Sunday, December 28, 2008

How to Use Your Digital Camera

It's Christmas, and we're betting that at least some of you received new digital cameras (be they point-and-shoots or DSLRs). And if you're a photography n00b, we've got a few tips to help.

Turn On Burst Mode
It's harder to capture candid shots on point-and-shoots (let's call em PASs) than DSLRs, but in either format you should turn on "burst mode" or "continuous shooting." This allows you to keep the camera taking shots as fast as it can by holding down the shutter button. Even the greatest photographers don't predict magical moments down to the millisecond—they let their camera do it for them. And with today's cheap and gigantic SD cards, you can afford to waste plenty of shots to get the best.

Control the Color Temperature Yourself
Auto White Balance (AWB) does a good job on most cameras. But you know who can do a better job? You. Backing up for a moment, since every color has its own relative "temperature" that's measured in degrees Kelvin, even the orangey glow of an incandescent bulb or the relatively bluish hue of the sun's light can screw with your photos. Your brain factors it out when you're looking around, but it's important to notice whether the light falling on your scene is more yellow or blue, and to compensate.
Your camera uses auto white balance to get around this cacophony of color, but it's not always right. On some cameras, you can actually use "manual white balance" (MWB), shooting a white patch, such as a piece of paper, in order to say "THIS IS WHITE." That's the most accurate way, though the simpler way found on most cameras is to manually select the best white balance by choosing the tiny icon that identifies your light source: a sun for direct sunlight, a cloud for cloudy, a round bulb for incandescent, a rectangular bulb for fluorescent, etc.

Keep ISO to 400 on PASs, 800-1600 on Low-End dSLRs
ISO, a carryover term from the days of film, essentially signals the sensitivity of the imaging sensor to light. A higher number means grainier (noisier) but better defined shots in low light; a lower number means smoother shots in decent light. Most cameras will crank this number in medium to low light situations so that it can capture a shot without blurring, but you will get a grainy image. This may just be a rule of thumb based on the cameras I've used, but for optimally crisp shots, don't let the ISO exceed 400 on your PAS or 1600 on your DSLR. (In some older DSLR models, you probably shouldn't exceed 800.)
Use Diffuse Flash, Or Just Turn it Off
Any way you cut it, flash is a problem. When used instead of ambient light, it pulls the color and texture from skin, turns eyes red (a phenomenon caused when the flash is too close to your lens, which it is in most cameras) and often erases the background ambiance from your shot. A few things you can do will help tame flash:
1. Check your manual for minimum and maximum flash distances—probably around 6 to 12 feet away—and stay in those constraints.
2. Diffuse the flash. A classic trick for DSLR owners is to put a cigarette carton on large flash attachments, but in the absence of a large flash—and a cigarette carton—try taping some kind of translucent paper over your flash.
3. Turn it off. Even a grainier high-ISO shot is better than a washed-out flash explosion. If you use a tripod, you can get nice low light shots without resorting to flash or upping the ISO. Most cameras now have a flashless "night mode" to automate this process.

Carry a Pocket Tripod
Ultimately, if you want to take good shots in dark environments, you need to allow light to hit your camera's imaging sensor for a longer period of time. And the only way to keep your shots sharp in this scenarios is to stabilize your camera. Though even cheap cameras boast image stabilizers of all kinds, a $7 pocket tripod trumps all that marketing speak, allowing you to use a solid surface to set up the camera and then angle it to your liking. If you don't have a tripod, try resting your camera on the side of a table, or up on a (preferably empty) water glass.

Protect Your Images From Lens Flare
In any situation where sunlight or some other bright light source is hitting your lens indirectly (not associated with your subject), you may lose part of your image to stray light. Sometimes this looks cool, of course, but not always. The best and most common solution is a lens hood. The second best solution (and the one that works for PASs) is your hand, a piece of paper, anything, between that light source and your lens.

Exhale, Then Shoot
ISOs and tripods aside, maybe the best tip I've ever gotten to taking great shots was to exhale, then take the picture. Right after you exhale, the tension is released from your body, and you'll find yourself, for a brief moment, at your stillest and most relaxed. In low light especially, it could be the difference between getting a clear shot and getting a blurry one.

