Journey in America

Spice Up Your Photos: eBook giveaway

 

Make sure to enter a free download giveaway of the book Spice Up Your Photos at:
http://modpodgerocksblog.com/2013/02/spice-up-your-photos-book-review-and-giveaway.html
3 winners will be announced in 4 days.

GOOD LUCK!

New creative photography techniques book on Amazon

 

Spice Up Your Photos
Creative photography techniques to put a spark in your photos (2012)

Paperback: 104 pages
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
(December 21, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-13: 978-1481203524
Product Dimensions: 8″ X 10″ (more…)

Self publishing a photo book with print on demand [review]

 

Photo albums bound and digitally printed as photo books are the new phenomenon on the web. From wedding and baby books to travel and memory, everybody seems
to create their own coffee-table style book. These books are printed on photographic paper and provide beautiful color saturation in a variety of cool layouts.

Photo books are usually created offline using free downloaded software that provides ample page layout choices and makes it almost effortless to design your photo book masterpiece. Almost every digital printing service on the net offers to create an impressive coffee table photo book for you using the beautiful images you shot during your recent vacation to Hawaii. Kodak Gallery, Shutterfly, DotPhoto, Wallgreens Photo Center to name a few. And they are all fantastic and will supply you with a great service and a high quality photo book. However, most of these services will charge a relatively high price for these books and do not offer you a place to sell these books to potential customers.

So I decided to publish a photo book which would include a collection of favorite photos I have taken in the last few years.
First thing, I selected the images for my book Beautiful Darkness and put them all in one folder for easy access.
Next, I set out to find the right publisher for my bestseller. Since I’m always looking for DIY projects and wanted to self publish my book, I decided that print-on-demand was the right way for me to go.
The print-on-demand process utilizes digital printing technology which makes it possible to print and bind a book as soon as it is ordered, one copy at a time, in just minutes.
There are plenty of free print-on-demand publishers out there which will happily print a high quality book for you. Some of these publishers will let you set your price and sell your book through their website.
After a quick inquiry I decided to publish my book and evaluate the process and quality with 4 different free POD publishers: Lulu, VioVio, Samy’s Camera and everybody’s favorite, Blurb.

In this review I will focus on these areas of comparison:
• Ease of use
• Binding and print quality
• Price
• Turnaround time
• Customer service
• Extra features
• Online store

 

Lulu
www.lulu.com
If you want to publish a premium portfolio with Lulu they will be more than happy to print it on premium quality paper for you which they describe as a 100# silk coat finish paper.
In order to create a photo book you will need to use their book creator software Lulu Studio which opens on their website and therefore you don’t need to download anything to your PC .
Setting up a book with Lulu Studio is quite simple and in fact it takes just about a couple of hours to create the book. (wow!)
Once you open Lulu Studio you will choose the theme of your book. There are about 20 different themes to choose from and you can change your theme at any time.
Next you will upload your images or import them from other online sources such as Flickr, Facebook or Photobucket. Drag and drop your images into a nice selection of page templates, add some text and voilà you’re done! Your book is ready to be published.
Lulu lets you publish your book and buy copies, or set a price and sell it on the Lulu Marketplace. But you will probably want to limit the number of pages as the book’s price starts at $25 for a 20 pages 9”X7” book with $0.50 for any additional page after that.

If you ever get to talk to the people at Lulu you will find they are quite nice, however, it is quite difficult to reach them. On their help page there is a nice Live Chat feature however this chat is not always available, in which case you can email them by filling out a form and creating a support ticket.
They reply quite quickly, however you cannot write back. If you do need to reply you are forced to go to their website and submit a new support request and good luck trying to explain your previous conversation with them. They will answer rather quickly again and hopefully you won’t need to say anything or else you will need to log into their website and submit yet another support request. So, even though they are always ready to help and answer questions, their system is a let down and they get a low ranking for their customer service.

One of the best features they offer at Lulu is a free storefront called Author Spotlight where anybody can sell their self published books.
This storefront is simple to set up and you can even incorporate YouTube videos, Facebook, and Twitter.
I find the printed book to be similar to what I’ve designed on the screen. The cover looks quite appealing. The interior paper is premium quality and the printing is top quality, vivid and just superior to any book I’ve published in the past using standard POD. What I don’t like about this book is the quality of binding which appears like it won’t hold for any length of time.

