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  • Do You Want to Take Better Digital Photos?

    Do You Want to Take Better Digital Photos?

    I’ll admit right up front that I am not a great digital photographer, so I am always looking to take better digital photos. I can take some great shots from time to time, but there are many times I look at the pictures and think, “what did I do?” It is all part of the learning process – I learn by doing not by taking classes. If I take a bad digital photo I always like to analyze why the photo didn’t work out the way I had intended.

    A few months ago I received a gift: a boxed set of digital photography books. I have owned many different digital photography books in the past, but these books were different in the way they were written. The books made digital photography, and photography in general, easier to understand to the point where I started to take more good pictures than bad ones.

    Learn to Take Better Digital Photos the Easy Way

    Scott Kelby Boxed Set

    In case you were wondering, the boxed set was called: Scott Kelbys Digital Photography Boxed Set, Volumes 1, 2, and 3. If you would like to become better at taking digital photos, I highly recommend that you purchase this set of three books. Regardless of whether you are new to digital photography, or experienced, you will find learn new as you read through these books, and then be amaze at how you have learned to take better digital photos.

    The one thing that makes these books stand out is that fact that they aren’t long-winded. Each page is short, contains a photograph of the topic at the top, and a few paragraphs that explain the topic. Each page covers a single topic, and is very easy to read. Scott doesn’t go into confusing details about how to take a great photo – he just tells you how to do it. Many books would go into detail about setting the aperture, shutter speed, and ISO for taking a specific photo, but Scott would just tell you what settings you should use without the extra long-winded explanation, so you learn to take better digital photos easily.

    Scott also tries to add a little humour to some of the topics to keep the lessons interesting. While it isn’t over the top, it does keep you wanting to read more. At the end of each book, there are example shots that he has taken, and below each picture he explains – in step-like-form – how he took each of the shots. This allows you to understand what you need to do to take a similar photo.

    Very large books have been written to help with understanding digital photography. Scott’s books, however, are just over 200 pages each. Since each page isn’t very long, it won’t take you long to read through each one. Another reason there are three books is because he covers many different subjects throughout all three books. Everything from portraits, group shots, weddings, sports photography, and photography equipment are explained through the three books.

    3 Volumes That Explain how to Take Better Digital Photos

    The first volume sets the stage for the next two. By starting with volume one, you begin to understand the basics of digital photography. The first chapter doesn’t go into introducing you to apertures, shutter speeds, or equipment, but rather how to get tack-sharp photos – something everyone who takes photos would probably like to learn. The chapters for the first volume are self-expanatory:

    1. Pro Tips for Getting Really Sharp Photos
    2. Shooting Flowers Like a Pro
    3. Shooting Weddings Like a Pro
    4. Shooting Landscapes Like a Pro
    5. Shooting Sports Like a Pro
    6. Shooting People Like a Pro
    7. Avoiding Problems Like a Pro
    8. Taking Advantage of Digital Like a Pro
    9. Taking Travel & City Life Shots Like a Pro
    10. How to Print Like a Pro and Other Cool Stuff
    11. Photo Recipes to Help You Get “The Shot”

    As you can see there are many topics discussed in volume 1 alone, and set the basis for allowing you to take better digital photos. Volume 2 continues to build from that with the following chapters:

    1. Using Flash Like a Pro
    2. Building a Studio from Scratch
    3. Shooting Portraits Like a Pro
    4. Shooting Landscapes Like a Pro
    5. Shooting Weddings Like a Pro
    6. Shooting Travel Like a Pro
    7. Shooting Macro Like a Pro
    8. Pro Tips for Getting Better Photos
    9. More Photo Recipes to Help You Get “The Shot”

    Between the first two volumes, you can easily see that there are many topics discussed – many topics that you would probably be interested in learning to help you take better digital photos. Still, there is one more volume that covers the following:

    1. Using Flash Like a Pro, Part 2
    2. Using Your Studio Like a Pro
    3. The Truth About Lenses
    4. Shooting Products Like a Pro
    5. Shooting Outdoors Like a Pro
    6. Shooting People Like a Pro
    7. Shooting Sports Like a Pro
    8. Pro Tips for Getting Better Photos
    9. Avoiding Problems Like a Pro
    10. Yet Even More Photo Recipes to Help You Get “The Shot”

    While many topics may seem to be repeated throughout several of the books, each one provides even more tips to help make you a better photographer.

    If you would like to take better digital photos, and you would like a straight-forward approach to doing so, I highly recommend you pickup a copy of Scott Kelbys Digital Photography Boxed Set, Volumes 1, 2, and 3 if you want to take better digital photos.

  • Speed Up Your Web Site By Using CSS Sprites

    Speed Up Your Web Site By Using CSS Sprites

    If you own a web site or blog, chances are you have thought about how to make your pages load as fast as possible. This is an obsession with many, while a learning experiencing for others. I am one of those that look for ways to make my blog display faster. I have tried and used many different tactics, including changing settings for the browser cache, gzip compression, WordPress caching plugins, reducing the number of graphics, and reducing the number of third-party widgets that appear on my blog. The more that has to load, the slower a page will become.

    When I created this new WordPress theme, I wanted to try something new – CSS sprites. CSS sprites are used by some of the larger web sites to reduce the number of image downloads that are needed to display a web page. While I am not an expert by any means, I have managed to get some of the common images that appear on this blog to load from an image sprite.

