Just found this quote on The Sonic Blog. Figured it was worth sharing.

Step out onto the Planet.
Draw a circle a hundred feet round.

Inside the circle are
300 things nobody understands, and , maybe,
nobody’s ever really seen.

How many can you find?

Lew Welch, 1926-1971

Jonathan Greenwald of Shrued (and you have to admire his pluck) proposed to his girlfriend Lesley on his photoblog! Thankfully she was kind enough to accept

I've been lucky enough to meet them both and it couldn't happen to a nicer couple, congratulations and all the best guys!

A new photography forum aimed at people for whom photography is also a business is open at ProPhoto Forums. Ask a question, contribute an answer, post a resource and check it out.

Another great build your own tutorial from Jyoseph. This time build your own ring light. I'll be giving this a try.

I was just reading about the trend of 'camera tossing' - where otherwise perfectly sane people throw their cameras into the air, either on a long exposure or using the camera timer to release the shutter. There's even a popular flickr group dedicated to the art.

When I was a kid we used to toss disposable cameras up into the air and see if the shutter would trigger when it hit the ground, but throwing my 20d into the air doesn't quite have the same appeal!

On a related note Kathleen pointed out the new Eyeball Camera, which I'm sure will also be spawning a flickr group anytime soon...

Joseph has posted an excellent tutorial on building your own lightbox. If you're in the middle of a dark winter and frustrated by the lack of photographic opportunities then this could be your salvation!

From Lorissa:

I wanted to tell you all about ShutterSeek.com - a new, free, community-driven photography news/resource site. ShutterSeek allows you to add photography-related posts regarding articles, events and products, rate posts and comment on posts. It should be fun and hopefully a useful resource for all of us photography lovers.

Almost every view of the site has Atom and RSS feeds, so if you like a certain topic, you can subscribe to the feed for that section or tag.

For those of you who have a site dedicated to photography-related information, you can add in your feed(s) to ShutterSeek to be pulled into the Blogs section (and onto the front page if they are rated). As soon as more posts are added, a Tags section will be added with various tag clouds.

So, take a look, and if you know of an interesting photography article, product review or event, sign up and add a post about it! We are still testing things out, so if you find any bugs, or have any suggestions - let us know.

Cheers!
Lorissa

The Daily Shooter

Smallest Photo Says:

Andrew Houser and Garth Leach bring you The Daily Shooter. A new online resouce for digital photographers. I've had a quick look and I'm thinking it looks VERY promising.

I'm sure this has been done, but I looked through the archives and couldn't find any entries about it? If it has, just direct me to the archives.

I'm curious about the best ways to convert a digital image to black & white. There are so many ways to do it but I can't seem to get the results I'm looking for. My shots come out looking flat and dull with too few greytones. Anyone have similar problems?

Is it better to leave the image in RGB and reduce all the saturation or do I simply click "greyscale"? Or do I go to the channelmixer and hit "monochrome"? Or is it best to convert in the raw file converter for those who shoot raw?

Or are there other better ways? Any good plugins? I use CS2...

Sara

This is something I mentioned to a few people at the London

Photobloggers meet-up a couple of weeks ago. We were talking about photo stitching software and I mentioned

a few pieces of software that do a great job of making 360-degree QuickTime panoramas.

The first thing you're going to need is PanoTools - I downloaded the version found

href="http://www.ptgui.com/download.html">here. After you've entered an email address you want the first

option: 'Download and install Panorama Tools (version 2.7.0.9/nh1)'. I don't use this software explicitly but

the other software I use needs bits of PanoTools to function.

Next, get yourself a copy of the Photoshop plug-in PTLens. This

corrects barrel and pincushion distortion from a wide range of lenses, and you should correct all your images

before trying to stitch them together. This is a really useful tool, I use it on most of my wideangle shots anyway, regardless of whether I'm stitching them.

Once that's done, I use a free tool called

href="http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html">AutoStitch to stitch the images into one

giant image. This software is fully automated: you just give your images and it works out how they all fit

together. You'd be surprised by just how good a job it does, especially for an automated stitcher.

The final stage is to turn this image into a QuickTime movie, which I do using

href="http://www.panoshow.com/panocube.htm">PanoCube. One tip for using this: your input image must be 2:1

aspect ratio. If your 360-degree image isn't tall enough, copy and paste it into a 2:1 image in Photoshop, and

position it with the horizon halfway up the picture. Leave black borders top and bottom where necessary.

I appreciate a lot of people using this will be Mac users, in which case you can probably use Apple's

QuickTime authoring tools for the last part.

These tools require a bit of trial and error to use properly, and I won't bore you with a step-by-step

tutorial (I don't have the time, apart from anything else!). After a few attempts you'll be pretty pleased with

the results. I've posted one of them on my site so far, and hope to do more when I have the time:

Radcliffe Square

Remember: always shoot in manual exposure and white balance modes so your images are all equally exposed, it

makes the final product much smoother. If you need some inspiration, try these sites for starters:

• The Virtual Tour of Oxford
• 360 Days photoblog

James | jcoglan.com