Digital Photography Book

The Digital Photography Book

By Lockergnome on Books

Scott Kelby, the man who changed the “digital darkroom” forever with his groundbreaking, #1 bestselling, award-winning book The Photoshop Book for Digital Photographers, now tackles the most important side of digital photography - how to take pro-quality shots using the same tricks today’s top digital pros use (and it’s easier than you’d think) with The Digital Photography Book.

This entire book is written with a brilliant premise, and here’s how Scott describes it: “If you and I were out on a shoot, and you asked me, ‘Hey, how do I get this flower to be in focus, but I want the background out of focus?’ I wouldn’t stand there and give you a lecture about aperture, exposure, and depth of field. In real life, I’d just say, ‘Get out your telephoto lens, set your f/stop to f/2.8, focus on the flower, and fire away.’ You d say, ‘OK,’ and you’d get the shot. That’s what this book is all about. A book of you and I shooting, and I answer the questions, give you advice, and share the secrets I’ve learned just like I would with a friend, without all the technical explanations and without all the techno-photo-speak.”

This isn’t a book of theory - it isn’t full of confusing jargon and detailed concepts: this is a book of which button to push, which setting to use, when to use them, and nearly two hundred of the most closely guarded photographic “tricks of the trade” to get you shooting dramatically better-looking, sharper, more colorful, more professional-looking photos with your digital camera every time you press the shutter button.

Here’s another thing that makes this book different: each page covers just one trick, just one single concept that makes your photography better. Every time you turn the page, you’ll learn another pro setting, another pro tool, another pro trick to transform your work from snapshots into gallery prints. There’s never been a book like it, and if you’re tired of taking shots that look “OK,” and if you’re tired of looking in photography magazines and thinking, “Why don’t my shots look like that?” then this is the book for you.

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Home-Made Salad Dressing

The Well-Dressed Salad Wears Only Homemade

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/25/dining/25mini.html?ex=1319428800&en=9d700cc14136ec58&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

By MARK BITTMAN

ONE measure of a good home cook is the ability to make salad dressings. Even the best cooks reach for the better-quality bottled stuff on occasion. But taking two minutes to combine extra virgin olive oil, vinegar and a couple of real seasonings is an enlightening experience, one that can make you vow to leave the mass-produced concoctions of cheap oil, water (more water than oil, if it’s low-fat), dried spices and hideously unnatural chemicals on the supermarket shelf.

The simplest dressing, vinaigrette, is this: around three parts oil to one part vinegar or lemon juice, salt and pepper, and maybe some added flavor. This may be an herb (a pinch of dried tarragon is good, fresh chives better) or a condiment (Dijon mustard is classic, and a splash of soy sauce is amazing). There might be a bit of onion, garlic (easy on this), scallion or shallot. Combine them with a fork for a “broken” dressing, or with a whisk or a blender for a lovely, creamy emulsion. Presto.

Curious cooks progress from vinaigrette to bigger challenges: ranch dressing, which contains a mysterious flavor that drives people to distraction; the intriguing carrot dressing served over too-cold salads in many Japanese restaurants; and blue (or “bleu”) cheese dressing.

Because all are good even when they’re bad, imagine how great they’d be made well.

To take blue cheese first: if you combine blue cheese with yogurt or sour cream, maybe a little garlic, lemon juice and salt and pepper, in five minutes you will produce the best blue cheese dressing you’ve ever had. Start with good cheese. The classic choice is Roquefort, a blue made from sheep’s milk, but plenty of others work well, too, like Maytag or another well-made American blue; Stilton; or almost any blue from France, Italy or Spain. It should be strong but not piercingly sharp.

The Japanese carrot dressing is a little trickier because you need a food processor and some specialty ingredients: white miso, sesame oil, rice wine and ginger. Sample the result and see what that odd orange stuff was meant to taste like.

Ranch dressing is another story. Said to be an American concoction from the 1950’s, it has a secret ingredient: buttermilk. The flavor is enhanced if you use a little buttermilk powder, which is stocked in the baking section of many supermarkets. It’s a good substitute for buttermilk in biscuits and keeps for a year or so.

Ranch dressing is even better if you start with homemade mayonnaise, which is little more than vinaigrette super-emulsified with egg. This added step might make the entire process take as long as 10 minutes.

Once you make the effort, bottled dressings may disappear completely from your refrigerator.

Top 10 Research Tools

http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-9239_7-6654999-1.html
By CNET staff
(October 20, 2006)

It’s easy to suffer from information overload when the world’s data is at your fingertips. What you need are tools that help you home in on the most relevant facts and organize them. We’ve rounded up (in random order) some great services that help you go straight to expert sources and keep track of your research. These digital tools can keep you on track—whether you’re working on a middle-school science fair, wrapping up a graduate degree, or pursuing a hobby.

