• 10 ways to make Google love your photography site
  “The internet is a cold and heartless place, and the biggest source of traffic to any website should be coming from search engines.”
• 10 Steps to maintain your camera
  “Well, just like other rituals, many of us become very fastidious about our work flow. We color manage things, we duplicate images, back them up, and save in multiple locations. Yet there hasn’t been anyone that has really talked about establishing rituals over cleaning their gear.”
• Introducing Your Little One to Photography
  “Introducing your children to photography, whether they have extra needs or not, is a great way to encourage creativity and decision-making and can give you a new activity to share with your whole family.”
• PhotoshopDisasters
  This site always cracks me up.

Every week I’ll be posting links to articles and stories elsewhere on the web. If you know of a good article that would be of interest to other photographers, contact me.

Here’s an interesting website created by New York’ radio channel WNYC: Streetshots. It’s dedicated to street photography in New York and has some great video portraits of a few photographers (Jake Dobkin of Bluejake fame is probably the most well known in the photoblogger world).
Do check out Bruce Gilden’s video, because that man has some guts to get his close-up people shots!

Load up your iPod - a selection of photography podcasts to inspire you.  (link from: digital Photography School)

Do you know of any good photography podcasts?Let us know.

I am simply loving this Flickr set: Childhood Fears. Some really fantastic lighting going on. Personally,  my favourite (and the one that scares me the most) is the clown.  I watched IT as a kid and was terrified. I wouldn’t walk near sewer grates for months, but clowns are pretty scary even without the claws and murderous tendencies, right?

If you are looking for online tutorials to improve your photography you may want to check out Kelby Training.  There seem to be some really interesting tutorials from Joe McNally that could be worth watching, as well some on Photoshop by Scott Kelby himself. It’s not free however, but could be worth the monthly fee. If anyone has an account and uses it, let us know your thoughts.

I don’t think many of us here ever get fed up hauling around our camera, but I suppose that changes when you have to take an 8kg Linhof full-frame camera with you. But what do you do about it? Well, New York photographer Kipp Wettstein decided to build his own.

Using aerospace-grade aluminium and carbon fiber he created a light-weight and very mobile camera. He designed it in such a way that the lens and camera shape work together to create optimal sharpness and colour contrast.
It’s no surprise that this doesn’t come cheap: Kipp can be commissioned to build you one, but that will set you back between $5000 and $9000.

click! photography changes everything is presented by the Smithsonian Photography Initiative as an ongoing project to explore how photographic images shape our lives.

Some interesting articles here and this Fall the Smithsonian invites submissions from the public. Amazing how photography has impacted so many areas of society and life.

As everyone probably knows already, earlier this year Polaroid announced that they would discontinue production of all instant film. It’s a sad thought really. I know digital is much more accessible nowadays, and cheaper in many ways, but it is sad to see this dying out. I have no skills with a Polaroid, but I know a number of people who are exceptional and produce beautiful photos.

So, if you are a lover of instant film, head over to www.savepolaroid.com and join in. As the site says,

“This site is not about saving Polaroid, the company, rather the remarkable invention of Edwin Land, the instant film that made Polaroid a household name. “

Many folks will argue that film in general is on borrowed time already, but I’d hate to think that. Maybe I’m just being naive.

The New York Times has created a presentation of great photographs from 2007. 2007: The Year in Pictures is worth a look.

There is a new public art project underway, the Big Art Mob. It aims to create the first public submitted document of all the public art in the UK (from small projects by artists working in the  public realm through graffiti art to commissioned contemporary art and historical monuments).

The Big Art Mob is an online mobile blogging community project that supports a TV show that launches in April 2008. It is called the Big Art Project and is creating new public works of art in various areas in the United Kingdom. The site tries hard to ask the question “What is public art?”.

It looks really interesting and could be a really nice way to find all sorts of great public art pieces. I personally think the Banksy tag needs a little “sprucing up” and I’m sure we all have a few images we can submit to that.  I do think it’s a very interesting concept of the public “archiving” public art - much of which doesn’t stay around for very long - in the form of a community website.