 

If you like this article, you might want to consider downloading the PRINT ON DEMAND AND SELF PUBLISHING 101 pdf file [$5.00]

 

Blurb
www.blurb.com

To publish a photo book with Blurb you will need to download BookSmart and create the book locally on your PC.
BookSmart is simple to use and you will learn how to use it as you go.
You begin by choosing your book’s dimensions and entering the title and author name. Next, choose the theme for your book from topics such as portfolio, journal, poetry, and wedding. Now, just upload your images into BookSmart from your computer or from an online source such as Flickr or Picasa and you are ready to begin designing your book.
The main difference between BookSmart and Lulu Studio is that BookSmart leaves lots of room for creativity. There are more than 70 page layout choices and not only can you manipulate any of these layouts any way you wish but also you are essentially working with layers of background, text and images, much like working with Adobe inDesign. And since the design is exceptionally flexible and your options plentiful, BookSmart lets your creative juices flow and completely captures your interest. The result is that designing a book with BookSmart stretches out over a longer time but it is also more enjoyable.
Once the book is ready it can be uploaded to Blurb from within BookSmart.
After I ordered a copy I waited a week until the book was printed and ground shipping took another week or so.
The cost of the book is not exactly low but quite reasonable as far as print on demand goes; a Standard Landscape 10×8 inch premium print Hardcover ImageWrap 80 page book is priced at $51.69
The book is printed on premium paper and the print quality is very good!
The book cover is beautiful and the binding is sturdy.
You can sell your book through Blurb’s bookstore. It is nothing fancy but you can set your price, available book formats, and set a preview of your book.
One thing is for sure, Blurb has more goodies than any other print-on-demand service and is fully geared toward the online photographer community. It has tools such as inDesign plugin, conversion to ebook for ipad and iphone, Blurb Bookshow, badge creator and more.

Viovio
www.viovio.com

To make your photo book with Viovio you need to log in online to VioVio Designer to design your book. This software is easy to learn and offers many layout and design choices. The photos can be uploaded from your PC via web or ftp, or from Flickr, The overall photo upload is quite fast. They offer a few free templates for your book but you can also purchase some unique designs from their marketplace. When you build your book you can choose between designing your own pages or let the program auto fill the pages with your photos.
VioVio offers a nice selection of book sizes with different binding types.
Prices are very comparable with other POD services, however they require $10 if you wish to remove their logo from the back of your book.
The main drawback in using Viovio is that in order to sell your book in their online bookstore you will need to purchase a retail annual membership for $35.
Print quality is quite fine; saturated colors and nice tonal range for the black and white photos. And one last note, the book cover is glossy. That would not be my choice for this book, but then again I didn’t get to choose.

Samy’s Camera
www.samys.com

I’ve been a loyal customer of Samy’s Camera for years now. Samy’s is our local major camera store in Los Angeles. When they told me about their new photo book service, I knew I had to give it a try.
When making a book with them, the first thing to do is download and install their Creative Solutions software. This software is outstanding with lots of pre-made layouts, backgrounds, and frames, a fast learning curve and a straightforward workflow.
When you launch the program choose to start a new project. In the next window choose the size and titile of your book, then simply begin designing it. Most of the design works by dragging and dropping the layouts, backgrounds, frames and photos into the pages. When you are done the software will check your book for you and warn you if anything is wrong. Next, you can order your book from within Creative Solutions.
Books are available in a small selection of sizes for a price that is comparable with other services.

The main difference between Samy’s photobook service and others is that it’s really just a service that allows you to create one book but does not supply you with the opportunity to actually publish and sell it.
That said the quality of the printed book is superb!
The paper is of high quality and heavier than any papers used by the others. Color photos are brilliant while the black and white photos are even toned and printed in a way that made me fall in love with them all over again.

 

	Lulu	Blurb	VioVio	Samy’s Camera
Ease of use	Lulu Studio. Very easy and fast paced however, LIMITED design options.	BookSmart. Easy to learn with many layout and design choices.	Viovio Designer.  Easy and fast with several creative selections.	Creative Solutions.  Superior book creation software.
Quality	A for cover, paper and printing. C for binding.	Very good	Very good	Excellent
Price (For 80 pages 9″X7″ Imagewrap Hardcover printed on Premium paper)	$54.95	$51.69 (10”X8”)	$59.99 (+ $10 to remove their logo)	$54.95 (8”X8”)
Turnaround	Shipped in 3 days.	Shipped in a week	Shipped in 5 days	Shipped in 3 days
Customer service	B-	A	A	A
Extra Features	Upload photos from Flickr, Photobucket, Facebook or SmugMug.	Convert to ebook for iPad. Facebook or Instagram book. BookShow for a website or facebook. And more.	Apple iPhoto Books
Upload your own PDF	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Online book store	free stylish storefront	Very simple book store	Only if you pay for  the annual membership	No

 

If you like this article, you might want to consider downloading the PRINT ON DEMAND AND SELF PUBLISHING 101 pdf file. The Print on Demand and self publishing 101 PDF file contains 24 pages of detailed instructions accompanied by images and related links which will guide you through the world of Print on Demand self publishing, book design and online marketing. This article is the result of 8 years of experience in designing and self publishing books. In this article: Starting with an idea, designing the book, Adobe InDesign, Which Print on Demand should I choose?, Standard books POD, Lulu & CreateSpace, Publishing a Photo book, Publishing on Amazon, marketing your book, tools you can use etc. Thank you for your support!

