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» Sunday Updates

Today is Sunday, so I decided to write about some of the newest things that have come into the world of technology. First off, the very cool tablet mac Axiotron ModBook has been upgraded. It’s now available with 2.1 and 2.4 GHz and ships with a hard drive on 120 or 160 GB. The 2.1 GHz edition costs $2 290, while the 2.4 GHz one costs $2 480.

Moving on to some quickie Apple news. On the 14th of March Irish O2 will start selling the Apple iPhone. It will cost €399 for 8GB edition, and $499 for 16GB edition. Also, rumor has it that there might be coming new iMacs pretty soon, since Intel just upgraded their processors.

Last off, i wanted to share this lighting tutorial from the UK with you.
The results are very impressive i may say!

» Late Friday Post

I know I’m very late with this Friday post but I do have a valid reason. I and my class at school will be going away at a ski trip from Sunday morning until Tuesday night. I’ll talk more about that in a later post however, but I’ve been busy (still am) making sure I’m packing all stuff I need etc.

Nik Software announces their Viveza plugin for Photoshop!

Nik Software has released what could possibly be the best Photoshop plugin so far! Even better, if you are a NAPP member like me, you’ll get a great $50 discount on the plugin! Their press release says as following:

Introducing Nik Software Viveza, powered by U Point® technology for direct on-image editing, the most powerful and precise tool available to control light and color in photographic images. For the first time, corrections and enhancements can easily be made without the need to create complicated selections and layer masks.

Read More »

Free Lightroom Gallery Templates

• If you are looking for new new free Lightroom gallery templates, then Sean McCormack has released a bunch of free templates, just for Lightroom.
• Also, The Turning Gate has released a gallery that lets your visitors rate and comment photos!

Getting a CSS Signature in OS X Mail

If you, like me, are using Mac OS X built in Mail application, then this is a good read for you. It’ll tell you how you can make CSS signatures in the mail application. It’s pretty cool and I think you’re all going to like it! Read here »

» It’s Design Monday

 Today is design monday and will feature some great links for, you guessed it, design! Today will be all about design, how to do it and what to think about! Also we’ll have some tips on getting started! Should get you prepared for "Tutorial Tuesday" tomorrow!

• Smashing Magazine, today had a great article about some of the cool and breathtaking typography and typographic posters. There are indeed some really breathtaking things in there so if you want to get inspired, then that is definately an article to read!
   
• A Web Design tip that kind of lines up with the article tip above is to really think about the typography when designing! Do think about the fonts you are using in the header and text and make them suit eachother and the theme and the site in a nice way, that goes for their colours as well! It’s perhaps one of the most vital things you have in your designing and it is what your goal is!
   
• Another tip; when you are showing a design to your client, make sure that you have it filled with sample text (Lorem Ipsum will do just fine) and sample images so your client will get a feel how it is going to look for him/her! That will greatly help to sell the site and perhaps convey the feeling of the site you’ve made!
   
• When entering the realms of designing and keeping in with the latest news you should definately be reading A List Apart! It’s a great site with a ton of very helpful and in-depth articles on coding, design and the general web production!
   
• Final tip; think your design through before making it! Outline on a sheet of normal paper with a normal pencil what you want on your site and where to best fit it in. What kind of navigation are you going to have? Are you going to have any columns? Will there perhaps be a large or a small header? Basically what you need and where to put it thought through before actually desgining it. And of course, do design things that are codeable!

Look back here tomorrow for the "Tutorial Tuesday" where I’ll be putting up a lot of brand new tutorials and a few cooler announcements regarding those as well!

» Business going slower? Do something about it!

 If your business is going slower these days and are as most others facing down, don’t stand there wondering what to do about it because it is then that your competition will get the chance to get the grip of you! Instead try to get the grip over your competition by putting money into the right things. Famous sales author Jeffery Gitomer wrote an article on his site about just that, what to do in these times. Read the article »

» Coping with clients or read other peoples stories

My good buddy Pritthish sent me a link to a cool site called Clientcopia where you can find a real ton of histories that anyone can submit about stupid clients. I must say it is really amusing and always been amusing to read the stories of other peoples clients and the fun and sometimes scary stuff they’ve said and done. I assure you that you’ll be spending a lot of time and have a lot of fun reading Clientcopia!