Use Sepia Filter Whenever Humanly Possible
Sepia is well known for making your lousy photography "deep." Helllllooo precious moments! (OK, I sort of despise sepia because it's been so overused, but that's just me. It can be beautiful, of course.)
For DSLR Owners...Shoot in RAW, Shoot in RAW, Shoot in RAW
There are many advantages to the average DSLR camera, but the best, by far, unequivocally, is RAW shooting. If you save your pictures as JPEGs, they can be beautiful, but they've been compressed and packaged into a product. If you save in RAW, you have a picture, but you also have the cold clay that shaped it.
RAW is the data pulled right off the imaging sensor of your camera, before it gets run through a bunch of optimizer and compression algorithms. This data allows for a complete do-over on many aspects of the picture, like color temperature. In other cases, it allows a lot of room for fudging, as with exposure. You'll need software that can handle RAW images—most cameras come with something proprietary, but Photoshop can also manage RAW from the major camera brands. Just don't be scared by it. It's why you're holding that shiny new DSLR you have no idea how to use.

And Your Own...
I realize this list will seem too obvious to some, but the goal is to help those who didn't know much to start with. Since we have more than our share of incredible photographers among our readership, I'd encourage any of you with pro tips to please offer them up in comments.

Saturday, December 13, 2008

Manager Achieves Full Mastery Of Pointless Managerial Jargon

Manager Achieves Full Mastery Of Pointless Managerial Jargon

CHARLOTTE, NC—During what was described to them as "a look-forward meeting to discuss and evaluate the company's event-chain methodology," MediaLine employees stood with mouths agape Wednesday as they witnessed the very moment at which project manager James Atkins attained complete mastery over the fine art of meaningless corporate doublespeak.

Enlarge Image Project Manager

Project manager James Atkins has at last perfected his idle administrative blather.

According to his awed coworkers, Atkins' usage of vacuous administrative jargon reached an almost mythical apex with the pre-lunchtime announcement, during which a string of expertly crafted drivel rolled off the 28-year-old's tongue with the confidence of a seasoned executive.

"Due to the increased scope of the project vis-à-vis Tuesday's meeting, compounded with our aforementioned desire to maintain quality without increasing cost, an as-yet indeterminate amount of time will be allocated to our newest venture," Atkins said without once stuttering. "You should all be proud of the amount of effort and energy you have put forth thus far, and can be certain the project's conclusion will become more apparent as the tasks become increasingly more finite."

Atkins then told the stunned boardroom, "I look forward to partying with you all when the work is done," and concluded the meeting by saying he had to "step out." After they had regained their senses, his coworkers determined that this seemingly innocuous send-off was, in actuality, an attempt by Atkins to portray himself as a regular guy—a clever tactic that only further proved him to be a veritable wizard of ambiguous executive nonsense.

However, the magnitude of Atkins' achievement was only fully understood later, after employees finished sorting through the cloud of lilting bureaucratic bullshit that spewed forth from his mouth and deduced their project manager had just informed them that he had no idea when the new project would be completed, and no one would be receiving overtime pay.

"My God, just listen to him spin that empty administrative rhetoric into flaxen strands of gold," said a visibly stunned Tim Rosen, one of the company's head market researchers. "The fact that he could come in here and talk to us like that is…. Well, I'm speechless."

MediaLine president Brian Morrow was among the first to recognize Atkins for his newly achieved mastery of corporate gibberish. After years of directing Atkins to a large binder whenever he asked for tips on speaking with employees, Morrow said he knew his protégé had become a true virtuoso of business jargon when he witnessed Atkins enter the conference room with a newly acquired clipboard and ask a group of adults to participate in a "targeted brainstorm."

According to Morrow, Atkins is now closer than ever to receiving a promotion after confidently relaying the message that employees needed to "focus on diversifying the brand"— a masterful phrase of managerial gobbledygook devoid of any significant content that Morrow admits he himself doesn't fully understand and is unable to deliver convincingly.

"We are very impressed that James has made great strides to elaborate in this solution-oriented manner so as to more adequately harness heightened executive verbiage when such platitudes aren't necessarily mission critical," Morrow told reporters. "That's what we desire from those managers who are employed by, work for, touch base with, and attain biweekly compensation from, MediaLine. If he keeps up this outside-the-box thinking, and continues to focus on diversifying the brand, perhaps there could be a position opening up for him here at corporate."