Digital Kirlian photography

A new DIY photography book on Kirlian photography is being written. The book, by John Iovine, is a complete updating of his original Kirlian photography book that used film. This new digital photography book will detail the construction of equipment needed to take beautiful kirlian photographs using digital cameras and image processing.

Beautiful Darkness

My book/portfolio on Blurb.

Recommended web hosting – Bluehost.com

Quite often people ask me to recommend a web hosting provider, so just in case you are searching for a good service I warmly recommend bluehost.com.
I’m not going to list all their goodies, you can check them out for yourself, but I’ll just say that I’m quite happy with them and I have all my sites hosted with them. I also always encourage my clients to go with bluehost. I went through really bad hosting providers before I found bluehost a few years ago, so trust me on this one; I really know what’s good for me
And something some photographers will appreciate; they offer an easy installation of online photo gallery software, blogs (such as this wonderful but humble photography blog) and lots of other scripts.

Bargain camera

If heaven was made of different branches I think I know what the photographer’s section is going to look like: the Bargain Camera show in Pasadena.
Every now and then I am dragged (kicking and screaming) by my friend David to the computer swap meet, i.e. nerds’ heaven, where people excavate through computer parts in large bins. Oh what fun!
Now it was my turn; “we are going to the Bargain Camera show in Pasadena” I announced and left no place for an argument. This camera swap meet is the place to find everything photographic, mainly film and vintage, but also some digital related. Stuff like lenses, old cameras of all formats, studio lighting, camera parts, tripods, photography books, film etc.
But I think that actually one of my favorite things about this swap meet was in fact being among “my people” And by the way, I’m almost sure I had a couple of dreams about a place like this before.

So much more than photography

My book So Much More than Photography is now on a special holidays sale through Amazon:

So much more than photography: creative and experimental photography [Paperback]
By Nitsa (Author)
Paperback: 172 pages
Publisher: CreateSpace (August 12, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1453771018
ISBN-13: 978-1453771013

So Much More than Photography is a book of ideas, inspiration and actual practices for creative and experimental photography. Every photographic and mixed media artist is sure to find something they can apply. Start the journey with exploring new methods and ideas to approach photography without following the rules. Next, learn numerous ways to present your photographs artistically such as image transfers, texture layers, and mixed media photography. Discover how easy it is to apply these creative techniques, taking your ordinary photos to the next level. And finally, find out everything you need to know about print-on-demand, read selected entries from “Still Alive” photography blog, and final thoughts. All the processes in the book are easy to follow and will sure to inspire you to create your own photo-art work.

Photographers get inspired checklist

Here are a few ideas you might want to try when you have a photographer’s block
and you are in need of inspiration:

• Shoot reflections or shoot through glass
• Take pictures in the rain, fog and shoot into the sun
• Photograph the sky, sunset & sunrise
• Take fun long exposures
• Experiment with flash effects
• Do motion panning and zoom lens effects
• Shoot with toy and classic cameras
• Use the wrong film (or wrong camera settings)
• Use expired film
• Photograph silhou ettes or halos
• Shoot in black a nd white
• Photograph multiple exposures
• Shoot the subject at different a ngles / tilt your camera
• Leave lots of empty space in your photograph
• Take picture of extreme colors
• Photograph textures (you ca n use them later in the texture layers techniqu e (page 96)
• Make panoramas
• Take pictures of rundown places.
• Document your day
• Take fun pictures of your kids, pets or friends
• Take pictures of shadows
• Shoot neon signs at night
• Photograph continuous pictures or create a storyline.

Phototuts+

(This website recommendation posted by mshutch)

Phototuts+ is a source of learning on all aspects of photography. The site pumps out regular tutorials on composition, equipment settings, post-processing, film photography, retouching and much more.

Film Photography Podcast Website Review

(This website review posted by inwardstudio)

Looking to learn more about shooting film? Appreciate and irreverent approach to life? Love the New Jersey accent?

Film Photography Podcast is for you. Michael Raso and Duane Polcou head up the cast of characters that explore many aspects of film photography. The Impossible Project, Kodachrome and old cameras fill much of the time in this bimonthly podcast.

