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» Wednesday News

A lot has been happening in the tech world, especially since the iPhone 3G release. I’m going to try and focus a bit less on all iPhone news and instead go in on the other things that’re happening.

• What is the world coming to?! A father of three got complaints from other parents when he was at a park with his sons taking pictures of them. He was accused of being a pervert and even for taking pictures of children and putting them on the internet. The whole story ended with the father getting a police officer to confirm to them that he was doing nothing wrong. Read the full story.
   
• Last week I told you about the interview Scott Kelby did with attorney Ed Greenberg. Well this week on this weeks Photoshop User TV, Scott is doing a follow-up interview with photographer and copyright advocate Jack Reznicki. It pretty much takes off where we left with Ed last week and finishes up the major concerns a photographer and graphics designer might have. Scott has the interview clip on his blog.
   
• A buddy of mine turned me onto a very cool site called woork. On the site Antonio Lupetti talks about different techniques, scripts and css styles to make cool web things. The posts are always interesting and contains great information overall.

» The deal about Copyright, Model Releases and Public Shooting

There are a lot of discussions going on always about what you can do and can’t do when it comes to legal issues and photography. As Ed says in the interview, photographers have a trend to ask other photographers to get a simple solution to the problems. Well, most of them aren’t true and most times don’t apply to the situations as you think. Scott Kelby however took a little different approach and asked Intellectual Property Attorney, Ed Greenberg to come on as a call-in guest on Photoshop User TV which is airing next week. Scott posted the clips of the interview yesterday on his blog however. In the interview, Ed clears up the major things about Copyright, Model Releases and Public Shooting.

• Listen to the Interview

» Friday Coolies

It’s Friday today and since yesterday was a silent blog Thursday, I have a lot of things up today. Now, for those of you wondering, all is well with the person I talked about yesterday and only got a sprained leg and bruises.

• I get some questions to me sometimes on how I manage to run a business and manage to do all this etc. while still keeping up with school (getting almost straight A’s, so no slacking here) and life in general. Well, if you are running a business from home it’s the things that David Ziser mentioned in this blog, Digital Pro Talk yesterday, with "20 Pointers for running your business out of home".
   
• A trend these days in Web Design is to use resizable image backgrounds in websites to really make a website out of a photo or similar. This week CSS-Tricks posted a tutorial/article on how to make it. It takes up three different methods and rank them, good, better, best. If you want to know how to, read the article!
   
• I thought I’d tip all of you off on an article which I read back when I started out, but which still does apply very much. The article is called Becoming A Web Designer by Mat Dwyer and it is well, really awesomely made with a lot of insight and tips. It is well worth a read any day, even for someone who’s been in the industry for a little while.

» Saturday Article: How to handle client contact?

It’s a very vital part of the web designers daily routine and a very important one. It’s all about handeling the client contact in the right way so that you’ll end up scoring the jobs you want and making sure you have happy customers at the end of the day that are willing to refer you to potential new clients, the best free advertising.

You can definitely divide client contact into a couple of different categories. Here I’m going to focus on client contact over the web and internet and not so much over the phone. Why you may ask? Well, mainly because myself, I don’t speak a lot on the phone with my clients because it is easier to portray thoughts etc. through text and images on the computer. The one time I may speak with a customer over the phone etc. may be when they are signing up and we might be discussing the start of a project.

» Thursday Happenings

It’s another fine day and that makes you happy! However, there is one thing that is bothering me and in the end you guys as well. My microphone that I’m using to record the tutorials with has gone awry and I will need to get a new one (about time I got a good headset anyway). Good thing for you all is that it’s going to improve the quality of the audio. Bad news is that it’ll take me a little while to find a good one and get it shipped here, so meanwhile, all episodes of the podcast and all video tutorials will be halted. Now onto the news!

• Open Office 3.0 Beta has just been released. Being one of the best competitors to the Microsoft Office Package and being free it is a very awaited new release. What’s best for Mac users, is that it has been made to use Aqua, the program frame on Mac and thus you no longer need X11 installed to run it.
   
• Do you deal with customers a lot in your business? If so then David Ziser, famous wedding photographer, has posted a little step by step number guide on what to do when answering the phone with a client on the line. It’s a good read and most of these pointers I myself consider pretty self-explanatory but nevertheless it isn’t for a lot of people.
   
• Scott Kelby posted last week a little review on the Hoodman RAW Memory Cards which has some incredible reliability. Today he posted that he got an email from Hoodman VP of Marketing who was telling a little bit more about the cards. They do sound pretty cool so I urge you to check the post out!