Just a while back, the publication called ‘Popular Photography‘ held a photo contest where the two winners obviously had a large amount of Photoshop manipulation in their images. When the rest of the contestants were asked for their opinion on this matter, they obviously felt that any type of photo manipulation is not real photography. If you spent enough time in photography communities as I have you will realize that there are a large group of photographers that believe that true photography must capture reality without alterations. These people are very traditional, and want to stick to traditional practices as much as possible. But are they really just holding onto a ideal that doesn’t hold water?

Continue Reading

Apache Solr is an extremely powerful, enterprise level search engine, and can be used to store billions of records. For anyone with experience in MySql, you will understand how query time starts to degrade after reaching around 1,000,000 rows for any given table. After doing tons of research to try to find an alternative method for a quick and reliable search database, I stumbled upon the Apache Solr Project. The general consensus about Apache Solr is that it’s lightning fast, and after using it for a recent project I will definitely agree to this.

Continue Reading

If you are a do it yourself Uncle Bob type, or a photographer that is looking to spice up some family portraits then let me share 5 interesting baby poses with you. But before you can determine if these interesting baby poses are right for you, you must first determine if the child you are photographing is the right age. I’d say if the baby is anywhere between 10 months to 18 months then you should be good to go. The reason is if the child is too young they won’t be able to stand, but if they are too big then they may be harder to pick up. Just as a warning, your ability to pick up your child depends on your level of fitness. Curiosity Media is not responsible for the breaking of your back, or giving you hernias. If your child is too fat, then it is highly recommended that you put them on a diet before attempting any of these poses. But if your child is a grown adult, then it is not recommended you lift them up as it may create an awkward situation. Proceed with these poses with extreme caution, and use good judgment. You have been warned!!

Continue Reading

So I remember seeing this visual representation of the internet a while back, and didn’t really think too much of it. At a glance you are able to see a snapshot of all activities that are happening online with search engines topping the biggest piece of the pie following retail, social networking, and media. So today I was just randomly browsing through some blogs and found the same graph but with a more realistic snapshot of the visual representation of the internet. I cannot believe that I didn’t think of this first.

A professional photographer has always been highly dependent on the equipment he carries, which leads most people to believe that it’s the equipment that makes the photographer. The reality is that even a semi professional entry level camera has so many bells and whistles that the average photography enthusiast will probably never even touch most of them. They probably don’t even have time to read one page in the manual, and so are limited to pointing, zooming, auto focusing, and shoot. Although he looks like he’s holding professional equipment, he has no clue how to utilize it to the fullest potential, and this is why Uncle Bob has been such an eye sore to a lot of professional photographers today. Uncle Bob by definitions is any person outside an industry who is performing a service in order to save money for themselves or for others. If you’ve ever seen someone at a wedding who looks like a photographer but has a camera that doesn’t quite look professional, that person is probably Uncle Bob.

Continue Reading

If you are a web developer you understand first hand how miserable IE (internet explorer) can make your life. While trying to format some div elements on a web page, I noticed that parts of the div would disappear anytime I scrolled through a page then magically reappear later. Apparently if you had a div container, and within that container there were floating div elements you would see what is known as the IE IE peekaboo bug. Luckily for me this is a well known and well documented bug so I quickly found my solution for it. Just add this tag to your main CSS stylesheet.

Continue Reading