This thing is great!  I found it after reading Joe McNally’s most recent blog post (if you don’t read his blog, you should; not only is he a great photographer, he’s funny as hell too!).  Joe often presents the details of the lighting setup that he used for the pictures he presents on his blog in the form of a lighting diagram.  He usually scribbles them on the nearest piece of paper that he finds lying around, such as a notepad from the Hotel he’s staying at.  He also uses napkins or any other piece of available paper. 

So it was hilarous to realize that he now has a spiral bound Napkin Notebook to sketch out his lighting setups.  These notebooks are perfect for anyone who needs to jot down their thoughts and ideas, no matter where they are.  If you are an engineer or an artist, or anyone else that that needs to be able to remember the ideas that fly in and out of your head, this product is for you!

Speaking of Joe, if you’re a photographer you really have to check out his two books, “The Moment it Clicks” and “The Hot Shoe Diaries“.  These have become instantly classic volumes on photographic lighting and on being a photographer.  They are easy to read and contain hundreds of valuable nuggets of incredibly useful information….

I am definitely a gadget guy. I have some pretty cool electronic stuff that makes my life easier and more fun. I have a programmable Harmony Remote to to control my home entertainment system. I have some seriously cool photography gadgets (such as a wireless remote to fire the camera itself and a whole set of Alienbees remotes to fire flashes off camera). I have a GPS datalogger that I can use to create tracklogs to show where I’ve been, and also to Geoencode my photos.

These gadgets are cool, and very fun, but they all pale in comparison to my iPod Touch. This thing is seriously cool and I use it all the time. I use it to listen to my favorite music and to Podcasts every day during my drives to and from work. I use it to quickly check my email and my Twitter feeds when I have only a few minutes and can’t get to the computer. I check the current temperature and the weather forecast all the time! Occasionally, I even play games on it (and I’ve heard that it’s a better gaming maching than even the Nintendo DS), but I’m not much of a gamer so that’s not all that important to me.

One of the most amazing features of the iPod Touch and the iPhone is the ability to download and install applications from the App Store. There are Apps for almost anything you can imagine, and there are more being produced and released every day. While you have to pay for some of them, there are also a great many that are free. And just because they’re free doesn’t meant that they aren’t good either. Some of my favorite apps are free, or at least very cheap. Here are a few of them:

1. GooSync – This free App allows me to sync my Google Calendar to and from my iPod.  I use Google Calendar to manage all of my appointments and important events, so it was a no-brainer that I would want to be able to take that with me on my iPod.  I don’t understand why the native iPod calendar can’t sync with external services, so GooSync is a perfect alternative.  Note that there is a premium version of GooSync available for $14.99 hat has a lot more functionality, but I don’t need that so I stick with the free version.
   UPDATE (June 18, 2009) – I now sync my iPod Calendar directly to my Google Calendar.  Check out the tutorial on how I do it.
2. Byline – I also use Google Reader to manage all of my RSS feeds and wanted a simple way to sync those feeds to my iPod.  This is another feature that I would have expected the iPod to support natively, but until it does Byline works very well.  The one thing it can’t do that drives me crazy is to allow me to mark articles as “Unread”.  I like to quickly scroll through my feeds and have a quick look at all of them, and then mark those that I want to read in depth later as Unread.  This should be a simple change though and I have hopes that they will eventually make this improvement.  This App costs $4.99 and I had no problem paying that after trying several other apps for Google Reader.  Byline is by far the best of the bunch.
3. Sudoku – This is a free Sudoku App that helps me get a quick fix with the popular Sudoku numbers game when I’m bored or I need a diversion.  There are lots of other Sudoku apps, this was just a free one that I found.  It works well so I keep using it.
4. Sportacular – For any sports fan this app from Citizen Sports is the bomb!  It quickly and easily allows you to see the current scores and standings for all your favorite sports teams.  It has a huge list of sports and teams that you can follow, from pro to college, from mainstream to obscure, and it is always up to date with up to the minute news and results. And it’s free!  This app rocks!
5. iBird Explorer Plus – Any serious bird watcher (or photographer that shoots birds) must have this application.  It has an easy to use search function to help you find and identify the birds of North America.  The included range maps and photographs are essential for confirming the true identify of the birds you see, while the playable audio files are also extremely useful to help identify birds by their song.  This app is not free (and at $19.99 it is by far the most expensive app I have purchased) but it is a great example of why some apps are worth buying!

If you’ve ever had a hard drive failure you’ll know exactly why I’m writing about this topic. If you haven’t, know that you will, and I hope for your sake that you will be prepared for it. Hard drives die. It’s a simple truth, and not a matter of if, only when.

