More and more these days I find just surfing the Internet to be a little dull on it’s own, I’m sure this is another symptom of the Attention Defecit Disorder that modern technology provides but I always find myself needing to do something else beyond just surfing.  So what do I do?  If I can get hold of one of my friends on Skype I’ll do that but sometimes if noone’s available or it’s too late at night to be talking I’ll just fire up TWiT Live and listen to Leo.

For those of you that don’t know, Leo Laporte is a broadcast journalist who has had a long career in radio and television (see his Wikipedia page for more info) and who now runs a succesful network of podcasts spearheaded by This Week in Tech (other podcasts available here).  A while ago Leo started moving from podcasts to doing live video with his TWiT Live initiative allowing viewers to watch Leo live as he records his podcasts.  The clever part is that it goes way beyond just watching a guy wearing headphones talking into a mic, Leo has the equipment to have double-screen video showing guests both in and out of the studio as well as graphics, lower thirds, screen casting and so on.  All of this adds an extremely interesting dimension to the video and give me something else to do, although I will admit that I don’t always watch the video (and Stickam provide a facility to pause the video to save bandwidth).

Having had my Canon 400D for around a year and a half now I no longer consider myself a beginner, I’d say perhaps that I’m an intermediate-level amateur and so I’d like to share what I think are my 10 top tips that I’ve learned over the past year or so. I appreciate that it can be a bit daunting going from a point & shoot camera up to a fully-fledged DSLR with interchangeable lenses and so I’m aiming here to provide a little bit of guidance that worked for me that said these tips might not work for everyone and you don’t have to do them all on day one, if you have any questions feel free to get in touch.

1. Don’t get disheartened - not all shots are good ones!

It’s easy to think that you’re doing something wrong, or it’s just too difficult but that’s most likely not to be the case. Photography is a learning experience but it’s not like learning your times tables by rote, over time you’ll develop a sense for what works and what doesn’t but even then you should push yourself beyond that and experiment as it usually pays off. Some days you’ll go out shooting and come back with loads of great photos, other days you’ll come back with a card full of average shots but don’t let that get you down - if you take 100 shots and only one of them turns out to be a ‘keeper’ then it was still worth the trip for that one shot. I’ve taken thousands of shots and I’d probably only pick out 10 that I really like, then again - they’re not the same ones that other people like so I guess it’s down to taste!

2. Learn how your camera ’sees’ light.

This one is all about research, I won’t provide precise suggestions for where or how you do this but if go down to your local book shop or library you should find plenty of books that talk about photography in general otherwise you could always go on the Internet - remember Google and Wikipedia are your friends. In terms of what you research, you really need to understand how light gets into your camera and how that affects your photography - key concepts you’ll need to grasp are:

• Exposure
• Aperture an F-Stops
• Shutter Speed
• ISO and Grain
• Depth-of-Field
• Light Histograms
• Composition
• Rule of Thirds

3. Get used to Manual settings

Once you’ve done your research you’ll be in a good position to start using the manual settings on your camera, I strongly recommend that you immerse yourself in the world of manual settings (leave the lens on autofocus though) and completely ignore any of of the automatic or semi-automatic (Tv, Av, etc.). modes. At first you will find yourself being quite slow and you may miss a shot or two through fumbling with the controls but with practice you’ll be as quick as you like and you’ll really understand when to use the semi-automatic modes and when you need full control. From the moment I first bought the camera I pushed myself hard to understand the manual settings and it really paid off for me, now I spend 80% of my time on manual but I’m beginning to use the semi-automatic modes when I’m shooting in variable light conditions (e.g. tracking a flying bird).

4. Replace your kit lens

This tip depends on which lens(es) came with your camera but as a rule, the kit lenses are not the ‘best of breed’ lenses and usually compromise on both build and optical quality. A dead giveaway is to compare the ‘body only’ price and the ‘kit’ price for your camera, my 400D cost £500 with a kit lens but if I wanted to buy a body-only package it would cost £490. No lens that retails for £10 is going to produce great results! I replaced my 18-55 kit lens with the Tamron 17-55mm f2.8 and it revolutionised my photography, it’s probably the best £300 I’ve spent ever. My advice for you here is whatever you do, make sure your replacement lens is wide (goes down to 17mm or 18mm), goes up to a ‘normal’ focal length (e.g. 50mm) and make it at least an f2.8 - the Tamron is perfect because it is f2.8 at 17mm and 50mm.

