John Burchell Photography

I am doing 43 things.

My profile on www.LinkedIn.com for anyone interested in staying in contact with me or anyone interested in joining my network.

I’ve had a LinkedIn profile now for quite some time. A collegue of mine had sent me an invitation so I went ahead and created a profile, with the absolute bare minimum of information at first, because I didn’t know how much SPAM I was going to start receiving. So far, it’s been completely spam free. I haven’t looked at it in a couple of years until recently another colleque sent me another invitation to join his network. I’ve been hearing the buzz about the linkedin website and I didn’t really see why I should join it till I read this article by Ben Worthen on the Wall Street Journal Biztech Blog site.

According to the article: “LinkedIn is also a good way to solve problems that you don’t know how to answer. If you need help with a marketing problem, for example, but don’t have a relationship with anyone in your company’s marketing department, you can find out what friends or friends-of-friends have that expertise. It’s the equivalent of asking your friends if they know a good dentist, says Luo, only faster.”

I know personal referrals aren’t 100% always great, but they are light years ahead of calling someone at random out of the phone book.

I’ve added myself on a cool new website as a Freelance Photographer

If you’ve landed here from the Freelance Photographer, FreelanceDesigners.com site, you’re currently in my BLOG section. If you’re interested in viewing some of my work, please visit my Gallery page.

Whether you need a photographer for your wedding, your portraits or commercial needs, or if you’re another photographer, I hope you find my site, my Blog and my Gallery exciting and full of useful information.

Just a few off the last memory card…

I recently found an excellent multi-part article, originally posted by range, over at http://thememoirs.org, titled “Understanding modern HDR Photography, a set of tools, links examples and explanations”.   I’ve never seen such a complete and concise article anywhere else that covers the topic as well.  The article goes into many great topics including the functionality of modern Digital Cameras, their ability to capture the range of color, how the technology works and some techniques using software to extend the range of digital cameras to produce absolutely stunning results.

“Although the meaning of dynamic range for a real-world scene is simply the ratio between lightest and darkest regions (contrast ratio)” He mentions, “its definition becomes more complicated when describing measurement devices such as digital cameras and scanners.”

And the several articles the cites and posts go to great lengths to clarify those definitions.

No matter what your skill level is, this article will definitely provide something useful that will help you master the light and color of anything you might be photographing with a modern digital camera.  I would consider this article a MUST READ for anyone that works with digital images.  Bookmark this article and check it frequently for any future posts on this topic.

You probably spent a lot of time or money or both to get a great looking website up and running. You might even be keeping up with a Blog on your site as often as you can but chances are, unless you’re paying very big bucks, your site traffic is less than what you’d like it to be. Directing traffic to your website is a science some people make their living off of but at the bottom of it all is having some really stuff on your site. A lot of other people have written some really great articles and posts and have incredible information on their sites…. For instance, take this link:

http://cheapshooter.com Where another Blog poster took the time to locate and identify 11 videos that were posted on YouTube.  In their words:

Cheapshooter has been busy pre-screening a lot of YouTube videos to make this list of the best video photography tips available online. They are among the best examples of photography tips on YouTube - well-produced videos that know what they’re talking about.

He’s gone through YouTube and watched several videos about how to take better photos, how to use your camera and other things. There’s no telling how many hours he spent looking them over. Then he was kind enough to actually put the best ones together and group them. By citing the article here and taking advantage of the trackback feature built into my bloggins software, WordPress, I can accomplish several things:

1. I can provide some decent content that would be interesting to other photographers, aspiring photographers, or the general public intersted learning something about what to expect out of a good photographer.

2. I can send a direct Thank You to the website who did all that initial research to combine those YouTube videos and publish them all in one place.

3. By using trackbacks, it’s almost like getting an ultimate Kudo. Nothing excites a webmaster more than knowing all their hard work and effort actually paid off. It lets them know that people are actually reading their blogs.

4. Last but not least, it creates links to each of our websites. This is where the website marketing people go nuts but the simple explanation is that websites that are cool have cool stuff. And when people find cool websites, they build links to them. Because I think there is a cool article on cheapshooter.com, I can easily let the rest of the world know it by casting a cool vote for them by using the trackback feature built into my blogging software.

It’s very important to calibrate your monitor when viewing proofs online, or viewing digital images from your computer screen.  If the color or contrast isn’t adjusted properly, the printed images will look a lot different.

 Here is an 11 color scale for adjusting contrast.

If you’re really up for calibrating the gamma of your monitor, and you should if you’re going to be proofing or editing photos, you might want to take a look at a brief explanation of how to do it on zonezero.  You can find his explanation here: http://www.zonezero.com/calibration/english.html. 

Its my favorite subject! I just love photographing babies because they are just so wonderful. If you watch closely, I think you can actually watch them grow and learn before your very eyes. But it’s more like the minute hand of a clock. Its hard to see the movement while you’re looking at it, but look away for a few seconds and it’s apparent it moved.

Photographing babies is a special time when I get to see and capture this new life growing.

Well I recently updated this blogging software to Wordpress 2.3. They worked out some bugs and added some new features and I like to stay current so here it is.

One of the noticeable differences is an “Addthis” drop down at the bottom of each post.  It’s there so you can conveniently add any of the articles to your favorite bookmark pages.  I like using these bookmark services, because no matter what computer I happen to be logged into, I can still access my favorites.  Other people can see my favorites too, by searching for burcjo on del.icio.us or http://delicious.com . Another thing, by adding my articles to your favorites lists, will let the world know that I’m doing something worth doing.

Aside from that, you shouldn’t notice many other changes, but if you run into problems, don’t hesitate to let me know.