A few interesting links about Professional Photography, Technology, Social Media, and Gadgets that I’ve come across recently. Some are smart, some are funny, and some are just plain dumb, but they are all interesting for one reason or another. Have a look and let me know what you think:

• Pinterest / Copyright Infringement Notification Form
  If you have an image that has been pinned on Pinterest without your permission then you can use this form to request an immediate takedown. Save the link, it's hard to find!
• MAKING A MARK: Takedown: How Pinterest moved fast to remove my pinned images (#2)
  It is very difficult to get Pinterest to take action to remove images that you don't wish to have on the site. It is much easier if it is a clear copyright violation, and this article provides a details procedure to follow to have those images removed.
• Should photographers offer gift certificates? » Elizabeth Halford Photography {the blog}
  Photography gift certificates seem like a great way to make some extra income. But they aren't always all that great…
• Custom Placement of Jetpack’s/Sharedaddy’s Social Sharing Buttons
  The sharing buttons implented as part of Jetpack in WordPress are great, but bby default they appear only at the bottom of the post after everything in else the content loop. If you want control over where your social sharing buttons appear then you can edit your post and page templates to insert the code found in this article. It works well on all of my blogs…
• WordPress › Admin renamer extended « WordPress Plugins
  If your WordPress admin account is still called "admin", you might consider using this renamer plugin to change it to something a little less obvious. This is a really easy way to thwart most of the attacks that get thrown at wordpress sites…
• Use CuteRank to check how your site ranks on various search engines for your target keywords
  This is a very cool tool for checking what position your photography website lands on various search engines for your target keywords. No more manually searching for dozens of keywords in incognito mode to see if your site shows up on page 1 of Google or not!

I don’t typically get too excited about beta software, particularly for my production environment, but this is one that I’ve really been waiting for! The first public beta of Lightroom 3 didn’t get me too excited. It didn’t really offer enough new stuff for me to bother with the hassles of the fact that it was beta, and in fact it had certain features that were disabled that made it problematic to use (like luminance noise reduction). But the new beta offers several new features that I’ve been hoping to see in Lightroom and I will definitely be giving this version a full workout.

One final word before I talk any further… This is Beta software. Your results may vary, and there is significant potential that you could really do some damage to your photography collection if you use this software. It hasn’t been released for production yet because it’s not ready. Be careful.

• Video Support: We didn’t get full on video editing yet, but at least we finally have some rudimentary management tools that allow viewing, flagging, keywording, and captioning of video files in exactly the same way that still images are cataloged. I certainly hope that they expand this further to include basic edits (clipping, exporting, and global exposure adjustments) but for now this is a huge step over the old version!
• Tethered Shooting: With this version they have added support importing live images directly into Lightroom when shooting while a camera is connected to the computer. This is a studio and product shooters dream. I won’t use it a lot, but every once in awhile it will be very useful.
• Performance Improvements: I haven’t tested the new version enough to fully buy into this one yet, but I really hope that this one is true, and the new version does seem to be a little bit snappier. I will definitely be watching to see how this pans out.

For a complete list of the new and upgraded features the best place to go is the Lightroom Team Blog. You can also check out the release notes included with the update.

To download the program head on over to the Adobe Labs site.

Here are a few more sites you can check for additional information and commentary:

• Jeffrey Friedl’s: Lightroom 3 Beta 2 and My Plugins
• The Lightroom Queen: What’s New in Lightroom 3.0 Beta 2?
• Terry White: Lightroom 3 Public Beta 2: What’s New?

In another widely anticipated move, Canon has finally announced an update to the firmware for their extremely popular Canon EOS 5D Mark II SLR camera. This update is mainly aimed at the video users that have been very disappointed (and very vocal about it) with the video controls that were included with the original camera.

This update brings several updates and improvements to the video controls for the camera, including manual control over the audio input level, and several new recording formats as well:

NOTE – Firmware Version 2.0.3 was very quickly superseded by 2.04 which fixed a few bugs that were introduced in 2.0.3. The major changes in 2.0.4 are the same as in 2.0.3.

Firmware Version 2.0.4 incorporates five enhancements to the
movie function and a fix to the manual sensor cleaning function
of the EOS 5D Mark II camera.