5. Buy a tripod and a cable release.

One problem of shooting with the camera in your hand is that you’re limited in the shutter speed you can select, if you choose a slow shutter speed there’s a good chance that you’ll get blurring due to unsteady hands. In low-light conditions you can always increase the ISO but that introduces grain, a pretty simple and straight-forward solution is to buy a tripod to keep your camera steady. When you choose a tripod go for one as light as your budget can afford but you don’t have to spend a fortune to get the benefit, I picked mine up for £45 and it’s far from the lightest tripod out there but it does the job. Another addition to your kit is a cable release, I picked up an unbranded one on eBay for £10 and it does the job perfectly. Cable releases for DSLRs are not quite the same as on old film cameras, mine is a small thumb-sized box with a button and has a 1m cable that plugs into the side of my camera. This allows you to take a picture without even touching the camera which is important if you’re on uneven ground, also the button can lock down so that if you’re doing a variable ‘bulb’ exposure you can keep the button held down for as long as you like and you’re finger won’t get tired or slip off.

6. Shoot in RAW

Your DSLR will likely have several options of how to record your photos, shooting in JPEG (possibly with various quality levels), shooting in RAW and probably the option to do both (JPEG+RAW). So, what is RAW? Your camera has a digital sensor that captures light and records certain information about that light (colour & intensity), if you have your camera set to JPEG mode it converts this basic information into a compressed JPG file and discards the detailed data. RAW files on the other hand contain all of that detailed data and allow you to perform a much deeper level of processing after you’ve moved your photos to your computer, in many cases I have taken photos in RAW that look under-exposed but have been able to alter the exposure on the computer and turn a bad photo into a good one. The down-side of using RAW is that you must process them afterwards (most DSLRs come with sofware to do this), although it may seem daunting to have to process hundreds of photos a lot of the work can be automated and it gives you a good opportunity to review the day’s results.

7. Invest in software - Lightroom or Aperture

Most Digital SLRs are bundled with some software from the manufacturer, whilst it may be possible to get by with this software I would strongly recommend moving up to a premier photo editing & management tool, the leading packages are Adobe’s Lightroom (PC + Mac) and Apple’s Aperture (Mac only). Both packages have advantages and disadvantages but they both do a great job, if you’re on a Mac and have to choose between them I would recommend downloading a trial and using both. Personally I use Lightroom and have never used Aperture, whilst I’m on a Mac now I used to do all of my editing on a PC and just moved my Lightroom catalog over to the Mac. These tools allow you to organise your photos in a variety of ways (names, keywords, collections, tags, by lens, by ISO, by camera) and also to alter many factors about the image to really make your photos ‘pop’, amongst other things you can alter the white balance, exposure, contrast, brightness, saturation, correct for vignetting & chromatic aberation and alter the composition (through cropping).

8. Share your photos - join Flickr

Taking your photos and looking at them on your own will only get you so far, to improve your photography and your interest in photography you should share your photos with others. For months I have been sharing my photos with the members of a video-gaming forum who are also enjoy photography over at the Gamercast Network, following on from that I joined the massively popular photo-sharing site Flickr where you can upload photos and other people will post comments on your work. There are also Flickr Groups where you can find communities of people that are interested in the same thing and these range from broad subjects such as ‘Black and White’ to narrow subject such as ‘Graffiti’, or ‘Dogs’. In these groups you can ask for constrictive criticism of your photos and find tips on how to photography you favourite subjects.

9. Don’t be afraid to copy others

I just mentioned joining Flickr to share your photos but remember that sharing works both ways, you should explore and comment on other people’s photos and you’ll learn about the composition and styles that other people like and use. The best part of looking at other people’s photos is that they will often give you ideas for shots you could take and it can be a great inspiration, if you can’t get the same results as someone else then you can get in touch and ask them how they acheived a certain ‘look’.

10. Listen to the professionals

Now unless you come from a photographic family or know a professional photographer they’re pretty hard to come by and probably don’t have too much time to spend helping out beginners like us, even though many of them would like to. The solution that some professionals have arrived at is podcasting, if you don’t know what podcasts are they’re essentially like radio shows (although some include video) that you can download from the Internet and listen to anytime (and anywhere) you like, the most common place to look for podcasts is through Apple’s iTunes store and a perfect way to listen to them is on your iPod on the way to work. I’m sure there are many photography related podcasts but the two I’d recommend are This Week in Photography and Tips From the Top Floor, I listen to TWiP religiously and find it both entertaining and informative, they regularly have professional photographers on as guests and cover everything from tips, news and equipment.