Each episode also includes a camera giveaway. Now, these aren’t the lastest high pixel count cameras coming from Japan. These are Ebay finds and listener donations. Canon AE-1s and Agfa Clacks are some of the more poplar giveaways.

Raso also gives away film from his personal stash to anyone who will write in. All he asks in return is some info about yourself and that you load the images to their Flickr group. I’m personally waiting on a roll of Kodachrome to come my way.

If that weren’t enough, the part I find most interesting is Raso’s progression as a photographer. Even though he has worked in the B movie genre for many years, he only recently started shooting still images on film. In each episode he talks about the “new” cameras, films and processes he’s discovered. His newby nature is balanced by Polcou’s many years of experience as a photographer. The combination is perfect.

This website review posted by inwardstudio

Recommend a website

Since I get a lot of requests to review and recommend other websites I decided to make life easier for myself and let you do the reviewing and suggesting. You can recommend any related website or blog you think might be of interest to this blog’s visitors.
Go here to suggest a website.

Metallic Prints by Kodak

As I mentioned in a previous post, I was having a great deal of trouble with the complicated process of ordering metallic prints from dotphoto.com so ultimately I decided to order them from Kodak Gallery.
Metallic prints are printed on a special paper and display images with excellent depth and a distinctive metallic look. Color metallic prints are particularly vibrant, sepia prints have a gold-like glow while black & white have a unique silver shine.
Kodak metallic prints are of superior quality and just beautiful.  Another thing I liked is that they printed and  delivered the order in  just a few days which is always a plus.

I scanned the prints but there is no way to show or even give an idea what the metallic prints really look like.  I guess you will have to try them out for yourself.

So I made some of these prints available for purchase over here.
All the metallic print are signed and dated 5”X7” and I offer them for $45 each which includes shipping and a 4″X6″ standard print of the same image.

Buy these prints

Best camera for street photography

[I hope you will choose to participate in voting for your camera of choice.
The results of this poll are going to be considered and published in my next book.]

I imagine some photographers will find it difficult to pick their favorite camera for street photography but whatever it might be, the selection will be especially diverse.
Common sense dictates that the camera is compact, light, quiet and fast, though I’m sure this is not always the case. Most photographers will probably select the camera based on the desired appearance and quality of the final images. And besides, photographers can be quite a fussy crowed and often become rather attached to their camera regardless of its adaptability to the streets.
Having some experience with street photography and shooting a variety of SLRs, rangefinders, box and toy cameras, I would have quite a difficult time choosing one favorite camera.

Generally speaking, I find SLR’s are especially demanding of my undivided attention and in addition they can be quite heavy cameras.
TLR & box cameras are often complicated to operate and just like toy cameras they can be fairly unreliable. In addition toy and box camera’s manual winding is a definite drawback if you want to keep up with the pace of the streets.
Rangefinders, though posses most of the ideal attributes, they sometimes turn out poorly focused images and sadly not everybody can appreciate this trait

As far as digital cameras go, I can only assume there is no wrong camera for street photography and that most digitals can get the job done and with rather decent results.
But what do I know?

You can find this article and many creative photo processes in my new book:
So Much More than Photography – eBook edition is now on sale for $10.
Get it here

Virtual Photographer

Recently someone recommended I try out a Photoshop plug-in called Virtual Photographer. I know, I know, every photographer out there is already familiar with this plugin and probably has been using it forever. But me, I somehow missed this great plugin, maybe because I usually prefer the “hands on” method when it comes to working on my photos. But never mind me, back to Virtual Photographer: I downloaded the plug-in, which is free and can be found here and took it for a test.
Well, OK, its really easy to use, not too much brain power needed, obviously the perfect software for me!
So you pretty much open your photo in Virtual Photographer’s preview window and play around with the large number of available photographic styles. (You can also manually control the styles but I really couldn’t find any benefit in doing so). When you find the style you like you simply apply it to your picture.
And there you go, your plain picture is now amazing.
And if it sounds like I’m patronizing this plug-in, I’m not, really.
I actually like this little thing and I will probably use it every now and then.

Dotphoto and the mystery of the metallic prints

In the past I mentioned here how much I love dotphoto, right? (here, I really did!).
and I do love dotphoto…
I’ve been using their printing services for a few years now and I was always happy with their printing quality and even with their fast and reliable customer services.
Until a couple of days ago when I tried to order a few of metallic prints from them.
So I went for the obvious; choosing the photos I want to print and selecting the metallic prints option… and nothing. I’m still on the same page. Ok, lets try something else. I start from the metallic prints page. Oh good, there’s a “choose photos” button on the page. It takes me to my albums. At the top it says “select photos and then go to cart” . I do just that, and guess what? You won’t believe it; my cart is empty. Ah? Now what? OK, I really want these metallic prints now so I go to the Help page and I put the “metallic prints” term in the search box.
In the search results page there’s a short explanation what metallic prints are, but nothing about how to order them… hmmmm… Ok, I admit this is a low point in my internet life and I begin doubting myself and my abilities to figure out a simple ordering process.