» Learning Wednesday

 Today will be all about learning new things, whether it be Photoshop, Lightroom or web things, I have some learning links saved up for you for today!

• Kelby Training has released a brand new online class that is called "Retouch a portrait in 15 minutes" by Vincent Versace. It is a great class where you’ll learn the secrets to quick and good portrait retouches that is actually used in a workflow environment. I’ve watched the first few lessons in the class myself and I think it looks great! Not for the beginner though but for someone who knows their way around Photoshop.
   
• If you are planning on visiting Photoshop World coming up to Orlando, April 2-4 this spring you should note that the date of the early-bird registration closing is coming up in about ten days. It is a $100 saving, so if you are planning on going to Photoshop World, you should register soon (and to prevent it from selling out before you register!). 
   
• If you are looking to learn a little about Photography then you should go ahead and subscribe to David Zisers totally free newsletter. A new edition is just out and you can click here to subscribe. Also check out his blog, Digital ProTalk!
   
• Over at Smashing Magazine, they have today listed 45 more excellent blog themes. They’re some really good themes so if you are into design, it is a very nice read!

» My Favourite WordPress Plugins

 It is probably no surprise to you that I’m running this site of the WordPress blogging platform and I run my other sites of it as well becuse it is a nice foundation. However I use quite a few plugins to help make the site what I want it to be, apart from a custom theme that is. So here is a list with my top favourite WordPress plugins that I actually use myself, and best is that they are all free!

Akismet

Included with the WordPress distribution is a spam protector that is called Akismet. It does its job wonderfully and protects me from the masses or comment, trackback and pingback spam I would be cleaning up every day! All you need is to get a free WordPress API key from the wordpress.com site and you’re good to go! It is a real life saver!

All in One SEO Pack!

The All in One SEO Pack is a great little plugin that is used to get better SEO control. It allows you to insert keywords and a description that is unique for each of your posts that helps search engines crawl your site better. It works great and really helps the SEO of your site.

cforms II

If you need any type of form on your site for email purposes, you really need to check out the cforms plugin! It is just the most powerful form creator available for WordPress! I use it for my contact form and I love it and couldn’t live without it! Check it out!!

StatPress

StatPress is a visitor logging script which logs your hits and unique visitors as well as the usual info such as browser, country and stuff. You can also see the latest referrers and also the latest keywords that people used to get to your site from search engines.

WP-Cache

The WP-Cache plugin is a plugin that caches your site for you to help the loading time. You can set it to include or exclude certain files and rules so it only caches what you would like it to!

Dean’s FCK Editor for WordPress

If you want a little more powerful WYSIWYG editor then this is for you. I just started using it and I find it awesome already! It has a lot more features than the Tiny MCE editor and suits the more advanced post writer.

 

 

» The key to getting good sunset photos!

When you are browsing through some of the photography communities online you see quite a lot of photographs of sunsets with their photographers wondering why their photographs are not getting the same amount of reaction as others. Most of the time, it has not got anything to do with big trade secrets but actually quite a few simple things you can do to make your sunsets better.

» Back home!

I’m currently back home and I’m catching up to everything that I couldn’t do whilst being away and resuming the project work as well with quite a few customer projects to do right now. Tomorrow will see a usual Monday Newsflash with some cool stuff gathering up for you Oh and by the way, there are two new tutorials up, one on History and Snapshots in Lightroom and the other one about HDR in Photoshop, they are booth in the featured tutorial box up top

» Fireworks - Tips and Tricks for photographing them!

Fireworks is a lovely thing to photograph but it may seem hard at first. I’m out for the first photographing of them right now in a few minutes and I took some time earlier today to write a little simple tutorial article on the tips and tricks when photographing fireworks! I hope it helps to clear up some stuff if you are unsure since I’ve gotten a lot of questions about it this year, and that you go out and try it tonight, it is really cool and fun.