Anyway, getting started in any kind of photography you need to have a camera. Unfortunately me or anyone else can’t just tell you want camera to buy. You have to decide on your own how much is to much, what brand you want and features you have to have and what you can leave out. No matter what, go dSRL or digital single reflex lens, they are more expensive but you have a lot more upgrade options and flexibility. The biggest thing is you can change lens so you aren’t just stuck with what lens is attached to the camera, permanently.

If you are starting at zero the best place to start is with a dSLR kit and that is the first big question you have to answer, how much to you want to spend? A lot of people really get caught up around the idea of not having the gear they need, don’t. Personally I think that if you have any extra money to spend you should spend it on the camera and lens. Lens are a whole other topic, but my plan of attack as always been not to cut corners with the camera body or lens.

If you’re on a budget or have a set amount to spend, look at used dSLR kits. You can get a lot of bang for you buck by finding some really nice lightly used cameras on eBay and photo supply sites. Looking at new Nikon kits, I personally would start looking at the D90 kit then decide if you want to spend more from there. Nothing is worst then finding out 6 months after you bought a camera that you could have spent a couple hundred more dollars and got something/features you really needed.

The couple things to look for. ISO or a camera performance in low light is a huge plus and is one of the biggest reasons you really need to go to a place that sells cameras to look how the camera performs. You really should go look at cameras in person just to get a feel for how they function. Another thing is look at if there are any add on features or extra you want and make sure the camera you are eying will work with those extra items.

Unfortunately this is the one subject I can’t just say this is what you need because there are just to many choices for camera kits and this is going to be one of the biggest upfront costs of anything photography. If I were to recommend something to start with it would be the Nikon D700, but your into about $2,000 just for the body.

Why the D700? The biggest thing it’s an FX sensor camera and $2,000 less then the D3. In Nikon cameras there are DX and FX cameras, every camera but the D700 and D3 are DX sensors. DX sensor add a 1.5 times zoom or any lens that isn’t a DX lens, meaning that a non-DX 100mm lens would really be a 150mm lens on a DX camera body. An FX camera is full frame meaning there is no built in zoom so 100mm lens is 100mm end of story. As you’ll find out almost all of the really great lens are not DX lens. Also the D700 as great low light or ISO and every feature you could ever want or need.

• 40 Free Icon Set for Web Designers
• 22 Fresh Fonts
• 85 Illustrator Paint Brushes
• 105 Free Grunge Fonts
• Free Rust Textures
• 10 Free CSS Menu’s
• Social Media Icons

Automatic the company be hide WordPress had recent purchased Intense Debate and it looked like it would integrate into a WordPress installation quickly and easily. Again this was last fall, so after looking around and I decide I was going to install it on the site to replace my comment system at the time.

Well after about two weeks of using it I went back to the old commenting system because the plugin just wasn’t working like it claimed it would be. Just general buggy reactions, the comment moderation from the WordPress admin panel didn’t work for me at all, some of my comments were completely lost during the IntenseDebate import and I couldn’t get them to show up for anything. Automatic and IntenseDebate would respond to comments that the integration inside of the WordPress admin panel would get better but at the time it just wasn’t worth the trouble.

However about a month ago I came across IntenseDebate again and from the looks of it, they had really added a bunch of features to the plug-in. They had clearly address the WordPress admin panel interface and a few other really buggy things that didn’t work the first time I installed it.

I decided to install it on a development site and see how it worked. To my surprise it pretty much worked flawlessly, comment moderation was quick and snappy. You could reply to a reader’s comment from inside of the WordPress admin panel and true to they’re words all of the integration issues with the admin panel we a thing of the past. And they added one big feature, to me at least, Facebook Connect and Twitter account integration. Which basically means a Facebook or Twitter using can use their log-in information for those services on this site and it would post or tweet their activity to their accounts.

I thought this was big because really this whole social market craze is about getting people to connect with you and their friends in their social network. So being able to offer someone the option of using their Facebook log in to leave a comment and then it posts to their wall that they left a comment on this site is a huge plus. It puts content in front of a whole new set of eyes that may not have ever known about it and that is the very basic idea be hide social marketing.

