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» Late Evening Update

 Alright so I took the train this morning down to the most beautiful little town and coastline that I know of here just north of the city Halmstad here in Sweden. It’s mostly a quick visit to my grandparents but obviously you can’t turn down an amazing shooting opportunity. This is the result of this evening’s shoot, well one of the results (I have a few more). Gonna share some more later one but for now, this’ll have to do. It’s so nice to get out there after working so long with little time for it!

I’ll see you all back tomorrow with a surprisingly bloggy Sunday!

» It’s the Wednesday News

It’s once again Wednesday and it’s hard working weeks here with a lot of stuff coming soon which I’ll be talking about in another post here, really soon, I promise you. But we do have some news for today as well:

• Dave Cross posted on his blog today about a cool company that makes embroidered shirts and more. Unlike many other companies, this one only requires you to print four shirts as a minimum. Their name is Queensboro and well, they sound really cool. So if you want to check it out, go to the Queensboro homepage. Clicking on the link above gives Dave and his barbershop quartet a referral credit if you order. The reason for the post is because I do support them.
   
• Each week over att Scott Kelby’s blog he features a guest blogger on Wednesdays. This week it is time for famous portrait and wedding photographer David Ziser to enter the stage…err…blog. He’s talking about what it takes to be a complete wedding photographer. Give it a read!
   
• I realise that it was a while ago since I posted some inspiration here on the blog so I thought we’d cap off this Wednesday with a link to an incredible photographer that I found on the NAPP Portfolios. His name is Mike Doran and shoots sports photography and has some true beauties in his portfolios. 

» Late Thursday News

I’m pretty tired after working a full day in the camera store and I’m going to be early because the day is repeating itself tomorrow. Fun but tiresome. Here are at least a few late Thursday news.

• From screenshots of the new Apple App Store we can see that they are imposing restrictions in both price and application size. The maximum size is 2gb and the prices range between $0.99 to $999, where the latter probably is for more enterprise styled applications.
   
• A new build of the Parallels Desktop shows support for both Linux as well as 3D graphics inside of Windows. To get the free update, just go under the help menu and chose Check for Updates.
   
• One of the site visitors sent me a comment yesterday noting me on a tutorial error which is indeed a realism miss. In the Pixelmator tutorial about Creating a realistic sunlight effect I missed to at the end, flip the copied image vertically so that the small piece of the window comes at the top. So for anyone being affected by this miss in the recording, now you know how to fix it.
   
• Over at his blog, Scott Kelby has posted a review of the Ray Flash. The Ray Flash is essentially a ring flash that attaches to a normal hotshoe flash to make it a ring flash. It sounds like a cool product so go and check that out.

That’s that for the news today, tomorrow I’ll be back with the Friday goodies, so stay tuned. Oh and until then, don’t have too much trouble, it is Friday 13th.

» Wednesday News Stuff

It’s a split day today, school is over for this time for me and a nice summer is awaiting. However because of the grade I’m now graduating from (our school system is different here) I’ll not go with almost anyone from my old class now that we all move up. A little sad to not see half of the people but I’ll all get over it. Onto the news.

• On Monday, Steve Jobs mentioned in the keynote very briefly that Apple is beginning to seed a developer version of the new Snow Leopard that will be replacing Leopard in the next year. It’s going to be much of a performance update with fewer new features. What we have learnt now from seeing the system requirements is that they will be dropping the PowerPC support to go to Intel only now.
   
• Today you’ll definitely want to check out the guest blogger over at Scott Kelby’s blog, Moose Peterson. He’s one of the best wildlife photographers I’ve ever seen and I love his wildlife work. Give his entry a read.
   
• Are you wanting to go the the Photokina in Colonge coming up on September 23rd through 27th? Then you might want to enter the contest from ThinkTankPhoto where you can win a trip complete with hotel stay and $500 in spending money. Just go to the contest site and read through the rules and enter if you are elgible.
   
• If you are interested in all the happenings at the WWDC Keynote you can view it either online or download the podcast.

» Thursday Quick-News

• Over at Photoshop Insider, Scott Kelby posted a very good post with what he wants to see in the next version(s) of Photoshop and Lightroom. It’s some really good ideas that I really like and agree on.
   
• If you are a keen photographer you should have checked out JPG Magazine and if not, then you should go ahead and do that right now. It’s a really cool photography magazine with contests and featured amazing photography.
   
• The Mac program Delicious Library has been updated to its second version featuring a lot of new updates and cool things. It’s only available for Mac OS X 10.5 and if you are interested in it and you are not using Leopard, you can still purchase the older version for use with Panther and Tiger. You can purchase a brand new copy for $40 and an upgrade from the old runs for $20.

 

» Monday Interview: Dave Seeram/PhotographyBB

  

It’s a new Monday again with a full week of work ahead of us. Now that is always a good time to ponder into the minds of a fellow artist a bit. This week we have Dave Seeram, photographer and graphic artist who is running the free online magazine, PhotographyBB!

» 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.

» Tuesday News World Update

It’s Tuesday today and I was writing this post at 7a.m this morning, before school, but apparently I was way to tired to hit the publish or save button so I quite lost all post content therefore I need to repost it now. I had my concert yesterday and thanks to my family and my best friends for being there and for being the best support. It was really awesome and went really well.

Olympus Releases E-520

Olympus is today announcing its new camera body, the Olympus E-520. It has got improved AF in LiveView, 10 megapixels, a 2.7" Screen, wireless flash control, 3.5 fps shooting and a built in image stabiliser. It is available in four kit versions, body only (£479.99), with 14-42 kit lens (£529.99), with double kit 14-42 & 40-250 (£529.99) as well as with second double kit 14-42 and 70-300 (£759.99).

Cool website - CSS-Tricks

I found out about this cool website through another blog I am subscribed to. It’s called CSS-Tricks and deals with, well, obviously cool CSS tricks etc. but also points to some good thoughts about image protection and other web related things that you really need to know and be in the loop with. A really good site I must say so keep it fresh in memory.

NAPP & Stuff clarification

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while you will know that I like to mention NAPP (National Association of Photoshop Professionals) and the gang over there quite often. Now I want to note that I don’t get any kickbacks or anything (apart from the fun of doing it ) when I mention them and I do it only because I’m a member myself and I really like the work they do and their style (plus they are all a really amazing and friendly crowd)! There you have it, the "amazing story behind".

ScreenFlow - Recording Application

I read this on Terry White’s techblog yesterday and it got me a little bit excited. He got turned on to (and in a chain reaction got me turned on to) a screen recording application called ScreenFlow. It’s another screen recording application for the Mac that lets you edit the recorded material right after you’ve recorded it (sadly though you need to export it out after, one of the things I love about iShowU is that you don’t need to do that there) and add callouts and even record from your webcam while you’re recording your screen. Here’s a link to Terry’s review. (If you are a PC user reading this post and hoping for a program recommendation, my recommendation is Camtasia Studio.)

» Professional Portrait Retouching Class by Scott Kelby

Today on Kelby Training a brand new class (like most weeks) are launched. This time however it is an amazing class by an amazing man. Scott Kelby is launching his brand new online class called Professional Portrait Retouching Techniques. It’s going to teach you the best ways to retouch your portraits, without making them look unreal or overdone. It’s all the real retouching stuff used by professionals worldwide every day. After the jump you can see a promotional video that Scott did for the class where he himself explains what is covered.

» 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!