Well that’s it for my tips, I hope you find them helpful - if you want to ask any questions or offer suggestions please feel free to get in touch. If you want to look at a collection of my photos please find my pages on Flickr

I decided to install Drupal on my web server and instead of downloading the install files to my desktop, unzipping them and then uploading them back to the web server (which takes ages over ADSL) I thought I’d have a go at downloading them manually over SSH. In effect SSH is a method of connecting to your Linux web hosting service as though you were actually at a terminal logged in to that machine, in effect you have complete control over your web space with the ability to use the array of commands available to all Linux users. Most web hosting companies offer SSH access on their decent packages and I definitely recommend it as a shortcut for various things such as deleting files, setting permissions and editing config files (yes, I actually like vi).  So, if you’ve got SSH access, how do you use it? First you’ll need to find out the Host Name, Username and Password from your hosting provider, then one of the following - depending on whether you’re a Windows or Mac user…

If you’re on a Mac running OSX you’re in luck, you already have an SSH client to hand, if you go to Applications then double-click on Utilities you get an array of useful applications - be careful here but the one we want is Terminal. Once you’ve launched Terminal type the following: “ssh username@system”, you will then be prompted for your password and you’re in!

If you’re on Windows then get yourself a copy of PuTTY, a small but fantastic little application that’s free for both commercial and non-commercial users.  As an aside, the PSFTP client on offer there is also a great secure FTP client.

Now, if you’re not used to having command-line access to systems and especially if you’ve no Linux skills at all I’d suggest you read some good starter materials and learn more about Linux - messing with the command-line is very dangerous and there is no undo feature!  I may start writing some posts about both the Linux and Windows command-line but in the interim please feel free to ask for advice, just leave a comment on this page and I’ll get an email, alternatively send me a direct message on Twitter.

I got home today and started my usual half-hour’s surfing, checking email, forums, etc. and saw that Jason Calacanis had posted on Twitter to say he was streaming live video on Ustream and I thought I’d check it out. Jason is the CEO of Mahalo, a start-up search engine with a difference - instead of crawling the web and picking up every site out there (including the SEO’d link spam) Mahalo is a “human powered search” where the results are crafted by hand. You might think this is a little odd but Mahalo aims more at handling the most common searches very well and eschews the more detailed and technical searches like specific error messages or code fragments. Mahalo also has a hint Wikipedia to it in that users can create pages, edit text and recommend links to go with certain search terms.

On the Ustream page Jason decided that as a collective (the room had around 150 members) we should start building some Mahalo pages and he kind-of walked us through the process, I myself signed up whilst on the call. Now I was cooking dinner during this period but I still managed to participate in the pages for “Home Theatre PC“, “Home Theater” and “Eye TV“, submitting a handful of links I thought might be useful.

The whole experience was great fun and really demonstrated the point of Mahalo but the amazing part was just the buzz and excitement of over a hundred people collabarating live, being orchestrated by Jason who was intermittently addressing the room and hollering at Mahalo staff in the background, some of whom he also put on air. All in all this was definitely one of those “wow” moments I still get on the Internet from time to time, proof that amazing things are possible if people work together and whilst I’m not ready to give up Google I will lean a lot more towards Mahalo if I just want an overview of a particular topic.

Yesterday I got another email from Facebook telling me that <insert random name here> has added me as a friend, so I diligently log in (and it seems to ask for my details every damned time) to see who it is and despite the photo and location and other scant details I have no idea who the hell this is. The question I find myself left with is who is the guy, why does he want me to be his friend and more importantly why do I even give a toss? The last 4 or 5 people to add me as a friend have been random people who I had little or nothing to do with at school and back then probably wouldn’t even have pissed on me if I were on fire. The other thing that bothers me significantly is the absurd number of bloody applications you get on there, I had to remove over 100 invitiations to be a zombie, werewolf, post on this wall, that wall, be a member of the christ-knows-what group, rate this, complete that, etc. etc. and it’s way too much for any sane human to bother with. If this is what the 21st century is going to turn friendship into then I’m out.

I find the most disturbing part of Facebook relates to it’s revenue model, sure advertising works and I’m sure that the founder Mark Zuckerburg (sickeningly named ‘Zuck’ by adoring fans) will end up being mightily rich if he sells at a good time but it’s the violation of privacy and the open mauling of personal data that really gets to me. The problem I have is that many of my friends use Facebook as their primary communication tool so I’m basically shafted if I don’t continue to use it.  You never know, I might change my mind and I might have a renaissance - I’m always willing to give things a second (or third) chance so maybe one day I’ll be back on there but deep down it’s not the principle of Facebook that annoys me, more the execution and they seem to be sticking with the design they have so for the time being I’ll stick with Twitter and the Gamercast Network for my social networking needs.

