Universal Photographic Digital Imaging Guidelines

If you're interested in photography and digital imaging you might want to check out the recently posted Universal Photographic Digital Imaging Guidelines at http://www.updig.org. You'll find a set of informative guidelines and best practices approved by the largest trade groups and professional organizations in the industry. I recommend downloading their PDF and taking a look at it.

Book Review - Being a Photographer by Yann Arthus-Bertrand

Incredible Retrospective
Any photographer lucky enough to have a retrospective of their life's work created with the quality put into this book and accompanying DVD would have to be happy. This is a wonderful volume of extraordinary photographs and excellent text. Being a Photographer traces the life and photographs of Yann Arthus-Bertrand, a French photographer who spent years in Africa as a young man. It was from there that he first started photographing the Earth from above as he gave hot air balloon rides to tourists. Yawn spent more years photographing major sporting events, travel destinations, and other projects before returning to aerial photography to produce his famous book Earth from Above. The superbly printed photographs in this book cover a lifetime of great work and are supplemented with biographical text by Sophie Troubac. The accompanying DVD makes it a great combination and inspirational book for anyone interested in photography.

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Book Review - The Names of Things by Susan Brind Morrow

Unique

Susan Brind Morrow has led a very interesting life. She's a graduate of Barnard College with a master's degree in classics from Columbia and for a short time was a fellow of the Creane-Rogers Foundation in Egypt and Sudan. Most of this book recounts her travels as a traveling archaeologist leading upto and around that period. Her prose is so lyrical that the book is more like reading poetry than anything else. So much so, that it's often difficult to keep a sense of where she is, who she's with, and what she's doing. The later is my only complaint, though to be honest it's not that anyone can capture in the lyrical sense what Susan Brind Morrow has in this very unique memoir.

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Book Review - Templeton Plan: 21 Steps to Personal Success and Real Happiness by John Marks Templeton

A Guidebook for Life

The Templeton Plan is a guidebook for living life. Templeton lays down 21 laws on how to be successful in your personal life and in your occupation. Interwoven with the Templeton Plan is an autobiographical story of how Templeton started from modest means growing up in Tennesse into a multi-billion dollar investor and money manager. It's an incredible and inpiring story. Not every day or in just any book can get you great, proven advice from a billionaire, but this text is a classic treatise on being successful from someone who not only knows as much about the subject as anyone but also has taken the time to formulate it into a teachable package. It is wisdom in the truest form. This book is cheap and more than worth every cent. It's also one that I will read again in the future which is the highest mark that I can give any book.

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POCKETEC 80GB Portable HDD USB 2.0

 Perfect for travelingThe 80GB Pocketec is perfect for traveling. You don't want to carry around yet another power supply in your luggage and this little drive is completely powered off of its USB cable. As I travel I use it to backup my images. No extra drivers are required on Windows XP though on Windows Server 2003 you will need to assign a drive letter to it the first time you plug it in throug the Computer Management administration console.

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Kensington PocketMouse Mini Ultra Compact for PCs or Mac

Decent, but could be designed much better
The Optical Mini is designed for travelers and works quite well for its size. Being a USB mouse over wireless is a 75.benefit because you don't want to mess with recharging batteries or carrying a cradle for it with you while traveling. The retraclable cable is the right way to go, but this model has an extremely inept design. On only my third or fourth use it because a tangled mess. This was a little different than what is promised on the product packaging which says, "And with the retractable USB cable there are no tangled cords." Right. Once you are finished with it you can hold the USB end in one hand and the mouse in the other and cause it to retract very slowly and carefully and avoid a rat's nest of cable. A tiny design change would have prevented this problem altogether. A larger design change would have retracted the cable into the mouse itself for an even more elegant product. I'm satisfied with the product since I'll only be using it as a travel mouse, but I would not recommend it for frequent use.

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