There are and have been other ways to use Facebook Connect for readers to comment using their Facebook log in, for WordPress, I’ve just about tried them all and I was always unhappy with the results. This being my personal site, I make no income from it and I don’t want it mucked up with ads so I want to spend as little time as I need to on fixing problems and issues that come up so I can focus on creating content. The other Facebook Connect options out I found I spent much more time then I wanted trying to get Facebook Connect to work correctly. And again if I’m working on a client’s site that wants a tight integration with Facebook I’m going to spend on the time on it, but here on this site isn’t the place for that.

Enter IntenseDabate, it gives that functionality with out the fuss of always making sure the Facebook login works correctly because now the IntenseDebate developers those issues. The only that has to be done as a webmaster is about 5 minutes of set through Facebook when IntenseDabate is first activated and that’s it.

I have a personal struggle with designing comment section for this site. Mainly because I never budget my time well enough or just plan forget about putting any thought into the comment section. It’s again because I’m working on a site that isn’t paying me anything, rightly or wrongly I want to get it redesigned and finished up quickly. I’ve found that IntenseDebate is great for this, it takes the concern about spending a lot of time on design and commenting system and lets me get any redesign done faster and easier.

As you may be able to tell I’ve move this site and a couple other sites I run over to the IntenseDabate system and I really couldn’t be happier with how it’s preformed. Take a look at IntenseDebate for any WordPress Projects you may have, with it’s built in social networking functionality it’s a no-brianer for getting a quick Facebook Connect system setup on any blogging platform.

So why did I want to keep this a secret? Because this plug in makes portrait retouching just way to easy. Well I take that back it doesn’t make portrait retouching easy, it makes what I think is the hardest part of portrait retouching to easy and that’s skin smoothing. There are tons of ways out there to smooth skin but the toughest part of any one of those techniques is maintaining the texture of the skin. With Portraiture 2 this is now a non-issue cause it does all of that work for you.

If you’re a wedding photographer this thing is your dream, because you can batch process through it and the default settings and presets are good enough that unless you just want to add more of your style to the photos with just a few clicks of the mouse you can smooth the skin of hundreds of photos, all why you go grab some lunch. And if you going doing a commercial shoot Portraiture is powerful enough to really get the custom look you may want.

After downloading the trial, I decided to just grab a picture and give it a try. The after picture is on the left and before is on the right. Just look at the skin and the skin tones/smoothing. How long did it take to get those results? Two minutes and about four clicks of the mouse. I was never sold so fast on a piece of software, never.

Now there are some limitations,  and none of them are deal breakers. Portraiture does no retouching, it may look like it does but it’s really just smoothing out the blemishes so they blend into the skin tones. In the above picture I didn’t remove any blemishes before opening the picture in Portraiture and you can really till zoomed at 100% on the face. So you still need to retouch and remove any blemishes before opening the photo up in Portraiture. Just do everything like you would before you get to skin smoothing, which should be toward the end of your workflow, and when you get to smoothing skin let Portraiture do the work for you.

There are Portraiture plug-ins for Aperture, Lightroom and Photoshop and they are each separate to buy. Don’t brother with the Aperture or Lightroom versions, go straight for the Photoshop. This is just because only with the Photoshop plugin, Portraiture will put it’s output on a new layer that you can then blend with masks and opacity if you think the output is to much.

Here is a short Screencast of the skin smoothing of the photo above so you can see for your self how simple and quick it is:

Link: Imagenomic Portraiture

Some Links on the subject:

• Apple Aperture
• Adobe Lightroom
• Joe McNally’s Workflow
• Chase Jarvis on Aperture
• Lightroom Killer Tips
• BH Photo Aperture Review

Designers consider spec work the dirty hairy underbelly of design work. Some designers don’t know how to handle being asked for spec work, other designers are flat out against it and will walk away from any possible client if they ask for it. If you don’t know what spec work is this is the easiest way that I’ve found to describe it, and remember before you read this there is no other industry in the world were this would be asked of someone seriously.