But I’m also upset and tired so I email dotphoto’s support:

Just letting you know your system for ordering prints is very confusing.
I’ve been trying to order metallic prints for about 15 minutes and it just doesn’t let me place the order.
I’ve tried a few different ways.
…

so I gave up. Just letting you know.
Nitsa

Aurora from dotphoto writes back:

Hello,
The problem you are most likely running into is that you are trying to order more than one at a time. With metallic prints, posters or gifts, these images go through our gift wizard so you can fine tune how your image will look. Please select one image and then click on metallic prints. This will take you to our gift wizard and allow you to order.
Aurora

Elementary! And oh so brilliant! You can’t order more than one photo at a time.
Would be nice if they mentioned it somewhere on the site.
I wish it wasn’t so, but sadly I don’t posses any psychic powers.

So I email Aurora:
true, I was trying to order more than one photo at a time.
However, no where on your site it is clear that I should order only one print at a time.
in fact when going to order metallic prints it says “Choose photoS” and not choose photo.
I’m just saying in case you want to improve your service.

Nitsa

But Aurora is determined to prove me an idiot or at least an unreasonable customer:

“Hello,
I apologize. This is stated in the gift wizard faq.
Aurora”

Ah. Yes. Obviously. The gift wizard faq. Dah!
It’s probably unnecessary to mention I couldn’t find the gift wizard faq, though I don’t doubt it exist somewhere on the site.

So finally I order metallic prints from another online printing service.
I can’t wait to see what they look like.

Meanwhile, here is my version of metallic prints 
(an image transferred to aluminum foil)

BUY THIS ARTWORK

Do you miss your Polaroid?

The other day, I came across this free little program that takes your digital pictures and turns them into cool Polaroid-like images. And even though I thought this is somewhat pointless, non-the-less I had to admit; this program was just too cute to pass up.
So this is how you use it: you download and install the program to your pc, you drag the photo of your choice and drop it on the Polaroid camera icon, you then wait for the picture to “develop” and you’ve got yourself a high res. digital Polaroid-like image.
Now go figure out what to do with it…

Publishing a book with Blurb print on demand (review and also blurb vs. Lulu)

Now that I’m holding in my hands a book that was printed with Blurb I have to say I’m undeniably impressed!
The book I put together using BookSmart which is Blurb’s bookmaking software, is titled
Chasing George Washington – Road trip in Virginia & Pennsylvania
I created the book for personal purpose and also to test blurb and so I’m not planning on selling it.
Working in BookSmart was quite fun and simple and maybe the main advantage of this software is that it leaves lots of room for creativity. It lets you layer backgrounds, images and text, much like inDesign.
Once the book is ready it can be uploaded to Blurb from within BookSmart. After I ordered a copy I waited 4 days until the book was printed and ground shipping took another week or so.
The price of the book was quite reasonable; a Standard Landscape 10×8 inches premium printing Hardcover ImageWrap 80 pages is priced at $43.95.
The book is printed on a premium paper and the print quality is excellent! As I mentioned, I’m very much impressed with the whole process and mainly with the high quality of the actual printed book.
And finally as a bonus I discovered BookSmart makes it possible to create a pdf file from the file/print menu (printing as a pdf using a pdf writer such as CutePdf) and though the pdf file has the blurb watermark on it, it is certainly a plus.

The Conclusion:
If I had to choose between Blurb and Lulu then my choice will depend on my objective.
I would definitely choose Lulu (and/or CreateSpace) for publishing a standard book but for a coffee table/portfolio type of book I will absolutely go with Blurb;
1) Blurb’s BookSmart software permits more room for creative design and layout which is rather limited with Lulu Studio.
2) Another bonus point Blurb gets over Lulu Photo Book is the price: the same book mentioned above will be prices at $54.99 with Lulu (instead of $43.95 with Blurb) even though it will actually have somewhat a smaller size (9X7 at Lulu’s instead of 10X8 with Blurb)
3) The ability to create a pdf file with BookSmart is a nice feature.

Related:
Publishing a book with Lulu Studio
What Print on Demand should you choose?
Print on Demand photo books / part one
Print on Demand books / part two
The process of writing a book – part one
The process of writing a book – part two

Don’t just sit there, go get inspired!