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  • Web Server Returns 404 Instead of 200 Status Code

    Web Server Returns 404 Instead of 200 Status Code

    I have been experiencing a rather weird issue with my blog recently, and one that I hadn’t noticed until I accessed my Google Webmaster account. The reason I hadn’t noticed the issue was because it wasn’t easily identifiable when viewing my blog, or the administrative pages. The problem was the fact that several of my posts were returning a “404 Not Found” status code instead of a “200 OK” status code.

    What has made this problem weird was that it was only happening on about 5 pages of my blog. All the other pages were returning a “200 OK” status code. Since all post pages use the same template file, and therefore are created the exact same way, I couldn’t figure out what created the problem. While the headers of the pages indicated a 404, the pages were displaying in the Web browsers without any problems.

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  • How to Backup Your Data Automatically for Free

    How to Backup Your Data Automatically for Free

    I have talked about how I backup my data, the tools and applications I use, and also how I have organized my data. I have also stressed many times in the past about the importance of data backups. Many people probably still don’t realize how easy, and cheap online storage can be to backup their data. If they experience a hard drive crash, it may be too late.

    In this post I will show you, step-by-step, how easy it is to use an online backup service to automatically backup your data. On top of that, the steps outlined below can be accomplish without spending a single dollar, meaning you can backup your data absolutely free!

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  • How to Become a Techie: Understand Don’t Memorize

    How to Become a Techie: Understand Don’t Memorize

    Back in college I had taken several computer programming languages. I had the opportunity (at times I use that term loosely) to learn COBOL, RPG, Visual Basic, C, Assembler, and the markup language called HTML. This was over ten years ago, so many of the languages used today, such as C# weren’t around then.

    I remember the first time I had to write an exam in one of those languages. It came as a surprise to learn that the exam was open book. In face, pretty much all exams for the programming languages were open book. After thinking about that for a moment I realized why they were open book.

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  • Advantages and Disadvantages of RAW Files

    Advantages and Disadvantages of RAW Files

    This is the second post in my two post series on discussing the JPEG and RAW file formats. My previous post discussed the advantages and disadvantages of JPEG files, and this post will discuss the same topic for RAW files.

    Unlike JPEG files, however, there are many drawbacks to using RAW files, and most who use digital cameras probably won’t want to use this format. The more experienced photographers, on the other hand, may love what RAW has to offer.

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  • Advantages and Disadvantages of JPEG Files

    Advantages and Disadvantages of JPEG Files

    I have received several e-mails in the past regarding JPEG and Raw files that are produced by digital cameras. There is a huge debate online about which image format you should use – some of the debates can get pretty heated. In reality, like all such debates, the answer is: it depends.

    While I have written many posts about both JPEG and Raw image formats, I decided to dedicate an entire post to each one, to sort of provide a more comprehensive description of each. After reading the two posts, hopefully you will determine which format best suits your needs.

    The most common file format in use.

    The JPEG file format has been around for many years, and is support by every image editor and web browser on the market. It is also supported by every digital camera, and any video camcorder that can also take pictures. Every digital photo print shop also supports the JPEG standard. If you want a universal image format, the JPEG format is the one to choose.

    Smaller file size.

    One aspect of the JPEG file format that has made it so popular is the fact that it doesn’t take up much storage space. This was important years ago when hard drives were much smaller, and the Internet connection speeds were much slower.

    Today, digital cameras that are set to save JPEGs can save them much faster than when using the Raw format since their smaller size means camera’s can write the JPEG to the memory card much quicker than Raw files.

    There are, however, a few downsides to compressing JPEGs, which I explain below.

    Compression discards some data.

    One of the downsides to the small files size is the type of compression that is used. The compression algorithm is “lossy”, which means data is discarded when the file is compressed. For the most part, however, you won’t notice any loss of data – unless you start to edit the file.

    JPEG files contain 8-bits (256 tones) of data for red, green, and blue. This provides 16.7 million colours. While this is more than enough for viewing the photo, it can be limiting once you start editing and adjust the colours. With enough changes, you will start to see banding in the histrogram of the image. Banding occurs when there are no pixels values in some of the tonal values, and looks comb-like in the histrogram.

    Digital camera’s sold today have the ability to capture 10-,12-,14-bits of data which provides more overhead for editing.

    Artifacts can appear with more compression.

    For the most part, you want to use as little compression as possible with your JPEG files. The more compression you use, the more artifacts may appear. These usually look like “smudges” in the image, and can really reduce the quality of the image. When saving JPEG images for printing, I usually set the compression level to the highest quality setting, which creates a great image without any artifacts.

    No editing required to print.

    If you aren’t into photo editing, and would just like to print your images, you can do so without converting to another file format. JPEG files can be printed directly from your camera without first editing the pictures.

    Processed within the camera.

    The one downside to the point above, is that all the settings from the digital camera have already been applied to the JPEG. This can be a downside if, for example, you had the wrong colour balance set, then your digital pictures would have a colour cast to them. As mentioned above, while you could edit the photos to remove the colour cast, you may also have issue with banding. With JPEGs you must ensure all the settings in your camera are accurate for what you want to produce. With black-and-white settings in the camera, you lose all colour information when using JPEG files.

    In my next post, I will look at the advantages and disadvantages of using Raw files.

    Which file format do you use, and why?

    What other points regarding JPEG files can be added to the above list?

  • WordPress: Cannot Modify Header Information

    WordPress: Cannot Modify Header Information

    I have created and edit the templates for my WordPress blog long enough to come across a few confusing errors. While I have had good success solving many of the errors fairly quickly, there is one that has continuously come up, and caused my blog from loading.

    Recently, however, I managed to find the cause of this common error, and since then have quickly corrected any problems that have caused the error. This post explains the error, and how I solved the problem.

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