Metacafe.com has teamed up with podcaster Israel Hyman, who has been production Izzy Video podcasts for some time now. Metacafe has a collection of videos that address many topics, including:
Tags: Izzy Video, podcasts, Tutorials
There are lots of scripts out there for making a dropdown menu in a website. Most of them are poorly coded or are too complicated for beginners to easily use. This one is clean and simple.
Tags: dropdown, javascript, menu, Web Development
Are you fed up with all your designs having the same boring fonts? Jessica Hupp from Free Geekery has compiled a nice collection of 101 free fonts for designers. They are categorized into a few groups:
Tags: Design, free fonts, illustrator, indesign, Photoshop
If you are a Photoshop user, but like me often find yourself hopping on a public computer or at a friends house, and wishing you had Photoshop to make basic image edits, you’re in luck!
There are lots of free online image editors. Here are a couple I recommend:
Tags: free utilities, online image editing, Photoshop Alternatives
There’s a ‘film music‘ section on moby.com where independent and non-profit filmmakers, film students, and anyone in need of free music for their independent, non-profit film, video, or short can listen to and request to use original Moby sound tracks at no cost.
The music is free as long as it’s being used in a non-commercial or non-profit film, however if you want to use it in a commercial film or short then you can apply for an easy license, with any money that’s generated being given to the humane society.
Moby has found a nice way to help a cause that is near and dear to him, while also helping film makers for free or cheap. Thanks Moby!
Tags: film, Free, gratis, moby, music, score, soundtrack, Video
David Hobby, former staff photographer for the Baltimore Sun turned full-time blogger, runs a website called Strobist. David has taken countless hours of his life to develop several free off-camera lighting tutorials for photographers.
The first set that I’ll mention is Lighting 101. These tutorials get you started, understanding why you’d want to utilize off-camera lighting, what are some key components, and how to use a DIY approach to build lighting gear for cheap. In future posts I’ll dig deeper on the Strobist blog for more great content.
Strobist is an invaluable resource for digital photographers, one of the very best collections available on the web. …oh yeah, and everything is free!
Tags: , digital photography, DIY, education, off-camera lighting, strobist, Tutorial
Established only 4 months ago, This Week In Photography has quickly climbed to #4 for all Photography podcasts on iTunes. Pro photographers discuss the latest equipment and trends in digital photography. Get a behind the scenes look at the folks who develop the software you use and author the books you read.
Tags: Audio, Photo, Photography Podcast, TWIP
Chase Jarvis is an amazing Seattle based photographer who, in his mid thirties, is both a Nikon and Hasselblad Master Photographer. This short video “Frames” shows every frame of a 4-day photo shoot, pausing on a few featured images. Chase has several videos online that show a glimpse of the man behind the curtain, so to speak. These tutorials and demos have helped countless aspiring photographers advance their skill. I highly recommend checking out his website for inspiration, and his blog and videos for education.
Tags: Chase Jarvis, commercial, fine art, Hasselblad, Photo shoot, Photographer, Tutorial
Wanna play a funny prank on your roommate? Download this image of a broken LCD screen, and bring it up full screen on their computer. Turn off their screen saver, and then unplug their keyboard and mouse. When they return to their computer, put on your best “I didn’t do it” face 
Tags: broken LCD, prank, roommate
You’ve probably seen some incredible photos of a landscape with an intense lightning bolts streaking through the sky and wondered, “How do they do that?” Some photographers use devices such as light or sound activated triggers to snap their photos. In the case of lightning, a light trigger will trip when a bolt suddenly lights up the sky. If you’ve ever seen the photos of a bullet bursting through an apple or something similar, then you’ve probably seen the work of a sound trigger.
But what if you don’t have one of these fancy triggers, and would still like to photograph the night sky during a light storm? There’s a few DIY tricks you can use that can give you the same resulting photos with no additional equipment other than a tripod.
Your first step would be to change your camera’s setting to manual if possible. We don’t want it to auto expose for the night sky, because the camera’s light meter works in real time. Ideally, we’d know right when the lightning would strike, and use an incident meter to read the brightness of a bolt. But even if we could, this still wouldn’t be entirely accurate, because one bolt may be brighter than the next, and some bolts remain lit longer than others. So set your camera manually to a medium aperture, maybe F8 or so, and then experiment with your shutter speed to balance for exposure. If you are in a city or some place with a lot of ambient light, you are going to have shorter exposures, and remote rural areas will be a longer exposure.
Now that your Aperture and Shutter Speed are set, (but don’t hesitate to fine tune them throughout the session), it’s time to adjust that third setting that controls your exposure, your ISO setting. Many people would read in their manual that in low light conditions, you’d want to use a high ISO speed. This may be the case when you are doing other kinds of photography, but with my method of photographing lightning, you’ll be taking longer exposures, possibly several seconds per shot. If you use the higher ISO, the exposures will be shorter, but you’ll get a lot more digital noise in the photo. I’ve found that you are much better off using your camera’s lowest ISO setting, as if it’s a bright daylight shot. After all, when the lightning actually strikes, it is very bright for that instant. Note that this is a place where higher end DSLRs really shine over point and shoot cameras. The larger sensor size tends to produce less noise for long exposures.
With your camera’s 3 exposure controls all set, mount your camera on a sturdy tripod. If you can photograph from under a cover (inside a house out a window, or under a porch, etc) then you are less likely to have to run for cover if the storm heads your way. Sometimes the best shots come from being out away from everything where you have an uninhibited view of the scene. I’ve used umbrellas to keep the gear dry, sometimes shot from inside a car with the window rolled down (when the wind is blowing and keeping the rain out of the car). Use your best judgment, and don’t be the person in the paper the next day for standing out in an open field with a metal umbrella in your hand during a storm.
The last step is to fire your camera. Again and again and again. You never know when and where it will strike, so you’ll be taking a lot of pictures that are dark, but if you are taking a series of 10 second exposure photos, for example, as long as lightning strikes during that 10 seconds, you are in good shape. So be prepared to throw out most of the images where mother nature didn’t cooperate. By the way, lightning often looks more impressive in a photo than in real life, because if the lightning does multiple strikes or branches out very far, the camera doesn’t discern the beginning of the strike form the end. In your photo of that 10 second glimpse of the night, you’ll see everywhere the lightning was during that time frame.
Another tip, if you have any bright lights in the foreground (a building or street light, etc), then you might find that simply pressing the button to fire your camera is inducing some camera shake, which is seen with streaks from those lights (from the camera shifting). If you set your self timer to the lowest setting, usually 2 seconds or so, then you can trigger the shot, take your hands away, and have 2 seconds for everything to settle down before the photo clicks off.
So get out there, be safe, and get some great photos!
Tags: DIY, DSLR, lightning, MPC, night, Photography, Tutorial
