Beyond Phototips

We hit 1000 subscribers a couple of times last month. But RSS feed subscription numbers are not absolute. They fluctuate often, sometimes going down, sometimes going up, based on daily feed views (not acutal subscriptions); so I preferred to err on the side of caution before making this announcement!

I decided to use the benchmark of 1000 subscribers over a period of one week; and we just managed to achieve that with your help (8 days now, actually)!

Wow, I’m thrilled about your support! For a blogger who does not post all that often, you’ve shown me a great deal of it. Thank you!

With a Little Help From my Friends

Through our transition from Photography Tip to Beyond Phototips, I’ve had some support from some wonderful bloggers, Brian Auer from Epic Edits Weblog and Umesh Gopinath from Whitespace have been a continual source of motivation. There are others too, but too numerous to mention, and some without a blog for you to check out… However, If you’re one of them, you know…

The graph below shows the steady increase in RSS subscriptions from when Beyond Phototips used to be Photography Tip till the 6th of May, 2008.

The large jump that you see from around 230 subscribers to around 550 subscribers in November 2007 is mainly attributed to Brian’s post about his favourite photography blogs and their RSS feeds.

You’ll find Beyond Phototips listed there at 31 under the name “Photography Tip“. This was before we moved from the blogger platform to an independent domain. BTW, Brian’s site comes up as a “Highly Recommended RSS” addition to your feed reader.

Whats coming…

My work as a Web Designer / Photographer does not give me much time to write for Beyond Phototips, but it is enormously encouraging to see this kind of support for whatever little that I do write. I suppose its also a good reason to try to make some more time in my schedule to write a bit more.

I’m going to take this opportunity to let you all know that I’m working on a new series of posts that I hope will be revealing to some, and engaging for all of you. What is it about? Check your feed reader one of these days, and you’ll find out!

Thanks for the great times so far, but I’m curious to see where this goes in the future. I hope you choose to stick around for the ride!

About RSS Feeds

If you’re wondering what all the fuss is about RSS subscribers, here are a couple of links to help you out, also do remember to come back and subscribe to the Beyond Phototips RSS feed, once you’re done. You could also sign up to receive our posts in your email.

• RSS in Plain English (Recommended Video)
  
• Getting Started with RSS

Also, do remember that your feedback means a lot to me. If you ever want to request a post about a particular topic, do leave a note in the comments, shoot me a mail (at susheel <at> beyondphototips.com) or catch me online at my twitter account. While I cant promise that I will write about it, I certainly will try to fill that request.

I hadn’t checked out Photography Voter before I made my post yesterday, about how you’ll get better expressions if you can get people to look at you “through the lens”. I just did, and look at what I found. Just on the first page! A whole bunch of posts about Portrait Photography!

5 Tips for Directing Models
Tips for making people relax, who might not be comfortable in front of a camera. This goes perfectly with my last post.

Getting those Portraits right, once and for all
Some interesting pose-related tips for taking better portraits.

Approach to Taking a Portrait
Different people, Same needs when you’re taking a photograph. How to get through to the person being photographed.

Wired Magazine’s top 10 Reader Self Portraits
Some really interesting self portraits here.

About a Pair of Green Eyes
A beginner’s first portrait photo-shoot.

All these just off the first page!

Photowalks are fun. I know this. I’ve been in the practice for ages, but it was only recently that “jargon” was applied to it. Now that it has, there are a lot more organised “photowalk” happening.

Apparently I’ve been missing a bit… Especially in my home-town, Chennai.

Now, Chandrachoodan of Selective Amnesia has been quietly organising photowalks for a while now, and this saturday plans are on for the fourth photowalk. Head on to the website to take a look, and read the discussion in the comments or just read on for more details.

The walk will start at 8AM on the 10th of February. We will begin at the Simpson’s building (near the Chintadripet MRTS station) and go on down Mount Road, going past the Hindu and The Mail offices, P.Orr and Sons, and the old D. Angeli’s buildings… We’ll then cross the road and finish at Bharat Insurance building.

Here’s a map to show you the locale.

View Larger Map

Do buzz us and let us know that you’ll be coming. Head over to Chandrachoodan’s post and leave a comment. And do remember to bring your camera…

Greetings everyone… Welcome to a new phase in our journey, and thank you for making it such an interesting journey so far. I hope you’ll be as excited about this new phase as I am…

Out with the old; bring in the New

Sometime late, late last night (in India), Photography Tip became Beyond Phototips. It was moved to a new domain name: http://www.beyondphototips.com/ with a brand new layout, (the new layout based on the Grid Focus theme) and blogging platform (we’ve moved from a free Blogger account to a self hosted WordPress platform). Not everything is as it should be at the moment, and links are still pointing to the old website, and some references need to be changed, but rest assured that they’ll all be set right in the coming days of this transition. Please bear with us in the mean time.