Backing up your stuff is a very personal thing. I probably go way overboard on this, but I’ve made a conscious decision that I don’t want to lose any of my important files, ever. Mostly that means my original images and other photography data, but it also includes all of my other important documents such as personal letters and financial and tax data. I even include the settings for some of my favorite and most important software iin this category. I have all kinds of presets and defaults for Lightroom in particular that would be just plain painful to figure out how to reset if the main drive on my computer were to fail, so I make sure to back that up too.

Backing up your stuff doesn’t need to be complicated or expensive. You don’t need to run out and buy a NAS box (network attached storage) to connect to your home network, and you definitely don’t need to shell out the cash for a Drobo (but that would be awesome!) or a hardware Raid system.

Backing up can be as simple as buying a second drive and manually copying your important stuff over every couple of weeks. This could be a second internal drive in your desktop machine, but these days it’s far easier to pick up an inexpensive external drive that you can connect via USB or Firewire.

Using a simple backup strategy like this will protect you from a single drive failure. Keep in mind that this will only protect the data that you have up to date on the backup drive, so if it’s been a couple of weeks since you did your most recent copy, you may still lose a lot of files. For me that would likely be hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of new photos. It’s also important to be aware that this will only be protection against a drive failure. It won’t protect you from a natural disaster such as a fire or a flood unless you store the backup drive somewhere other than in your house. It’s easy enough to keep it in your shed, your car, or over at a friend or relatives house, but doing so makes it that much more likely that your most recent backup will be from weeks ago instead of just days…

A much better strategy would be to buy two external drives. Keep one of them connected to your computer, and store the second one at an off-site location. Use software that will automatically copy your important files to the connected drive at regular frequencies, and swap out the two drives every couple of weeks.

Although my personal backup strategy is much more complicated than this (in order to ensure absolute redundancy), the basis for it is essentially this second alternative. I like to do a backup every night using a an automatic backup program called “AJC Directory Synchronizer“.

There are many other programs out there that would also do the trick, but this one works and it’s not very expensive. Windows users should also check out “Cobian Backup” (it’s free!). I’ve never used it but it gets great reviews.

Of course Mac users should check out “Time Machine” and “Super Dooper“. The combination of these two systems working together will make your life so much easier than anything available for Windows…

I get asked all the time to recommend some good books for new photographers wanting to learn how to be a better shooter. This is very easy for me to do since I have literally read dozens of photography books over the last couple of years. In my mind there is no doubt that every beginner photographer (and even some that are more seasoned in the craft) should read two books: “The Digital Photography Book” by Scott Kelby and “Understanding Exposure” by Bryan Peterson.

“The Digital Photography Book” is a very quick and easy read. It is written in a very simplistic format with the idea being that if you were to ask the author how to make a particular shot in a given situation, he would tell how to do it in a simple and straightforward answer. Not a ton of theory, just a simple “do it like this” kind of answer. This book is actually the first in a series of three books (the 3rd is coming out soon), each of which continues from where the previous one left off and gets progressively more advanced. Kelby is a prolific author and the reason fo his huge success is that his books are very easy to read while still being extremely useful. This is a must read for all new photographers.

“Understanding Exposure” is a classic. It’s actually somewhat out of date since it was written before digital cameras were common, and therefore makes very little reference to ISO, but that hardly matters given the rest of the content. It is an excellent guide to getting the right exposure using the basic creative controls within the camera, while also discussing creativity and composition. Almost everyone that reads this book immediately feels that they have become a better photographer. It’s as simple as that. Read it.

Coming up with a good domain name or URL for a new website can be exceedingly difficult these days.  There are so many webpages out there that it often seems like all the good names have already been taken.  Chances are that any combination of one, two, or even three words related to your intended website topic will already have been joined together to make up a website URL. 

When creating the URL (and therefore the brand itself) for this website I tested over two hundred potential URL’s before I found an address that I was happy with.  Don’t get me wrong, I found other available URL’s along the way, just not one that I really wanted to create  a brand around.  Here are a couple of tips that might help make your life easier when creating a new web address:

1. Try a random phrase generator to help with some words.  Ideally you could find one that would allow you to narrow down the range of words or concepts first before you start hitting the next button.  Unfortunately I can’t recommend anything like that because I simply couldn’t find one.  But I did find a few that helped to spark my creativity and they eventually led my to picking my URL.  Check out the tools from “Creativity Tools“, randomphrase.com, and the “Random Technology Phrase Generator“.
2. Use a good WHOIS tool to help you search to see if your word or phrase is available for registration as a domain name.  I really like Geektools and GoDaddy
3. Be prepared to buy your new domain name right away.  Maybe I’m just suspicious, but I’m always afraid that just using one of the WHOIS tools above might trigger someone else to register the domain that you were looking for.  So if you find something that looks like it will work, buy it!  Buy it now!
4. Don’t forget to use a coupon code to make your domain purchase cheaper.  Simply use Google to search for the a coupon or promo code for the domain registrar you plan to use.  Here’s a link to some codes for GoDaddy