Some great photography articles:

15 great tips for Candlelight photography

How to colourise black and white images

The best tip…”Capture an image with a sharp foreground and the rest will follow.” and many others

Some inspiring underwater photos

We’ve had alot of rain in Brisbane the last few days, here are some fantastic rainy day photos

Some useful links I’ve found in the past few weeks:

Zamzar is a free online file conversion tool, no need to download or install software, and it converts a huge range of image, video, document file formats.

If you ever lamented the number of cars on the road with one person in them, then you’ll like TripShare. It’s an Aussie service to get more people sharing their car travel and sharing the costs.

Work on your photos online using Picnik, another service where you don’t need to buy or download any software.

With the crazy amount of content up on the net at the moment, Popurls  is a great way to quickly find the most popular Urls at the moment

MailFreezr is a service that lets you create an email to someone, and then store it for as many years as you want, when it is then sent to the person. You’d want to make sure the recipient’s email address stays the same over the next 10 years..

We need this service in Australia - BookSwim is a netflix style service but for books..pay a monthly fee, get the books posted to you, and then post them back when you’re finished.

Zazz sells on thing, one day at a time, at a discount price.

This is awesome - a way to convert your own document into a magazine

Some great articles: Apples and Coloured bowl

1.Click on the Edit in Quick Mask Mode button.

2.Make sure the colors that you are using are black and white, then click on the Brush tool.

4. Using the brush, make the whole subject red. The quick mask tool uses that opaque color red as a default.

5. Then click on the Edit in Standard Mode button and you should see that it makes a selection. Go to the select menu and click on Inverse. (Select>Inverse) which will then select only what you painted red.
6. Go to the Layer menu and select Layer via Copy. (Layer>Layer via Copy).

Here is a quick way to straighten a wonky image in Photoshop:

1. Select the “Measure Tool” (in the eyedropper group)

2. Draw a line of a straight edge on your image. Use a horizon, wall etc.

3. Select >Image>Rotate>Arbitrary and the angle will have been filled in based on the previous line you drew.

4. Hit ok and Photoshop will adjust the image. Now crop.

If you hate paging in Flickr, and yes it does get tedious, try this cool tool out - Flickr Leech. The best thing is you can view the most interesting photos for any date that you specify on the one page.

Thomas Hawk has written a great piece on the top 10 ways to get more attention on flickr…

Photocritic has an excellent article on photographing smoke. Apparently the two secrets to taking great shots are inverting the image, and using grey smoke.

Here is one method I use:

1. Click on the Edit in Quick Mask Mode button

2. Make sure the colors that you are using are black and white

3. Select the brush tool

4. Using the brush, paint the whole subject - the colour should be displayed as red by default

5. Click on the Edit in Standard Mode button and the painted section will become selected

6. Go to the select menu and click on Inverse. (Select>Inverse) to select the inverse of the selection

7. Go to the Layer menu and select Layer via Copy. (Layer>Layer via Copy).

You should now have a layer with just the subject in it.

I’ve built a cheap lightbox to experiment with still life shots and improve my lighting skills. This one was made from sheets of foam from Reverse Garbage (thanks Amp), masking tape, cardboard and lots of lights from Bunnings. I’m using the cool daylight 125watt halogen globes, plus an extremely hot portable halogen spotlight.

It’s great because I can take photos any time of the day. The diffusion of light is great inside the box but the masking tape has caused some problems, and I have had problems with glare and reflections on glassware. Next on my list is to try a lightbox using diffusing material with the light sources placed outside.