Imagine you own a auto service and repair shop. One day a customer walked in the door having car problems, no idea of what it is or could be all you know is it has major problems that someone is going to have to find and fix them. So you tell the customer that you’ll get to work on it and call him with a quote to fix it. The customer responses to that by saying, “Why don’t you go a head and fix it, call me and I’ll come pick it up and if I like how you fixed it then I’ll pay for it. If I don’t like how it’s fixed I’ll take my business somewhere else.”

But the car is already fixed, so are you going to unfix it if the customer does like your work? Or are you going to tell this customer they should take their car somewhere else before you even look at it? Most people wouldn’t think twice in telling this customer to go somewhere else.

This is spec work, a designer take time and effort to create something with the hope of getting paid for it, but having a very real chance of walking away from the client with none but wasted time.

AIGA, American Institute of Graphic Arts, the professional association for design takes this position on spec work:

AIGA believes that doing speculative work seriously compromises the quality of work that clients are entitled to and also violates a tacit, long-standing ethical standard in the communication design profession worldwide. AIGA strongly discourages the practice of requesting that design work be produced and submitted on a speculative basis in order to be considered for acceptance on a project.

So with that, why is it that so many customers ask this of designers without thinking twice about it? A lot of designers, young [designers] and freelancers, think this is a way to get in the door or how to win clients over. Not thinking that if they do it once someone is going to ask again, maybe someone that the first client referred and they would be expecting it as well. So it ends up being a circle designers then can not get out of with the possibility of losing business.

Now days if anything close to spec work comes up when I’m talking to a client, I clearly state that there will be an agreement for the cost and some payment before any work will begin.

Basically it shouldn’t happen, again like I said above in no other industry would even be asked. So why is it asked of designers, sometimes like it’s the right of a client?

First and foremost, it is unfair to the designer. Because it not out of the question for someone to take the work they did to someone else, or someone that knows “graphic design” in their office and have them recreate the work. Without getting into a huge legal talk about it, stealing work that was not paid for or using work without a release of the copyright from the artist, in this case the designer, is copyright infringement and against the law.

I think there are a couple of big reasons why people ask for spec work:

• Everything thinks they know a “designer” and they can just talk to them if they need anything. This designer could be anyone from a kid to employee that claims to know Photoshop or some from of image editing software. This leads to them devaluing what a designer really does because a lot of people think that anyone can design anything.
• Most people just can not visualize ideas and want to be able to see it. Designers normally have a great ability to visualize what they want to create and what they are talking with clients about. So this leads to the thinking that they need to see something before they pay for it, there for they want a sample of what a designer will do for them and not just to look at the other projects a designer has completed.
• Designers do not do a good job of explaining the design process. This leads to clients being in the dark about how things are done. Since most know someone that can put things together with Photoshop they have the misconception that it’s everyone can do. So clients don’t understand the amount of time it takes to complete a project.

Most clients just don’t know it’s wrong. It’s really up to designers to handle how to talk about it will clients not the other way around. But I feel that clients should know what they are really asking for when they ask for spec work and should think about how they would react if someone asked for the same thing from them.

As I was in the process of finishing up this post and scheduling it to be published, this good article from David Airey’s blog about Spec Work showed up in my Google Reader. (Most of the time I just share the best things I get in my Reader with the list on the right, but this being the same subject I’m talking about here, I though it would be better served to link it here.)

Check it out: http://www.davidairey.com/a-conversation-about-spec-work/

Here the first of a few quick tips I’m going to do, why this one has been around for years it came up because I had a friend ask me how to do this, taking a color photograph turn it black and white and then adding color back into selective places via Photoshop. Instead of walking him through it over the phone I figured it would take less time to just record this. There are a few ways to do this technique and this is kind the quick and dirty method. These will get more cutting edge, but thought this was a good one to start with. Hope you enjoy.

Jump over to YouTube if you would like to watch this at a high resolution.

