Most tools like Photoshop or Gimp comes with unsharp mask tools, this weirdly named tool increases the sharpness of your image and is something that most photographers need at some point or the other.
There is a nice guide over at Earth Bound Light that explains more about this tool and what the typical settings mean.
About a month ago I went to Italy, I am only now finishing going through the photos from there and have prepared a few black and white photos of Venice.
Via Geek News Central comes a link to a great list of sites that offers free Royalty Free Images.
These are images that you can use in your own projects, commercial or not, without paying for them.
Where To Find Great Free Photographs And Visuals For Your Own Online Articles
There is a nice collection of links on guides, rules etc on composing images on Digital Photography Blog.
Possibly the most useful advice comes from the same site:
..sometimes in knowingly breaking compositional rules we actually create some of the most interesting and emotion provoking images possible.
Following the rules is all about getting a feeling for photography, breaking them is about getting your own style and standing out amongst the rest.
The full article can be seen here
I have been shooting in RAW mode exclusively for about 6 months now and for me there is no going back. If your camera gives adequate performance in RAW mode and you are serious about photography there is no reason why you shouldn’t be using it.
Past cameras I had that supported RAW mode was very slow or the images were HUGE. This has been fixed in my D70 at least with its lossless RAW compression and speedy processing that does the compression in about 1/4 second, the camera also has a big enough buffer that you can fire off a couple of RAW shots quickly without having to wait. The D70 also has a very fast bus and card writing system so it makes good use of the faster memory cards, all of this combines to a no hassle RAW mode camera.
Some articles were published this week that goes into the whys of shooting in RAW links to them below, all of these were first found on the excellent Photography Blog.
Image Sushi: Sometimes RAW is better
The RAW truth
and for Nikon users a new version of Nikon Capture has been released, Capture is the premium RAW converter from Nikon.
So as I have been saying here I am hoping to launch a photoblog, I am now doing just that. It can be found at http://photoblog.devco.net/.
The idea is to post a photo a day, now I cannot take a photo a day, I am just too busy at work for that kind of thing. So I will get stuff from my 25gig or photos archive and will post new things as they come. As it is now there are posts for almost 2 weeks that I created.
It is powered by Movable Type 3.14 and making the templates was much easier than I first expected. My other sites are done from templates that I found on template sharing sites etc, this one I made myself so I’d appreciate any feedback on the design.
I like MT 3.x, I will be upgrading my other blogs to it, for now though I will need multiple installs of it unless I want to go and buy a full version of it, but I do not think this will break their T’s and C’s, I will just give each individual blog owner their own install which should be the same as someone on a shared hosting service installing their own copy, this should be well within the bounds of whats allowed.
On the comments question, I allow non registered comments but they need to be approved and I left TypeKey there in case people want to use that. Comments via TypeKey authenticated people will not need approval.
There are some changes I still want to make to the site:
1) Implement another RSS feed. Dave wants me to link to the full image in my feed, I guess this may annoy some people so I will make it a choice between thumbnails and full images.
2) Create some kind of people link section, like the one on this site, where I will link to other photoblogs that I like.
