreciate your thoughts/suggestions about the most appropriate approach to this project

Print is such a different world. It's all about DPI. It's all a mystery to me. But I am confident we will work it out.

Heiko, March 2004

Anyone coming across the news/magazine/advertising world is bound to come across a puzzling talk about dpi as a key indicator of the digital images one submits. For the amateur photographer it's confusing at best. Luckily, Gisle comes to the rescue with the Pixel FAQ:

Pixels and derived terms such as ppi/dpi and resolution are probably among the most misunderstood things in digital photography. The major source of confusion is the fact that a ppi field is embedded in the image metadata by most digital cameras. This gives some people the idea that pixels do have size and that print resolution is somehow a basic attribute of the image file. This is, of course, nonsense. Size in inches is not really an attribute of an digital image until it is rendered on some output device, so there is no reason one should attach any meaning to the print resolution embedded in the file. But people do, and get confused.

Q 2: My expensive camera outputs images that is only 72 ppi! How can I increase its resolution?

The ppi-number embedded in the image file by your camera is meaningless. Don't worry about it.

Users of BreezeSoft's Downloader Pro can automatically set the JPEG's dpi to 300 to avoid confusing email exchanges with the printers. If not, read Gisle's FAQ on how to do it lossless in Photoshop.

Cross-posted from my personal blog.

I have perviously to friends and foes admitted to being a somewhat geeky person. Hey, I even managed to buy my own domain, set-up MT and such amazing feats... (grin)

I must admit that in the photoblogging world the term super-geek and great-photographer commonly goes hand in hand.

I would love to have my photoblog Shutterview be one of those that shows a picture at a time where you click the photo to move to the previous photo etc etc etc

Like so many of the other amazing site that are referenced here.

Any - non-geek tips out there - or someone willing to help me out?

After seeing the success of sunday's toronto photobloggers get together and the interest from Lor over at Apparently Nothing I am seeing who would be keen on a london based photobloggers get together?

there must be a fair few of us, and we also have the european contingency, Rachel (brownglasses) in The Netherlands, Fredrik (Smudo.org) in Sweden and Chrys (Exposur3.com) in Germany to name but a few.

This post is merely an initial thread to see who's interested and who has suggestions or other ideas, so....tell me what you think

We're getting together again this Saturday, 3pm:

Reverie Cafe
848 Cole St
San Francisco

(out back if the weather is good)

Has anyone here ever made their own photography book? You know, the pretty coffee table kind that features photos rather than words. On one hand I'd like to know if there are any realistic DIY solutions... On the other hand I'm wondering how plausible it would be to do something on a little grander scale.

Any advice or input you could share? I've had an idea for a while that is starting to become more than just an idea.