When Atkins first joined MediaLine as a young market researcher in 2003, he was reportedly inept at using such inane administrative buzzwords and phrases. Sources close to him said he "spoke like a normal person" and wasn't even sure he wanted to enter the field of marketing. He only applied for the company's project manager position, colleagues said, because the increased salary would offer him a better chance to pay off college loans.

"When he first took the job two years ago, he told me, 'They're putting me in charge of making sure that stuff gets done,'" art assistant Kyle Bovard said. "That's why I was amazed when I overheard him on the phone yesterday describing his position as 'a facilitator tasked with developing predictable increments that are intricately tied to benchmarks, milestones, and completion dates.'"

"I don't know how somebody even begins to talk like that," Bovard added.

When asked to comment on his recent success, Atkins responded in a one-line e-mail, stating, "FYI ETA TBD EOM."


Monday, November 17, 2008

Saturday, November 08, 2008

15 Free Tools For Mac OS X

15 Free Tools For Mac OS X You Should Bookmark


You maybe interested in our latest article 15 Free Tools For Mac OS X You Should Bookmark

Today, we are going to write first post of its kind at SmashingApps. This is the post where we are listing out few great free tools for Mac Operating System, this is an exclusive post for our those readers who are the Mac users. But our other readers will also enjoy this post. Don't forget to bookmark this post for your future reference as it has few most useful and free application that will be helpful for you when you are on your Mac system. This is absolutely a great list of 15 Free Tools For Mac OS X You Should Bookmark.

You are welcome to share if you know more free tools for Mac OS that our readers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed.

You maybe interested in these older posts
11 Free Windows Programs Alternatives For Linux
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17 Online Free Web Based Applications That You Probably Love To Use!
21 Online Free Web Based Applications That You Probably Would Love To Use Every Day!
23 Free And Online Web Based Applications Specially If You Are Designer Or Developer
6 Free Tools To Help You Run Windows Applications On Linux

Xe-IMG Image Editor

Xe-IMG Image Editor

Xe-IMG Image Editor is a standalone image editor for your Mac. It supports the following images formtats: PNG, JPG, BMP, GIF and SWF. Xe-IMG Image Editor allows yoy to edit photos, add effects, ,filters mask and after you're finished you can save files as JPG, PNG, BMP etc.

Skim

Skim

Skim is a PDF reader and note-taker for OS X. It is designed to help you read and annotate scientific papers in PDF, but is also great for viewing any PDF file.

SuperDuper

SuperDuper

SuperDuper is the wildly acclaimed program that makes recovery painless, because it makes creating a fully bootable backup painless. Its incredibly clear, friendly interface is understandable, easy to use, and SuperDuper's built-in scheduler makes it trivial to back up automatically.

The Unarchiver

The Unarchiver

The Unarchiver is a much more capable replacement for BOMArchiveHelper.app, the built-in archive unpacker program in Mac OS X. The Unarchiver is designed to handle many more formats than BOMArchiveHelper, and to better fit in with the design of the Finder.

Burn

Burn

With Burn you can burn five different kind of disks. With Burn you can burn Audio CDs and MP3 disks. With Burn you can burn three kind of images. Normal disk images, cue/bin images and toc images. And copy data disks.

Xee

Xee

Xee is useful as a more powerful replacement for Preview, or most any other image viewer available on Mac OS X. It is very fast, and uses less memory than most other image viewing tools.

Bean

Bean

Bean is a small, easy-to-use word processor or more precisely, a rich text editor, designed to make writing convenient, efficient and comfortable.

Perian

Perian

Perian is the Swiss Army Knife for QuickTime, any OS X application that uses QuickTime can now use all the other common media types like DivX, XviD, mpeg4, AC3 audio and more.

RSSOwl

RSSOwl

Applications that collect data from RSS-compliant sites are called RSS readers or "aggregators." RSSOwl is such an application. RSSOwl lets you gather, organize, update, and store information from any compliant source in a convenient, easy to use interface, save selected information in various formats for offline viewing and sharing, and much more.

Desktop Manager

Desktop Manager

Desktop Manager is my own pet project to implement a (hopefully) easy to use virtual desktop manager for OS X. It will be useful to others. Simply run the app and a pager should appear in the status bar and on the desktop.

