Photo Quickies

• All about lens flare, and how to prevent it.
• Interview with Hamad Darwish, whose photography made it into Windows Vista from Flickr.
• Can’t afford a lens hood? Then get some cardboard and print out a customized lens hood for your lenses
• AskMe: Why are sensors on point & shoot cameras so small?

• A photoshop tutorial to make those black-and-white photos that have 1 element of (striking) color.
• AskMe: What lenses to use when taking close-ups of hands and eyes?
• Some ideas on how to photograph smoke, with some beautiful examples.
• Creative photography by Chema Madoz — each photo has an interesting juxtoposition

• If your lens has image stabilization, you should probably turn off IS/VR when using a tripod.
• Is there really a difference between 5 megapixels, 8 megapixels and 13 megapixels?
• Not on my to-buy list: a gold platted SLR made by Pentex.
• An interview with MattBites about his gear and strategy for photographing food.
• What the heck does that diopter dial near your camera’s viewfinder do?
• How to get the best photograph of those lovely Christmas lights.

• 2 Minute Photoshop Tricks would be even better if there was a normal text feed inaddition to its podcast feed
• Photosynth, a technology preview from Microsoft, takes a lot of photos and renders a 3D scene out of it. Too bad it only works in IE6/7.
• Make a nice looking photo wall for about $60; nice photography not provided.

Oops, missed a couple of weeks:

• British photographer Platon shares his funny anecdotes of photographing famous people.
• Askme: How do freelance photographers identify themselves? (and journalists too)
• Very nice photoblog from the Time photographer at the White House.

• PhotoQuickie also has hazy photos from China, perhaps this approach will fix them, but we don’t count on it.
• Another challenge we find is to stabilize our camera when we don’t have a tripod, here are some great tips especially a bean bag!
• A Photoshop tutorial to post-process portraits in a Lichtenstein style. PhotoQuickie tried it but it takes some dedication to get good results.

• If you’re a Flickr user with a pro account, you might want to grab 10 free MiniCards from moo
• HP is advertising their digital cameras with a slimming feature, because obese people now outnumber malnourished in the world?

While PhotoQuickie hasn’t blogged as often as we hoped, we still surf and read about photography quite a lot. We expect our “Quickies of the Week” will be a regular feature with photography related links, but we expected to be Metamucil last time as well.

• Instructables on making a photo cube
• Canon Rebel XTi is out soon, and the trusty DPReview has an indepth look.
• AskMe: What are good, yesteryear digicams I can get for cheap?
• AskMe: Best (wide+fast) budget lens for a Rebel XT?
• Been going around the blogosphere, but How to make realistic hair in Photoshop

PhotoQuickie originally started Photo Quickies to share our tricks and tips as we learn the art of photography, but sadly we haven’t been doing very well at achieving our goal. For sure, we did not intend to have a posting schedule that involved blue moons. In any case, PhotoQuickie has not thrown in the towel just yet, but today we would like to point out a couple of photography sites on our blog roll.

Digital Photography School is in our minds, what we intended PhotoQuickie to be. Articles about the basics of photography with examples. We must admit that they post quite frequently and regularly, so it must be a deal of work (and a plus for people like PhotoQuickie); although we think our posts are more self-referrential.

Photojojo is a blog that talks about applications of photography, or what can we do with our photos once we’ve taken them that doesn’t involve staring at them on our computer. PhotoQuickie is pretty lazy (see paragraph 1), and we haven’t tried to do any of their suggested projects yet, but the seem cute and interesting.