A friend sent me this link explaining very nicely the basics of photography. If you have always wondered what different focal lengths do, what an f-stop is and what a polarizer does, hop over to Bernie’s Better Beginner’s Guide to Photography for Computer Geeks Who Want to be Digital Artists. Don’t worry, you need not be a geek to learn from this nice write-up.

As a taste here is Bernie´s recommendation on how to spend your money wisely:

Here are two ways of spending three grand:

• Spend all £3000 on a 300mm f/2.8 IS lens: an object of beauty and arguably the finest lens Canon have ever made.

• Spend £300 on a 70-300 f/4.5-5.6 IS zoom: not as glamorous, but very sharp, 1/10 the price and only 2 stops slower. Spend the remainder on a 2 month-long holiday to an exotic location taking pictures and learning how to use your equipment well.

Guess which one will yield better photos?

If you need more convicing before indulging yourself into the learning curve, here’s a quick quote from a commentor about Bernie’s guide:

Great job showing what you are telling. I teach a 12-hour digital photo course at the Community College. You condensed most of it into a simple quick tutorial. Very good.

Gems from the Web:

• Nobody Expects the SPAMish Inquisition – An alliance of 20,000 spam-fighters in more than 100 countries are suing spammers. The suit seeks the email harvesters’ identities and more than $1 billion in damages for violations of the CAN-SPAM Act and the Virginia Computer Crimes Act.
• Photoshop CS3 New Feature Tips – Nice collection of tips on what cool things you can do with the new Photoshop.
• Morticious Thrind – Phantastic! A Blog with a Commodore 64 feel. I love it!
• Jahshaka – The worlds first open source, hardware accelerate editing and effects system!
• Gallery – Gallery is an open source project with the goal to develop and support leading photo sharing web application solutions.
• International Billboard – Phantastic overview of documentary film festivals and seminars.
• A List Apart: Articles: Contrast and Meaning – Nice list of the fundamental tools a designer has at his and her hands.
• Apple to build new features into iPhone, Apple TV free of charge – Apple said Wednesday it will leverage its proven capability in the area of software development to gradually add new software features and applications to its iPhone and Apple TV products free of charge

Starting today, I’ll have a new offer on my blog. Often I come across really good video blogs, or other video films on the net, made by enthusiastic people. Some have amazing content, others are funny, and others again are just plain honest. What all too many of them have in common is that they could be easily improved. From time to time I shall pick out one video I enjoyed (and I am open for suggestions) and come up with some possible technical remedies.

I’ll kick off with Commoncraft’s excellent explanation for us non-nerds about what RSS is, and how it works. (Via Doug and Dawud.) I’ve been seeing RSS buttons everywhere, and have been told many times as to how cool and great they are, but before I had never understood the concept, nor its benefits for me. Now, I am enlightened. So, content-wise a fantastic video. Lets make it even better.

Gems from the Web:

• SPHERICALROBOTS 2004 – Using plain water to display images. Wow. I would love to find out how much that costs.
• This Guy Can Get 59 MPG in a Plain Old Accord. Beat That, Punk – Changing your driving habits can make your car much more fuel efficient. This guy managed to get it down to 4l per 100km.
• How-To: Make a solid-state A/V switcher – Do you have more boxes than your TV can handle? Grab a soldiering iron, and off you go!
• Free Vector Downloads – Nice collection of free graphic, ahem, inspiration
• My Ipod – A frank iPod modification
• Upgrading iPod Hard Drives – If your music library is bigger than your iPod, you can upgrade rather than buying a new one. Cool
• Tricks For Saving a Dead iPod – Before buying a new one, you might as well try
• The Complete Project Precita – A properly geeky home. Many buttons to push, signs, fun.
• MATTER Pierre Sculptor – Amazing sculptures
• “Pocket” Gramophones from the ’20s – Music was already portable way before the iPod. Hey, way before the Walkman. 1920.
• Avid investors prepped for Apple surprises at NAB – …”the ‘talk on the Street’ is that Apple is planning an event for April 15th at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) conference in Las Vegas”

Over at Ripplecast you can watch a free tutorial on how to smoothen shaky pictures within Shake. Personally, I use iStabilize, which is amazingly simple to set up and use.

By chance I stumbled across this nicely made demo on how to use pre-made backdrops while shooting an interview.

Usually one would use a green- or bluescreen, with all the headaches of even lighting and spill suppression. But at Digital Juice they offer a short film showing you how to use a projector to film the backdrop live.