TwitterPod

TwitterPod

TwitterPod is Twitter client for Mac OS X. TwitterPod adoption of Core Data. So TwitterPod can store logs to database and search Twitter logs quickly like Mail.app.

Backboard

Backboard

Backpack is perfect for collecting notes and tasks. But I missed a dashboard-like overview over my tasks, reminders and calendar events and the possibility to edit and search them a bit more Mac-like

MindNode

MindNode

MindNode is an elegant and simple-to-use mindmapping application for the Macintosh. It was created with the user in mind and features a very simple and intuitive user interface that lets the user focus on expressing and developing ideas. Nearly no time is required to learn the interface.

Text2iPod

Text2iPod

Text2iPod X is a very easy Drag&Drop application that can make any text file viewable on an iPod without text size limitation! In version 1.1, the 32kb implementation limit has been resolved.

Deeper

Deeper

Deeper is a personalization utility for Mac OS X. Deeper allows you to enable and disable the hidden functions of Finder, Dock, Dashboard, Exposé, Safari, Login window and many Apple's applications

Friday, November 07, 2008

Breckenridge restaurant food grub happy hour restaraunt

Here are some of our personal preferences for places to patronize in Breckenridge. See you there! 

Best happy hour to drink and be jolly: 
- MiCasa 3-6 PM (crowded, for a reason) 

Best happy hour to drink and eat appetizers and call it dinner: 
- Hearthstone 4-6 PM (2 for 1 appetizers and a great setting) 
- Taddeos, in the bar 4-6 PM (2 for 1 appetizers and wine and avoid the crowds) 

Best choices for eating dinner: 
- MiCasa (Out of the ordinary Mexican. Get there by 5 or be prepared to wait a long long time. Order some of the their specialties.) 
- Cafe Alpine (eat at the Tapas bar) 
- Taddeos (Italian - beat the crowds and drink great wine) 
- Empire Burger (the best hamburgers ever?) 

Best late lunch: 
- MiCasa (ask about $5 lunch choices, served until 3) 

Best ski / board tuning shop: 
- Pup's Glide Shop 

Place to rent stuff:
 
- Blue River Sports (next to MiCasa, hint hint) 

Best secret places on the mountain to find late powder: 
- Ha ha ha. Funny. 

Comments on this page or places in Breck? 

Monday, November 03, 2008

Indispensable Web Design and Development Firefox Extensions



A collection of extensions for your every Design and Development need, from Editing CSS and Database Management to Image Capture and Color Pickers.
If there are any you feel I have missed, just leave a comment.

Web Design and Development Extensions for Firefox

Web Design and Development ExtensionsURL : MeasureIt.
Description : MeasureIt draws a ruler across any webpage to check the width, height, or alignment of page elements in pixels.

Web Design and Development ExtensionsURL : Firebug.
Description : Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of web development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

Web Design and Development ExtensionsURL : View Source Chart.
Description : View Source Chart Extension draws a color-coded chart of a webpages source code and displays source in its altered state after the DOM has been manipulated by JavaScript

Web Design and Development ExtensionsURL : Web Developer.
Description : The Web Developer extension adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various web developer tools. It is designed for Firefox, Flock and Seamonkey, and will run on any platform that these browsers support including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
Features : Clear Session Cookies ; Display Element Information ; Display Image File Sizes ; Display Ruler ; Display Topographic Information ; Edit CSS ; Show Comments…

Web Design and Development ExtensionsURL : NoScript.
Description : NoScript Firefox extension provides extra protection for Firefox, Flock, Seamonkey and other mozilla-based browsers: this free, open source add-on allows JavaScript, Java, Flash and other plugins to be executed only by trusted web sites of your choice.

Web Design and Development ExtensionsURL : Greasemonkey.
Description : This extension allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript.
Hundreds of scripts, for a wide variety of popular sites, are already available at userscripts.org.You can write your own scripts, as well.

Web Design and Development ExtensionsURL : FoxyProxy.
Description : FoxyProxy is a free, open-source advanced proxy management tool that completely replaces Firefoxs limited proxying capabilities. FoxyProxy automatically switches an internet connection across one or more proxy servers based on URL patterns. Put simply, FoxyProxy automates the manual process of editing Firefoxs Connection Settings dialog.