The old website will remain as it is, for now, and will not be updated. If you have bookmarks pointed to the old site, please re-mark this new domain so that you don’t miss out. If you have posts with links to the old website, don’t worry they wont become invalid. I’d like to point out to you at this stage that all of the content from “Photography Tip” is also available on the “Beyond Phototips” website too, and if you wish to, you can re-link your posts to the new website.

If you’re viewing this in a feed reader, worry not, you don’t have to do a thing. Your feed url will be automatically redirected to the new website’s content and you should have no trouble in reading it. There may be a delay between the stream being redirected and the time that feed readers have their cache updated, but hopefully this will not be too long. In any case, here’s the new URL for the RSS Feed http://feeds.beyondphototips.com/photographytip/

So what does this mean to you as a subscriber / reader of the blog?

I’ll be maintaining my old(er) schedule of three posts a week. But it does mean that you have a much nicer interface to look forward to when you visit the website. There is a simpler, less cluttered interface (though the old one was quite simple by itself), making important links very accessible.

The Archives are accessible via all the categories right on the main navigation menu; along with other important information that will make its way there eventually. The center column has links to posts that were among the most popular on “Photography Tip” and which I hope will continue to interest you on “Beyond Phototips”. There are also links to the popular categories of posts for quick access.

The third column has links to the home pages of the various Series posts that Beyond Phototips is running. This is so that you can find all of these links in one place.

I guess that’s it for now. Do let me know what you think of the new theme in the comments, and please do let me know if you spot any bugs. I’ll be ironing out the kinks over the next week or so, and you can also expect a number of new posts to come flooding in.

Canon today announced their replacement for the 1Ds MkII, the 21.1 megapixel EOS 1Ds MkIII.

The news of the USD 7,999 camera was splashed across amazon.com pages for a while before some details went offline. However, engadget managed to get some screen shots.

Apparently the EOS 40D has been announced too. Go to dpreview.com for Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III specs and Canon EOS 40D specs.

I’m off to yet another photoshoot in the long list of photoshoots that have been keeping me busy through the last month… I promise we’ll be back with more tips and tricks by the middle of this week. In the meantime, let the drool rule!

Update: Amazon is now taking pre-ordersfor this amazing camera.

Yes, I’m all drooly and skeptical at the same time, you can tell by the large pictures… It sure does look like a Canon… and not any Canon that I’ve seen till now. I’m in two minds about buying that point n shoot now…

Word is that Canon’s new camera is likely to be a 10.1 Megapixel marvel with the Digic III processor.

Interesting new features currently look like - low and high speed continuous shooting, sRAW (possibly a lower res RAW file format), 3 User Customisable shooting modes, 2 different Self-timer durations and possibly a more full featured heads up display.

I first caught wind of these pictures over at Engadget, but the images were found by a Forum member at dpreview who managed to download them before the source went offline.

Personally, I’m a Canon man; at the moment, more because I have the equipment than because I like the body (I actually like Nikon’s camera layout better), but I’m certainly going to wait for news of this to get official before making my camera buying decisions. Aren’t we all…

by The JohannEspiritu™

Hi there… I need a bit of help; for a change, I need you, yes You… to share some information with me. It doesn’t matter if you’re new to photography or not, your opinion is welcome. What information? Well, do read on…

All these years I’ve been taking pictures with SLR and D-SLR cameras and I’ve never really really had a point and shoot digital camera, or a point and shoot film camera for that matter. I’ve recently had a revelation though…

Off late, I’ve been noticing that there are a lot of things that I really do want to photograph, but I really don’t want to have the hassle of lugging around a big, expensive piece of equipment. I have used other people’s point and shoot digital cameras in the past and I’ve enjoyed the experience. So, I’m looking to buy one for myself.

So now I come to you, my experienced reader, because I need help in choosing a good point and shoot digital camera. I’d posted this on my shiny new personal blog a while ago, but the problem there is that hardly anyone knows it exists… Well, so far Johann has suggested the slightly bulky Canon G7 which he himself uses and the Fuji Finepix F31fd, and Trish suggested the Canon Powershot SD630.

Important criteria to me are the camera’s capabilities in low-light situations, it’s size, and its ruggedness. This is a camera that I’ll want to keep in my pocket all day, even if I’m on a photo-shoot, so ruggedness is a real factor.

Any Suggestions? Do let me know…