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?

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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.

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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!!

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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.

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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.

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In 1982 (Year of my birth), two brothers, Bruce and Winston Dorbowski created a toy camera called the Hipstamatic. This was a plastic toy camera, which is rumored to have sold only 156 units. Looking through ebay, I could not find a single Hipstamatic, so this is obviously a very rare camera. In the photography world, the last few years has seen a rise in retro photography. There are hundreds of Photoshop actions made to achieve the look of a retro photo, in fact it’s being used so much it’s starting to lose it’s meaning. None the less Hipstamatic photography has become a sought after look by amateurs and professionals alike.

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About 2 years ago I purchased my very first Nikon D40x DSLR camera without even knowing what a DSLR meant. Being frugal in nature, I was trying to find ways to save money on my up and coming wedding by purchasing this camera. I mistakenly believed that I could find a friend that was competent enough to help me out, but as I used the D40X myself I realized the challenge in mastering it. I never did find a friend that I entrusted enough to capture my whole wedding, but what I did gain was a new found interest in digital photography. Since than I’ve come a long way in my photography education, and it would be my honor to plant my seeds inside of you, my seeds of knowledge.

In this article I will explain 2 important camera settings that will allow you to control camera exposure, and they are called the Aperture and Shutter Speed. And for those who don’t know, under exposure is when your image is too dark, over exposure is when your image is too bright. Our goal is to get the perfect exposure, which is the middle ground of over exposure and under exposure.

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I’ve been using mysql professionally for a little over 2 years now, and have found it increasing inadequate for humongous databases. I had first hand experience with this when building out a 7 million record database for a client of mine. I did resolve some of the issues by placing the proper indexes in the table structures, but it still had underwhelming performance issues when it came to the keyword searches. As I knew the client didn’t have the funds to have me solve this issue, I just left it the way it was.

But as a person who is always trying to seek answers to my problems I felt the need to do some investigative research. How are websites like Google able to have billions and trillions of records, and still have fast and responsive queries? It took me a while, but I discovered Apache Solr as the answers to my prayers. Based on the Lucene Search Engine, Solr is able to handle databases into the billions of records. The only catch to using Solr is that you must be on a server that has java. The only servers that allow java are dedicated servers, which can cost up to $200 a month. So obviously this search application is not for your average run of the mill website, but what kind of run of the mill website needs millions or records anyways?

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Right around New Years we received a call from Sarah Min at around 8 in the morning. Still feeling groggy from just waking up, we decided to let the call go to the machine. To our surprise, she was our very first referral that actually wanted to pay us to take her family portrait. Her family was in town but they were leaving the next day, so it was imperative that we do the portrait at that moment. I was in a weird dilemma because everything was such short notice, and there was no time for preparation. So I told her that we would be available in the afternoon to take some studio shots for her. That gave us about 4 hours to get ready, so I cleaned my equipment, pre visualized the type of pictures I would take, then headed off to meet with her family.

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