Congrats to the United State’s first ever gold medal in Women’s Downhill to the current best woman skier on the planet Lindsey Vonn. To make it even better the US goes 1–2 with Julia Mancuso taking the silver. Great day for the US Ski Team.

This shot just makes me want to get photo credentials for all FIS World Cup events.  But then I’m a sucker for photos that show what the athletes see like this one. I promise the Olympic stuff will stop soon, I mean the games only last two weeks.

Although Apple and Adobe seem put on that they are working together and that they collaborate with each other, lets face a couple facts. In the three years since the iPhone’s release they have never been able to get Flash to working on it. And if you want to admit it or not, Apple is attacking Adobe in the battle for photo editing and video production software.

Now I’m not talking about Photoshop here, because I’m sure Apple knows that is a battle they just can’t win. With Photoshop’s 20th anniversary this week it’s become so iconic that trying to launch a competing piece of software would be nothing more then an money loser.

But iPhoto clearly looks to take some of Photoshop Elements market share and Aperture is a direct competitor to Lightroom. I’m going to cover the Aperture/Lightroom topic at another time but don’t think it’s a quintessence that Aperture 3 launched a couple months before Lightroom 3 launches. What’s more is Lightroom 3 as been available in public beta for months so it already has a set list of features. Apple goes ahead and beta tests Aperture 3 to select users and adds features that I would guess Adobe can’t get in to Lightroom 3 before its launch.

But it all comes back to Flash. Why hasn’t Apple and Adobe been able to create a working version of Flash for the iPhone? I really doubt that Adobe is not wanting Flash on the iPhone platform, Adobe loves to run out the stat that Flash as 95+% penetration rate into all browsers on the internet. With every iPhone, iPod Touch and up coming iPad that is sold that percent goes down.

My guess is Adobe badly wants Flash on the iPhone platform but for some reason Apple isn’t letting that happen. Again I’m guessing that Apple believes Flash is to buggy for use in a mobile browser or wants to try and push Quicktime as a replacement for Flash video on the web.

Here is the problem as I see it though, the iPad can not work without Flash. Can not work. I don’t think that people are going to be willing to shell out $500 for a laptop replacement that can’t show video from major sites. iPhone users are okay without flash because the screen is smaller, but that isn’t going to fly with the iPad’s bigger screen. And Apple just isn’t going to be able to get web developers to replace Flash with Quicktime in the numbers they would need to be able to say they don’t need Flash.

The one great thing that Flash has done in the last few years is create a standardized way to deliver high quality video over the web. Instead of trying to catch a news story on TV you can now go to major news sites and watch the story you want on demand and let’s not forget catching up on missed TV shows on sites like Hulu. I couldn’t judge how fast I would buy an iPad if I could use Hulu on it.

So if it is Apple does have a problem with Flash, why not just make a bid and buy Adobe then let Apple’s engineers fix what they don’t like rebrand it Quicktime and get it on the iPhone/iPad as quickly as possible? Seeing that Adobe’s market-capitalization is $16 billion today, and Apple reportedly has around $30 billion cash on hand one would think it could happen pretty quickly, if Apple was inclined to do so.

Will this happen? I doubt it, but I think it makes a lot of sense from an end user point of view. I just don’t see how the iPad is ever going to really catch on until Flash is a viable option. Why would I get rid of my laptop for something that only shows half the web? And this is coming from someone that has 3 Macs, 2 iPhones, 6 iPods, an Air Port Extreme and an Apple TV in my household.

As an avid skier, the idea of liking a snowboarder outfit makes my stomach turn. But I have to say that every 4 years when the winter Olympics come around the designers of snowboarding outfits really tone it down. So someone needs to tell me where I can get a pair of the official American snowboarding pants that look like jeans. Seen in the middle worn by two time gold medalist Sean Wescott.

Normally when we see someone skiing in jeans it always makes us laugh a little, mainly because we can’t understand how in the world any could be comfortable skiing in denim after it gets wet. But these for these things, I’d have the final laugh when everyone sees they aren’t really jeans just really, really cool pants.  Seriously if someone knows of a place to get these email me.