The main difference between designing your own book and designing a book for a client is that you have to work even when there’s no inspiration what-so-ever. Especially when the client wants an “artistic” design which without ado transforms the job from a simple book arrangement into the illusive realm or art.
But I guess this is a common problem for any form of art which is to be preformed as a job; you can just sit around and wait for inspiration where there’s a deadline to meet.
So what should you do?
I don’t know about you but for me books are a great source of inspiration. So I went to our local book store looking for books about book design (kind of challenging writing a book about book design, don’t you think? I mean this book, not only has to be informative and written well but it got to excel in its own layout and design)
OK, anyway I found a few good books about book design (non of which had any special design…) but I was actually quite captivated by another book about graphic design titled:
graphic design for the non-designers
Non-designer? Definitely me!
Even though I’ve done plenty of design work over the years, I have no background in graphic design and in fact I really don’t know much about it.
The main thing I love about this book is that they take you through the very first steps needed to get started, from equipment, through basics of design and to actual design projects. You can’t go wrong!
So if you are interested in learning something about graphic design and finding inspiration with your own creative project (including photography related work) check out this book.

“All you need is a little patience and imagination and you’ll be fine”

Flickr slideshow

There are many ways to incorporate Flickr slideshows into your blog or website such as Flickrshow or flickrSLiDR but my personal favorite is PictoBrowser
It is quite simple to set up:
Go to PictoBrowser > click on the PictoBuilder tab > enter your screen name > choose the set you want to use > and customize your settings (such as size and background color).
Now, all you need to do is get the html code which is automatically generated for you.
That’s it, you’re done!

Joomla vs. WordPress

During the summer I decided to teach myself how to install and employ a Content Management System. And since my smart & handsome little brother recommended Joomla, I took his advice and I installed it on my server.
Essentially my intention was to transform an old site of mine, Streets of Los Angeles.com, from a site that was built plainly on HTML and CSS, to a full CMS structure. So I had to start from scratch and than just write over the old site.
(btw, feel free to visit the site and let me know what you think)

I have to say that Joomla is quite more challenging to learn than WordPress, but once you figure it out; there are plenty of applications to help you manage your site.
And by the way, this is not at all a proficient comparison between these two systems; I’ve been using Joomla only for about a month now while my knowledge and experience with WordPress spreads over a much longer period of time, so keep that in mind.

The main difference between these two systems is that WordPress is a blog publishing system that grew into a Content Management System while Joomla was developed to be one from the start.
As far as the ease of use and the learning curve WordPress is far ahead of Joomla. WordPress is simple, clear and straightforward which makes it a better tool if you want to install CMS for a client. It takes less than an hour to teach a reasonably intelligent client how to use WordPress. Right now, I doubt that any of my past clients would have been able to utilize Joomla in their business without much difficulty.
So what is Joomla good for? Joomla is the right choice if you need a community based portal with multiple user signup and login.
The main thing I didn’t like about Joomla is that it offers only a limited number of add-ons, many of them are actually not free, whereas WordPress seems to have a larger community of developers who create a wealth of (free) plug-ins.
At any rate, to sum up my non-expert opinion: Choose Joomla if you need a powerful multiple user system otherwise I’d be quite happier with WordPress.
(And I seriously hope my little brother doesn’t read this!)

bluehost.com

Just in case you were searching for a good web hosting provider I warmly recommend bluehost.com. I’m not going to list all their goodies, you can check them out for yourself, but I’ll just say that I’m quite happy with them and I have all my sites hosted with them. I also always encourage my clients to go with bluehost. I went through really bad hosting providers before I found bluehost a few years ago, so trust me on this one; I really know what’s good for me
And something some photographers will appreciate; they offer an easy installation of online photo gallery software, blogs (such as this wonderful but humble photography blog) and lots of other scripts.

photo gallery

If you are looking to present your photos in an attractive online photo gallery display, there are lots of ways to do it, but I think my favorite one is an open source Flash gallery I stumbled upon the other day.
  I love open source! And as I always try to find alternatives to the unreasonably expensive software I’m always happy to try any of the open source choices. 
The main thing to remember about using open source software is to keep the creator’s copyright notice intact whenever using it online.  It is part of the Creative Commons licenses included with open source software.