1. Encyclopedia Britannica 2007

In an era of free content, ponying up for expert information still pays off. Britannica’s $49 digital encyclopedia draws upon an astute legacy of more than two centuries, offering entries vetted by Nobel Prize winners and ready-made citations for your term papers. This version is faster than its predecessor, and the DVD purchase includes access to Britannica articles online. You weren’t really going to cite Wikipedia as the last word in your final project, were you? Read review

2. Wikipedia

You might shun this online, open-source encyclopedia if you’ve ever been burned by prank entries or fudged facts. But because anyone can edit Wikipedia, it’s a richer resource than Britannica for subjects off the beaten path, such as the 1960s underground press or rivethead subculture. Though it’s not the only source you should reference in term papers, at least Wikipedia gets you started. Read review

3. FeedDemon 2

Many free RSS services let you subscribe to oodles of news sources that so you don’t have to hopscotch from site to site to get the scoop. But the $29 FeedDemon 2 is the best RSS reader for steamrolling through thousands of feeds. Need headlines from the science section of the world’s major newspapers? Check. Want the latest research from insider blogs about solar power? Check. FeedDemon is faster and more customizable than browser-based freebies, and it also lets you access feeds online. Read review

4. Diigo beta

How helpful is it to bookmark a Web site if you need only one sentence from that 3,000-word article? Diigo is a free bookmarking service that lets you do what we wish Yahoo’s Del.icio.us would: highlight text and comment on Web pages. Diigo caches each site so that you can search within text, not just the topic tags. And you won’t have to leave the Del.icio.us community, since Diigo lets you save bookmarks simultaneously in both places. Read review

5. Google Scholar beta

Google Scholar searches journals in the arts and humanities, business, science, medicine, and mathematics. It turns up abstracts and sometimes full articles that are indispensable for academic and professional research and points to libraries that keep the hard copies. One downside: Scholar doesn’t let you subscribe to newsfeeds for your search queries, while rival Windows Live Academic beta does. So far, however, Scholar retrieves more content. Read editors’ take

6. Google Book Search

Google’s goal to digitize the world’s libraries has hit some copyright snags, but Mountain View continues to sign deals with universities, scan books, and put their pages online. You can read the entire text of books in the public domain or see excerpts from, say, Build Your Own All-Terrain Robot, before committing to buy the hard copy. Props are due to Project Gutenberg, the first major effort to make e-books free. Read editors’ take

7. Yahoo Answers

When you’re stumped about something, asking a knowledgeable person can cut to the chase better than a Google query. But what if there are no experts on, say, epiphytes in your circle of friends? Pose that question about rare orchids to Yahoo Answers, and you’re sure to find a green thumb among the tens of millions of users. Among rival social search sites, we found the widest array of explanations on the broadest range of subjects at Yahoo Answers. However, the site can be cluttered by amateurs, so be patient. Read review

8. Windows Live Local

Although Yahoo Maps beta won our Editors’ Choice award, Windows Live Local innovates in ways that are ideal for research. You can save locations to your account and even mark up maps with pushpins and by coloring in routes and regions. You could use these features to impress your history teacher, for instance, with a customized map drawing that shows where ancient Native Americans lived in your town. And Local is powered by Redmond’s impressive Virtual Earth technology, which makes for some stunning satellite views. Read review

9. Google Earth 4

Google Maps first made satellite views of the planet free on the Web. But the Google Earth download gets you even closer, letting you fly around the globe, zoom in for a closer view, and add your own landmarks with Google SketchUp. If research brings you back to the land, Google Earth is an essential ally. For instance, environmentalists fighting mountaintop removal mining used Google Earth to assemble a virtual tour of the damage done. View slide show

10. Google Home

Google Home organizes your newsfeeds, site bookmarks, maps, stock quotes, e-books, podcasts, calculators, currency converters, dictionary lookups, language translators, search histories, yellow pages—hold on, we’re out of breath. Anyway, you can drag all that onto one simple Google sign-in screen that goes wherever you do, with some advantages over Netvibes and others. Read review

11. Google Search

Oops. A list of 10 wasn’t enough to cover all the good stuff. We do so much Googling, we almost forgot to mention the No. 1 search engine, which gets more powerful the more people use it. We tend to take for granted finding what we seek on the first page of search results. At the same time, Ask.com is quietly innovating to narrow its results, separating long-necked birds from construction equipment when you look up cranes. But we like Windows Live Search best for grabbing images. Read review

Free "You've got mail" sounds

Download of the Day: Free “You’ve got mail” sounds

Wow your friends and annoy your co-workers with a custom new email sound: web site I Love Wavs offers 38 email .wav files, from the X-Files’ Agent Scully (“Have you checked your email this morning, Mulder?”) to Austin Powers (“You’ve got mail, baby, yeah!”)

Mac user Tim Gaden offers instructions on changing Mail.app’s default sounds here. Thunderbird users should check the General tab in the Preferences pane - hit the Advanced button near “Play a sound” to set it up.

Got Mail Replacements  http://www.ilovewavs.com/Events/GotMail/GotMail.htm

In Outlook/Outlook Express: http://email.about.com/cs/outlooktips/qt/et112102.htm
In Eudora: Click on Tools, Options, Getting Attention.  Click on the box with the folder where your current mail sound is located, and select a new sound.