In a never ending search for great resources on Digital Photography, I recently came across this one: The Digital Picture.  Now I'm a Canon guy, and it slants that way, so it suits my 'lifestyle'.  If you're from the Nikon camp, you might like to check out Nikonians. 

There's a great section with detailed reviews on just about every lens you could imagine (for a Canon SLR body).  Their reviews and ratings track very closely with preferences and suggestions that pro photographer friends of mine have made.  So I'll assume they're pretty spot-on here.

You can also find some nice tips for shooting, and understanding what your camera is actually doing.  All in all it's a very nice collection of information about Digital Photography.  Whether you're Canon or not, it's worth a peek and a read.

In case you haven't heard, QJ Photography has a Flickr group! We're gaining members slowly, so why don't you join and tell all your friends? For now, get your shots into The group pool and you may be picked as the Shot of the Week. Lots of glory and prestige come along with this honor of course...

With relatively few shots in the pool thus far, I'm inclined not to pick runners-up shots (as they could always make it in following weeks), but I'm inclined to this week, as for me, it was so close. First, the runner-up shot.

Little Church, by Kruggg6:

The stark contrast was nice and makes for an interesting shot with lots of lines and angles. A slight crop (mainly on the right) would have done it for me, to make things completely symmetrical, but it's still a neat photo. In fact, read in the comments - one flickr user played in photoshop, and lightened the image, to find there was A LOT more detail hiding there. Love the hidden stuff!

Ok, the Shot of the Week! A 30 Second Blink, by Kashmir Szekeres:

You've seen this shot before, right? Sort of. How often have you seen this shot in daylight? Exactly. Kasimir leaves a comment describing his technique for this 30 second day time capture:

"A welding glass, this makes the picture all green but when correcting the RAW file's white-balance the colours come back pretty good."

I'm always looking for some new and interesting technique, and this one definitely fits the bill. Love the creativity Kasimir! Thanks for sharing the shot, the idea, and the how-to. Thanks to everyone who's been submitting photos to the pool. It's fun to see the variation in submissions. Keep them coming!

So apparently there are consequences for those who take photos that look too good.  Yahoo & Target have teamed up to provide online uploads of digital photos and print them out for customers - with the option of in store pick up vs snail mail.  (This is actually the service that flickr uses for allowing members to print their images out.)  There are numerous services such as this one, available all over the internet. 

Well Target - along with most others, I'd assume - decided to hold one woman's photos and not sell them to her.  The reason?  She didn't have a copyright release for them.  Why didn't she have a copyright release?  They were her pictures!!!   She was even in one of the shots.  But no matter.

I can understand corporations attempting to protect themselves from legal action by true copyright holders, but this seems a bit extreme.  Digital cameras, in the hands of many an aspiring photog have been yielding amazing results in recent years.  Apparently as we get better and better, we may have to resort to printing our own at home, and being bitten by ridiculous ink costs, instead of the economical and simple process of using a professional printing shop.

The cool people at Lighthouse in a Tree have put together a way for you to make your own pinhole camera.  There are probably easier ways, but not to make one this stylish.  Once you've downloaded and printed the materials, there's a video demo of how to assemble your new camera.  Probably pretty smart of them to offer this, as the questions they'd have undoubtedly have gotten would have been a lot - I'm guessing...

A pinhole camera is essentially a box with a tiny hole in it.  The hole functions as a lens, allowing the light to shine into an enclosed space and be captured on some film already inside of the box.  Many a photography course uses this project as an assignment, and it's fun to do.  Take it to the next level with this snazzy design, and then get check out the pinhole a day website and see how you can get involved next year.

File this one under a new and fun way to display your photos.  In wall size proportions! 

Upload your photograph to the Rasterbator, and determine the size and dimension you want the finished product to be.  The Rasterbator blows your shots up to immense proportions and then offers the best way to print them out.  You get a downloadable PDF file which consists of the many pages your wall sized shot will be comprised of. 

Make sure you've got plenty of ink and paper around, or hit your local Kinkos and pay for it there (it'll probably be cheaper.  Make sure you put the pages all back together in the right order (think of it as a puzzle).  Then just sit back and enjoy as friends and family talk about how cool your frame-up and wall display is.