So far (until I find something more exciting) my favorite photo gallery is called Flash Gallery.
It is very easy to install and modify tough unless you have php server installed on your local hard drive you will need to modify the file directly on your server.
One of the things I really like about this little photo gallery is that the main file is a Flash file (swf) but you don’t need to open any Flash software to modify it.  All the information is located in an xml file which can be edited in notepad.
Here’s an example of a photo gallery I created using Flash Gallery: Virginia photo gallery

WordPress tips

Here are a couple of tips that are not precisely photo tips but since they are WordPress improvements, they can in effect support and also enhance your WP photography blog presentation.
The first one I want to mention here is the lightbox 2 plugin I installed here. This plugin opens the image in a new window while darkening the background page. Pretty neat and quite easy to install. Just download the plugin here, unzip, upload to the wp-content/plugin folder and activate in the plugin section in WordPress.
Here, give it a try; click on this image:

The other thing I wanted to mention is that WordPress allows the design of pages outside WordPress which can then be uploaded into WP. The reason one would want to do it is if they want pages that look differently than their blog pages but still keep them inside WP.
It took me a (long!) while to figure it out, but once I did, it turned out to be a pretty easy and straightforward practice.
Here it is; How to create unique pages in WP:
1) Create the page in your html editor.
2) Add this code at the top of your page above the html: < ?php /* Template Name: TemplateName*/ ? >” (replace the TemplateName with anything you want)
3) Upload the page into: wp-content/themes/default folder.
4) create a new page in WP. Give it a title and select the template you have just created from the Page Template pull down menu.
5) publish your page.

Take a look at the page I created outside WP: Creative photo techniques (link is located at the top of this page)
As you see it doesn’t have the sidebars like the other pages. In this case I chose to keep the page looking somewhat like the rest of the blog by maintaining the title and the colors but you don’t have to if you want to create something new all together.

Blogs and spam

If you have a blog, or a message board, or a guest book, you probably had to install something against spam. For obvious reasons, blogs and other types of community sites with user participation are a great attraction to these scam bags.
The reason spammers choose to overflow other sites with their links is that the existence of these links, even if nobody actually clicks them, increases their artificial search engine ranking.
Before I began this blog I installed a street photography forum on my site which was a nice place for street photographers to talk about related issues and review each other photos.
But very quickly the spam robots discovered this forum and began posting their links in the older discussion threads. Back then the anti-spam practice was to ban ip addresses and certain key words but other than that there was nothing much to do.

Minolta SRT 101 . Kodak T400 CN BW film . Malibu 2009

Now days it is much easier to prevent spam in comments.
There are many ways to fight spam like installing automated spam detectors, rejecting links in posts, members participation only, using the “nofollow” tag (which in my opinion is not at all effective), and of course the most irritating anti-spam method; the CAPTCHA. This is when you need to validate your message by entering a combination of letters and numbers before you can post your comment.
Needless to say that this method tends to get on everybody’s nerves when so often the letters are impossible to read that it takes a few tries before the form is finally submitted.
When I installed my blog I made sure to add an anti-spam plugin called Akismet, which works just fine. It always finds the spam and leaves it in a folder on the server for me to go over and make sure it is all spam alright. Until recently, I didn’t mind checking this spam folder every once in a while and deleting the spam, but suddenly there are more and more spam comments and going over the spam folder became more time consuming.
So I decided to simply install another plugin which requires the posters to review their posts before they submit them. It is a very simple fix but quite smart. It lets people review their comments and at the same time it prevents the automated spam comments from being posted.
So far, in the last couple of weeks there were no comments in the spam folder. It is empty.
Seems like problem solved.

Another book on Amazon Whooo-hoooo!

This is my second book on Amazon and by far the road to Amazon this time was much faster, not to say simpler. As I mentioned in a previous post, I published this book with CreateSpace instead of Lulu, my usual publisher for a few years now.
So to follow up: I received the proof from CreateSpace a few days ago, loved the book and approved it.
Once I approved it, the book is sent to Amazon and other distribution channels.
I am told the retail page on Amazon is built in stages over the course of fifteen business days, so you will see parts of it appear over time, rather than all at once.
Surely, it is not complete yet, for instance, the “search inside this book” feature is still missing.
The main thing I like about it is there’s no additional distributors’ fee to cover so the book can be reasonably priced.
So to everybody who’s interested in publishing a photography book I recommend CreateSpace.com
go for it.

Scribd.com

Yesterday I received an email message from Lulu.com saying:
” Due to your current success and the popularity of No Rules street photography on Lulu, you have been selected to be a part of this exclusive Scribd iPaper trial, starting in June.”
Incidentally, last week, I asked my friend Jeff (aka. Wxman) to check out Scribd and write a review about it.

Anyway, if any of you is familiar with Scribd.com I would love to hear about your experience and opinion about this site.

Here’s wxman’s review:

For about a week I experimented with a little program called “Ipaper” by Scribd.
Basically, it’s a little embedded viewer that a site developer can use to display multiple documents or photos on a web page.
At first I liked the program… easy to install the “script code” to my site and blog and easy to work with… changing documents and images.

But along with the good came the ugly side.