URL : DOM Inspector.
Description : DOM Inspector is a tool that can be used to inspect and edit the live DOM of any web document or XUL application. The DOM hierarchy can be navigated using a two-paned window that allows for a variety of different views on the document and all nodes within.

Web Design and Development ExtensionsURL : sqlite-manager.
Description : Manage all your sqlite databases using this lightweight extension for firefox, this extension will be useful to developers who want to create and play with sqlite databases.

Web Design and Development ExtensionsURL : QuickJava.
Description : QuickJava is a Firefox plugin that allows you to easily enable/disable the Java and Javascript from the toolbar. Two icons are placed in the toolbar, click on them to toggle the state. If you right click either icon it will update both icons.

Web Design and Development ExtensionsURL : FirePHP.
Description : FirePHP enables you to log to your Firebug Console using a simple PHP method call, alll data is sent via response headers and will not interfere with the content on your page.
FirePHP is ideally suited for AJAX development where clean JSON and XML responses are required.

Web Design and Development ExtensionsURL : CSSViewer.
Description : A simple CSS property viewer.

Web Design and Development ExtensionsURL : EditCSS.
Description : The Editcss project is an easy way for web developpers to edit and modify currently loaded stylesheets.

URL : Browser Window Resizer.
Description : The Browser Window Resizer is useful tool for testing different screen sizes. It accurately resizes your browser so you can test to see if the web page you are working on looks right in all of the standard resolution sizes.
Window resizer supports the 640×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1280×1024, 1600×1200 resolution sizes.

URL : Table2Clipboard.
Description : This extension adds two menu items, one in Edit menu and the other one on context menu. The item on Edit menu is always visible but grayed if no table cells are selected. The item on context menu is visible only when table cells are selected. To select table cells you must hold down Control key and click on cells to copy.

Web Design and Development ExtensionsURL : YSlow for Firebug.
Description : YSlow analyzes web pages and tells you why they are slow based on the rules for high performance web sites. YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the popular Firebug web development tool.

Web Design and Development ExtensionsURL : Extended Statusbar.
Description : A Statusbar with speed, percentage, time and loaded size.

Web Design and Development ExtensionsURL : Dummy Lipsum.
Description : This extension generates "Lorem Ipsum" dummy text.

Validation and Aceesibilty Extensions for Firefox

Web Design and Development ExtensionsURL : CSS Validator.
Description : CSS Validator is a Mozilla Firefox extension which Validates a page using the W3C CSS Validator. Adds an option to the right-click context menu and to the Tools menu to allow for easy validation of the CSS of the current page. Opens the results in a new tab. Will only work on pages that have a CSS file associated.

Web Design and Development ExtensionsURL : Html Validator.
Description : HTML Validator is a Mozilla extension that adds HTML validation inside Firefox and Mozilla. The number of errors of a HTML page is seen on the form of an icon in the status bar when browsing. The details of the errors are seen when looking the HTML source of the page.

URL : Firefox Accessibility Extension.
Description : This Mozilla/Firefox Accessibility Extension makes it easier for people with disabilities to view and navigate web content. Developers can use the extension to check their use of structural and styling markup that support functional web accessibility.

Web Design and Development ExtensionsURL : Total Validator.
Description : The Total Validator Firefox extension provides one-click validation. Once installed all you do is browse to the page you want to validate then click on the TV icon in the browser status bar.

Imaging and Screen Capture Extensions for Firefox

Web Design and Development ExtensionsURL : Image Zoom.
Description : Image zoom gives you complete control of the size of most images displayed in mozilla based software. Both individual images or whole pages of images can be zoomed.

Web Design and Development ExtensionsURL : ColorZilla.
Description : Advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker, Page Zoomer and other tools.

Web Design and Development ExtensionsURL : Screengrab!.
Description : Screengrab! is an extension for Firefox that makes it easy to save a web-page as an image. With it, you can save anything that you can see in a browser window - from a small selection, to a complete page.

Web Design and Development ExtensionsURL : FireShot!.
Description : FireShot is a extension for Firefox and Internet Explorer that captures, edits, annotates, organizes, exports and prints screenshots of your web pages.

Web Design and Development ExtensionsURL : Abduction!.
Description : Capture an entire web page or part of a web page and save it as an image.