Wow, what a great idea!  Rent lenses by mail through RentGlass.com.  Right now they only offer Canon lenses, but Nikon lenses should be available anytime now - or 'Spring 2006', as the site says.  It looks like lenses start as low as $17 for a single week and $51 is the highest.  Obviously, higher end lenses cost more than the cheaper lenses.  And if you rent for 2 or 3 weeks, the per week cost is slightly discounted.

The renter pays the shipping each way - which is automatically insured - on top of the rental cost.  While lens bodies are said to show typical wear, the optics are guaranteed to be flawless.  Currently the site is all first come, first served, so there's no way to really schedule a specific time period to secure a lens.  I don't have anything to compare it against, so I can't say if the costs and setup are good or not, but it all sounds fair enough.  A great way to try before you buy, if you ask me.  I've got my eye on a couple I'd like to try out before I shell out big bucks for new glass.

There's about eleventy-million (it's a real word - my son uses it) photo sharing sites on the internet.  Most of them are essentially the same - same features, same interface, same usefulness.  On occasion a couple do some interesting things and stand apart from the crowd.  Or there are some that will do the same thing, but package the experience differently.  It's the last type that I'm here to talk about today.

ScrapBlog takes the idea of posting (or blogging) your photos, and the offline hobby of scrap-booking (a multimillion dollar industry by itself) and puts them together.  It's essentially the same service you can find in other places around the web, but it makes a point of using the scrapbooking tilt to 'sell' the idea. 

So you upload your shots, and then you can tilt them and put them on top of each other - basically arrange however you want - and put digital cutouts (or stickers as ScrapBlog calls them) around the pages to pretty things up.  You can add text bubbles to tell a story, and have multiple pages to a ScrapBlog.  Then just publish it and your webpage of your scrap blog is up.  It's got regular blog features, such as email notifications and rss feeds too.  There didn't appear to be any actual book-publishing options available.  Maybe that'll be a future capability.

It's a free service too.  In my opinion, it seems geared more toward the ladies.  I don't mean that as a sexist comment, only that I've only known women to practice in the art of scrap booking.  But that's kind of why I don't think this will quite catch on.  Scrap booking - in all the examples I've seen - is about the touch and feel of the end product.  Something tangible that you can pull out and show around.  Seems like one thing that should stay analog, in this digital age.

Let us know if you've used the service, and share you scrap blogs - we'd love to check them out and hear your thoughts about the service.

Users of the TiVo Digital Video Recorder can now view their stored online photos using Aplus.Net's Web-a-Photo service.

 Photos need to be uploaded first to their free Web-a-Photo account. Once photos have been uploaded to the site, TiVo users only need to use their TiVo remotes to be able to view their photos which can be rotated, e-mailed, zoomed and ordered.

A collaboration between Canon and Photo-i will bring DVD video tutorials to your TV screen.  If you're trying to get started and not sure what to do, these may be a good place to start.  The first movie is 2 hours and 20 minutes in length and geared toward beginners.  It includes assignments to go out and try the things that have been taught throughout the lesson.  DVDs will cost £14.99.  For now only the one beginner disc is available, but more are slated in the near future.

Of course, you could also follow the educational posts we write here on QJ Photography, and they'll cost you nothing.  Plus, as an added bonus, we'd love to hear your questions and answer them specifically.  Try getting that from a DVD.

Pentax has released 15 new picture frames for its compact digital camera series "Optio". Users can download them from the official website for free.

The supported devices are: "Optio S6", "Optio A10", "Optio WP", "Optio WPi", "Optio M10" and "Optio W10".

The frame picture formats of Optio S6/A10 and Optio WP/WPi/M10/W10 are different. Users should download them from their own page.

You can save the downloaded frames in the root directory of the SD memory card, and select them in the "Frame composing menu". You can even store the new frames into the internal memory to replace the old ones. There is no need to worry if you deleted all of the frames, since the official website offers both the add-on frames and original frames that came with the camera. You will be able to restore the camera to its initial state easily.

Download: [New Frames for Optio S6/A10]
Download: [New Frames for Optio WP/WPi/M10/W10]