Great Christmas Presents for Photography loving Guys

Since I am a photography loving guy myself, this is partly my own wish list. I will classify myself as a relatively skeptical and critical person. This list is for the slightly geeky type that enjoys nostalgic retro stuff and photography gadgets. This post I presume is for the girlfriends and wives of photo nerds.

Ultra cool slippers

I have these myself and love them. Very durable too.

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Silhouette vinyl wall graphic

Perfect silhouette for the smart office space or for the home. I ordered one of these for my new studio.

Ahead of the rest...

A summary of the top early birds blogs

Give yourself the upper hand, twitter these helpful blogs before anyone else

I often find that the best blogs are discovered through lists and word of mouth. It never ceases to surprise me how difficult it can be to find new and interesting blogs, simply by looking for them. It really takes some thorough investigation. In thinking about this, I brought in my staff and had them research, in-depth, about some really superb blogs. We compiled an overall list of 100 blogs, and narrowed this down to about 20 blogs that were repeatedly mentioned and had high popularity. It didn't stop here though.. We wanted to now about which blogs were the first to post so that we could twitter about it, without having 100s of other users twitter about it before us. Basically, we wanted to know which blogs would enable us to twitter, the most relevant and up-to-date articles, possible. The blogs listed below were mostly selected as being in the top 20 because of this criteria. Altogether, we've racked up 150 hours compiling this list, so enjoy!

Here are the top blogs and the blogs that I now follow:

Best blogs of 2009

News Blogs

Lensbaby images sell!…

If you can get them online. That’s the tricky part.

I simply love shooting with my lensbaby and actually have four of them. One for Nikon and three for my Canon. Different kinds and different effects. The lensbaby does something smart: It makes the images look VERY intentionally blurred which is the criteria for getting blurred images online on stock agencies. My lensbaby (or babies..) is one of the only four lenses I bring in my Travel bag.

What is Macro stock? – Revised

Good Question? Macrostock, also known among microstock photographers as “tradition RF” is not as clear-cut to define against it’s counterpart, microstock, as it once was. Now that Istock has launched their Vetta Collection with prices definitively in the macrostock range (70USD for high res) and this being on a microstock platform, it seems that we are entering a phase of mixed prices for stock images. Fotolia has their Infinite collection with prices even higher than Vetta and these files are also selling alongside low priced images. And in high end agencies such as Getty Images, you can now buy web res for an ultra low price of 50USD.

 

Hi guys. For those of you who just read the post called, "microstock photographers making big bucks" – uh, opps.

You were probably just as confused as I when that came up on my blog. The reason it went up was simple human error: a fairly new employee I just granted site access to was working on a set of google meta text and he accidentally pressed "post", so it went live. The result was a bunch of gibberish that made no sense about making money from stock…etc, a good laugh. It "only" went out to about 3000 subscribers so no big deal right..….Argh.