I’ve heard talk to Twitter for so long but resisted because of my lazy stance on blogging and the fact that I thought it was just for trendy tech types, well this week I finally gave in and signed up and I love it! For those of you that don’t know, it’s a micro-blog - basiclly like a normal blog but only the post have to be less than or equal to 140 characters. Because of this it lends itself more to throwing up little comments about what you’re doing or where you are and often just URLs of interesting videos, articles or blogs you’ve found. The simplicity of Twitter makes it perfect for filling those little spots of time you have free such as train journeys, waiting for data to load (occupational hazzard) and walking down the street (looking both ways when crossing roads mind you), even better is the fact that it’s availably via the web, instant messaging clients, mobile web, SMS and RSS (supported by the Sony Ericsson W910i). In the service you choose people who you want to follow and then other people choose to follow you, I’m currently wondering how I might increase my number of followers but I guess like any medium that if you build it - they will come.

Well, that’s enough real blogging now - I’m going to get back on over to Twitter and try to find more people to follow.

I know this puts me somewhat behind the times, but I just wanted to comment on how great Skype is.  In the course of arranging a trip to the USA I have had reason to call on the phone a number of times to arrange hotels, etc.  I just got off of the phone from Ticketmaster as I had issues with their site booking tickets for a game at Madison Square Gardens.

I work in the IT industry and have been using computers in one form or another for almost 20 years so it’s hard for things to really give me that ‘wow’ factor, but occasionally the enormity of it all hits me and I my brain lets me stand back and appreciate the whole thing.  So, just now I was sat in the UK talking to some guy in the US over the Internet, wirelessly inside my flat and I though “yep, this is cool”.

Well, after about 4.5 seconds worth of thought I’ve decided to put my words where my mouth is (doesn’t sound right but you know what I mean) and say what I think is gonna go down in 2007, this time in no particular order…
Print Media Feels The Burn
I may be mildly premature with this one, but I can feel it in my bones - the carcinogenic newsprint will hit the fan sometime soon and I think 2007 will be the beginning. I’m sure print media has already had some reaction to the Internet and most of the UK broadsheets have pretty decent websites these days but for certain classes of publications I can foresee a major decline. For instance, I hardly buy gaming magazines these days for two main reasons, (1) the news is usually 3-6 weeks out of date by the time they go to print, (2) the reviews and articles are so full of marketing bullshit and rubbish games regularly get good reviews because the mag got an exclusive demo/interview/shag and finally (3) the demos are all downloadable now so why bother paying for them? I’m absolutely sure that those points apply to most monthly tech magazines and one other ‘primary factor’ in the decline is that newspapers / magazines are full of writers who write about things they barely understand. Have you read any ‘generic press’ articles about IT, gaming or technology lately? If you’re really interested in something (anything) then you’ll probably find a decent, articulate and well-informed blog / forum / news site on the web that’s 100 times better than some pokey journo trying to meet a deadline.

Nintendo Kick Ass
With the recent launch of the Wii and the massive public interest coming from traditional non-gamers I really think Nintendo are onto a winner (see: I Love My Wii) and Sony have still not really got their act together. I’m still not ready to predict final winner in the battle but by the end of 2007 I would not be surprised if Nintendo are on top.

Watching The Computer
People are going to spend much more time in 2007 pointing their LCD-hungry faces at computers this year than ever before. This includes consoles, high-def video players, IPTV, mobile TV as well as the traditional fare such as YouTube, Google Video and the web.

The Corporate World
After some relative calm I can see things turning bad for a major tech company this year, obvious choices would be people losing their identity such as AOL or Sun but perhaps it won’t be such a good year for people like Dell or Yahoo. I predict that a few more social networking sites will be acquired by media companies this year, possibly bebo or facebook - also predict it won’t do them much good.

Operating Systems
Last year started the war of next-generation consoles, 2007 sees the war between next-generation operating systems. With the release of WIndows Vista and later in the year Leopard (Mac OS 10.5) this does look like an interesting year, I also foresee more manufacturers offering pre-installed (or embedded) Linux than they have in the past. As for the outcome, obviously Vista will win but I’m even more sure that it will be plagued with bugs and security issues throughout the year. I do however still think that Apple will notch-up their market share somewhat in 2007 - from people holding out for Leopard and people who just want something solid, dependable and easy to use and have been slowly wooed by the iPod.

Well, that’s the lot - I wish my predictive mental offspring well as they try and navigate the great wide world, and if you should meet one whilst you’re traveling through 2007 please stop and say hello.