When you sign up for this program, and without any warning, you are also signing up for a “Social Networking” account… similar to MY SPACE or FACEBOOK.
Also your documents and images become public domain and they are displayed on the Scribd website.
Call me paranoid but I feel very uncomfortable about social networking sites.

The next day after signing up for the account, I was flooded with emails about becoming person x or y online friend. After some work I was able to finally block these incoming emails.

During the next few days Ipaper became somewhat “buggy”; I was getting “ page cannot be displayed” messages on the viewer and sometimes I was unable to upload documents or images to be displayed in the viewer.

After about a week’s experiment with this product I finally deleted my account with Scribd.

Last thought about Scibd’s Ipaper:
I would be very hesitant about using product from a company that deceives a customer like they do.

Issuu

If you are interested in displaying your book, magazine, article or any other document in a neat way, issuu.com will let you do just that.
I don’t even remember how I stumbled upon this site but right away I liked the fact that each and every publication displayed on this site looked good, and possibly even better than the real thing.
So basically its a stylish way of publishing your PDF document to the web, while you can get feedback from your visitors and also dynamically embed the document on your site just like I did here.

ACDSee Pro 2

I’m not going to write a review about ACDSee here, there’s no need to do such a thing as there are plenty of reviews all over the net written by experts who know much more than I do about photo editors.
But all I want to say is that if you have lots of photos to work with, and if you have thoughts about putting together a website or some sort of a catalog of your photos ACDSee can really make things faster for you.
I used to have an early version of ACDsee and I was definitely not impressed with it. It was merely an image viewer and I didn’t need one.
Recently I wanted to put together a website/catalog of my photos and was looking around for a tool which will help me working with the large number of images, organizing and displaying them. ACDSee turned out to be perfect for batch renaming images in a folder, tagging them and creating a PDF file or an html album which displays image information below each image. Perfect!

Noise Ninja

Typically I like images that have film grain; it accentuates a dark mood, a gritty feel and depth. But I don’t really care much for the digital noise – grain’s ugly cousin. Digital noise is the result of high ASA digital camera settings or scanner employment.
In the past, I used the Noise Removal filter provided in Paintshop Pro in order to eliminate noise in some images, but recently I needed something that works better and without any loss of detail.
This is when I decided to give Noise Ninja a try and was ever so impressed with the fact it is capable of effectively reducing the amount of noise but at the same time without losing detail.
Noise Ninja is available as a plug-in or stand alone software and the best way to learn using it is through their Five Minute Guide located under Help/User guide.
Basically there are 3 ways to use Noise Ninja: automatically generating noise profile from the image, creating an image profile manually or loading an existing profile. You can download a profile of your scanner or camera from Noise Ninja homepage.

Why photoblogs are boring

As you might have noticed there are photography blogs and there are photo-blogs.
So what’s the difference?
Unlike photography blogs, photoblogs typically don’t share information, advice or ideas, but instead display their beautiful photos which is really nice of them, but after seeing a few of these photos it just becomes a little boring. yawn.
As it is there are way Too many beautiful pictures out there and if one wishes to check them out they can just visit photo sharing sites such as flickr, picasa, photobucket, pbase and such where you can view photos by categories or keywords and bookmark your favorite photographers. Makes much more sense then just jumping between photoblogs and wasting precious time before stumbling on something worthwhile.
In fact photoblogs often miss the opportunity to deliver and share meaningful information and deal with photography in any serious way.
This is why Photoblogs are dead!

On the other hand check out Dave’s photography blog: New York photography (black and white photography blog).

If you know of any good photography blogs, feel free to share them here.

Recommended: DotPhoto.com

DotPhoto is one of these places where you can upload your beautiful photos and have them printed at a high quality prints.
I’ve been using DotPhoto forever now and I was never disappointed with the quality of prints. Even more, I’m still always surprised by the fast turnaround.
I use their service to printout my photos for me of course, but I also use them to sell my prints. I upload my photos and order the prints which are available in a large variety of sizes and in glossy or matt finish. They then ship the prints to the buyer and send the bill to me. Fast and simple.
And finally, I absolutely love their low prices (duh!) especially for poster size prints: 8X10 for $2.89, 11X14 for 7.99 and 24X26 for $25

Rcommended: Film is not dead it just smells funny

This is one of my very favorite blogs and is high on my list of online places I like to visit.
The idea behind this site, as the name suggests, is to promote film photography. Essentially it’s a place for photographers who use and are interested in analogue photography .
Most pictures are selected for this site from Flickr, and in effect the site is directly connected to the Flickr group with the same name: Film is not dead

Line of palm trees in Santa Monica.
One of my pictures which was featured on the site.