Bernskiold Media

Unexpected Wednesday Newsies

This week my blog schedule has been a little changed, first with the postponed he said – she said post and now with something cool on track for tomorrow. So for that reason I’m postponing the posting of the general article or showcase for Wednesdays to tomorrow for this week! Stay tuned! ;)

• An app store tracking and rating website called Apptism is beginning to report that over 20,000 apps are now online in the Apple App Store. Only three months after hitting the big 10,000 applications—which in and of itself didn’t take more than six months—the store has doubled that amount!
   
• The InstantShift website has a great article listing 30 Great WordPress Comments Page Hacks. The hacks that you can do to your comments page include specific comment styling, giving the comments new features and many more cool things! Check it out!
   
•  If you are a blogger and also using Lightroom you might want to check out a cool new plugin by plugin-veteran Timothy Armes. His newest plugin called LR2/Blog is designed to post images to blogs that are using the MetaWebLogs standard. Among the systems using this standard is WordPress which should make this plugin perfect for anyone that is using WordPress for photoblogging (as an example).
   
• Nikon has released a new lens this week. It’s an AF-S 35mm ƒ/1.8 G lens made for the DX format. It sports a focus motor in the lens and is clearly meant for anyone that has been having their eyes on a fixed 50 1.8 but this one made for the DX cameras, giving an equivalent focal length of around 50mm, this while as said providing internal focusing for the latest bodies.

The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book for Digital Photographers

 The Adobe Photoshop Lighroom Book for Digital Photographers by Scott Kelby is one of the quite few how-to books on how the Lightroom application works and how to get the most of it. It is written in his award-winning one step at a time style which makes you easily get how to do things in, and how to work with Lightroom.

What sets this book apart from the other Lightroom how-to books that is available, is the fact that it is not just tool tips and module tips and tricks through the book but the two entire chapters are dedicated to the entire workflow. The first of the two is for a portrait photographer and the other is for a landscape photography and it is here the entire book comes together and it is here that you learn the most valueable things and is the reason why I purchased the book in the first place.

Everything is written so that you can easily understand it and there is the compulsory humor in the books that is always in the things that Scott produces. You may or may not like it, I for one do like it and it doesn’t bother me one bit.

If you are looking for a quality book on the different techniques and tools that Lightroom consists of and if you are looking on learning how to work with Lightroom and the modules, then this is definately the book for you and you are going to learn a lot from it!

Back to Reviews »

It’s Monday “Start of the week” News

It’s raining heavily outside, it’s cold and it is dark. I definitely do not want to get up and go outside today but I have to nonetheless. Here are some news for today:

• Photodex, makers of the ProShow Gold slideshow program, has announced a plugin for Lightroom that will let you quickly export photos into ProShow Gold or Producer to make slideshows. With ProShow Gold being a PC only program so is the plugin.
   
• A report from SquareTrade says that it’s two times more common that a Blackberry breaks during the first year than an iPhone. Despite all the reports of unhappy iPhone customers (don’t you always hear the unhappy more?) the iPhone, according to the report, is the smartphone with the lowest malfunction rate.
   
• Terry White has posted the new CS4 wallpaper and screensaver (both Mac and PC available) on his blog. Sadly not as nice as the CS3 ones they still are worth to check out!
   
• Finally, Nick La over at the Web Designer Wall posted today and let us know that he’s beginning a complete wordpress theme guide. He is going to update the post with links to each tutorial as he is publishing them.

Finally, check out my own annual Holiday Gadget Gift guide coming in an hour or two, or click the sidebar banner on the site to download it beforehand!

Tuesday News Goodies

• Net Applications has presented the list of browser usage statistics from October. This month we still see that Firefox is gaining market shares while Internet Explorer is losing then. Furthermore after several months of going strong, Safari has dropped slightly in market shares  for October.
   
• Jeffrey Friedl has announced the release of his new “Jeffrey’s Lightroom GPS Support” plugin for Lightroom. It will let you add a “shadow” GPS data from Google Maps or a GPS tracklog for example in Lightroom and then on export combine it into the regular metadata file. Pretty cool so definitely check it out.
   
• WordPress revealed late last week a new feature on their site called Showcase. Showcase is really a showcase of some great WordPress powered websites out there, described as a “display of some of the best and brightest WordPress users, who do a whole lot more than blog.”