Andre Gunther lists the ten most common photographic mistakes and explains how to eliminate them with some good examples.

A “photographer” took a photo of a group and noticed that the flash hadn’t fired. He put the camera in his pocket with the comment “I’ll photoshop it later”.
There are so many things wrong with this (read my post if you want to know more), but even if he could solve all his problems with Adobe Photoshop (he would at least get increased noise levels), he would need to spend a lot of time on the photo.
Taking a second shot with the flash enabled would only take a few seconds. So if you think a photo didn’t come out right and if you have the chance, always take another one (but don’t delete the first – see 4, someone might have their eyes closed in the new one or there might be some other reason the previous shot turns out better).
Photoshop is an invaluable tool for photographers (I even wrote some Photoshop Tutorials myself); however, it is not a remedy for everything and you cannot turn bad photos into good ones with Photoshop alone.
I am a technical (computer) geek and we used to say, Garbage in – Garbage out. The same applies to Photoshop.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Slate has started a feature called Today’s Pictures in collaboration with Magnum. Something different and interesting to see each day. Perhaps it would have been even better with a RSS feed.

That great site Photojojo has some wonderful ideas on getting the camera out for another year and to start clicking. For example there is Take a photo every single day, oops too late for that or I’ll just start today and continue to January 9th 2008. Check it out and get inspired.

From Semantic Bits

The New York Times has an article about a segment on digital cameras that was done for a television programme. The main point is that passers by were not able to tell the difference between the photos printed at different megapixel resolutions.

On the show, we did a test. We blew up a photograph to 16 x 24 inches at a professional photo lab. One print had 13-megapixel resolution; one had 8; the third had 5. Same exact photo, down-rezzed twice, all three printed at the same poster size. I wanted to hang them all on a wall in Times Square and challenge passersby to see if they could tell the difference.

In the comments section, differing opinions on the value of the experiment. One issue that I think about is what it would have been like to have shot the photos from cameras rather than using the same photo.

Beautiful images from Alberich Mathews.

Here is the link to the originating page.

So it seems that Canon has announced some new cameras today including replacements for the A range. Currently, I am shooting with an S70 but the specs announced for the new A630 and A640 may make me upgrade to those beauties. The main problem I have found with the A series is that grip that sticks out on the left side of the camera. I like to keep my S70 in my pocket for all of the imprompu photo opportunities and the grip makes the bulge in my trousers (yeah yeah) stick out a little bit too much. But the features….

The Gadgets Page has some great tips on ensuring that your digital photos don’t disappear or get lost.

One tip they note is to rename your photos to keep track of what they mean. I recommend the Flexible Renamer as it uses powerful operators and makes renaming large quantities of photos a snap so I can add the date from the exif information and add other information like location, keywords and titles to the filename. Sure the filenames are long but it’s much easier than manually assigning keywords in Picasa.