1. Adds or changes the following movie frame rates
   NTSC:
   1920×1080:30 fps (changed – actual 29.97fps)
   1920×1080:24 fps (added – actual 23.976 fps)
   640×480:30 fps (changed – actual 29.97fps)
   PAL:
   1920×1080:25 fps (added – actual 25.0 fps)
   1920×1080:24 fps (added – actual 23.976 fps)
   640×480:25 fps (added – actual 25.0 fps)
2. Adds a function for manually adjusting the sound recording level (64 levels).
3. Adds a histogram display (brightness or RGB) for shooting movies in manual exposure.
4. Adds shutter-priority AE mode (Tv) and aperture-priority AE (Av) mode to the exposure modes for shooting movies.
5. Changes the audio sampling frequency from 44.1 KHz to 48 KHz.
6. Fixes a phenomenon where communication between the camera and the attached lens is sometimes interrupted after manual sensor cleaning. (This phenomenon only affects units with Firmware Version 1.2.4.)

For all the details about the firmware update including a download and installation instructions head over to the official Canon site.

Windows 7 is due out on October 22nd and many people will be planning to install it as soon as possible after it arrives. I know I will be as I’ve completely had it with Vista! In order to try to help make your installation day go a little bit smoother I’ve compiled a list of 7 things to do before inserting the Windows 7 program disc into your computer’s drive:

1. Check for Viruses
2. Backup your System Hard Drive
3. Backup your Data Files
4. Update your System BIOS
5. Find your Hardware Driver Discs
6. Find your Software Installation Discs
7. Consider Dual Booting Windows

1. Check for Viruses: You should be doing this all the time anyway, but if you are planning to upgrade your existing Windows installation to Windows 7 (rather than performing a clean install) you will definitely want to ensure that your system is clean of viruses before proceeding. This is not quite as important for a clean install, but it’s still not a bad idea. If you don’t have a virus scanner check out the free version of AVG Antivirus
2. Backup your System Hard Drive: You will want to be completely prepared to recover your computer just in case the worst happens. It probably won’t, but better safe than sorry. The best way to do this is to make a complete backup of the system drive (ie. the drive that contains your operating system, usually the C: drive) onto a brand new spare hard drive. Hard drives are very cheap these days and it’s always good practice to have a complete backup drive sitting on the shelf anyway, just in case. I generally buy bare drives and install them in USB enclosure to connect them to my computer. I do this rather than buying dedicated External USB Drives so that I can take the disc out of the enclosure and insert it directly into my computer when my installed drive fails (because eventually it will fail). I use Acronis True Image backup software to clone the drive. There are other good software programs out there too, but I’ve successfully used True Image many times.
3. Backup your Data Files: If you have important files stored on your computer, such as legal documents, photographs, music, videos, and financial information, you will want to ensure you have spare copies of those files handy for use in an emergency. USB thumb drives are a good choice here (they are small, fast, cheap, AND easily writable in case you make changes to your files), but burning a CD or DVD would also work in a pinch.
4. Update your System BIOS: Check the website for your computer manufacturer to see if they have any BIOS updates available for your system. Sometimes these updates are required to ensure that your system will even run with newer operating systems, and immediately prior to an upgrade (and immediately after backing up your hard drive) is a great time to do this.
5. Find your Hardware Driver Discs: Windows 7 has been out in the wild in a release candidate version for a long time, so it’s likely that the installer will be able to find the drivers for most of your hardware devices. But sometimes printers, scanners, etc. really need the OEM installer before they work properly. Unless you are uber-organized your discs are probably not all together in one place, so it’s a good idea to find everything and have them ready in one convenient location.
6. Find your Software Installation Discs: Unless you are doing a direct upgrade of Vista to the corresponding version of Windows 7 (ie. Windows Vista Home Premium to Windows 7 Home Premium) you will actually be doing a clean install of windows and you will need to reinstall all your software, so you’re going to need your installation discs (or setup files if you downloaded them from the web) and license information. Again it’s a good idea to gather all of this stuff into one convenient location in advance. You should also take some time to go through everything you already have installed under Vista to be sure that you aren’t forgetting about some of your rarely used programs (as long as it is still relevant and important).
7. Consider Dual Booting Windows: If you’re really scared about losing everything when you install Windows 7, you might consider “Dual Booting”. Basically that means installing Windows 7 beside your existing OS without killing the existing version. There’s an easy step-by-step guide on how to do this over at Lifehacker, so I’ll leave it to them to help you make this work.

Well that’s it. If you do these things then you should be pretty safe to go ahead and install Windows 7 without worrying about losing all of your important files and data. There’s still likely to be a lot of work to set up the OS the way you like it, and to install all the software you need, but this is a great first step. Good luck!