One of my favorite photoblogs (Photocritic) is back with a post about having photos in a photo gallery. It's an interesting read, even if it's not in your immediate future.

JPG Magazine Blog Overload (But good!)

JPG Magazine has been quite active with their blog as of late. In late September, a Featured Member post was written with this to say:

"With so many amazing photographers on JPG right now, we thought it would be nice to make a few introductions. Here on the blog we'll be featuring some of the talented JPG contributors..."

Then in early October another post:

"With thousands of photos submitted to each issue, it's incredibly difficult to pick just sixty or so for the issue. Excruciating! We've been searching for ways to encourage people whose work we really admire who don't make it into the issue..."

Since then, there are have been lots of posts featuring photos from different themes, via the blog, as well as the addition of Featured Outtakes for different themes available to logged in users via the downloads section. Featured Outtakes are the photos that didn't make the cut for a given theme in the print magazine, but are photos that would have made the cut if the magazine was, say, 50 pages larger.

As far as I'm concerned, I'm happy to see this stuff sitting in my feed reader. I've been busy as of late, and in general browing galleries and surfing sharing sites (as well as voting on photos for themes) has not made it into my day in quite some time. However, with this new stream of posts, browsing comes to me, even if it is just a quick glance. Thanks JPG!

Shashin

A coworker of mine uses WordPress and Picasa for his personal blog and to share his photos. Naturally, being a programmer he merged the two together via a WordPress plugin. Check out Shashin, which just hit it's 1.0 release.

One Exposure HDR

There's been much talk about HDR in the last year and how you have to take multiple shots of exactly the same thing. Unfortunately there are times when this isn't possible, whether it be because you are tripodless at the moment, or there's some action in the shot. Fortunately, if you're shooting RAW files there's hope. (You are shooting RAW right?) Eirikso has a technique for creating HDR images from one RAW file.

The Nikon D40 is apparently popular enough for it's own photography blog. Seems like a good source of information for those [D40 users who might have been screwed out of 4MP with the introduction of the "X" model.... I mean] proud owners of this camera.

Pete Radocaj, our in-house photographer at work, has posted about Product Photography and It’s Importance in eCommerce on our company's blog.

Top Photography Blogs

If you're just learning about digital photography (or film) in your spare time, as I am, or are a full time studio shooter, traveler, or other paid camera-slinger you undoubtably subscribe to some photography magazines. I for one keep getting Outdoor Photographer even though my subscription ran out; thanks! I also subscribe to ShutterBug. I find that ShutterBug is insightful for thinking about new techniques and equipment to buy, whilst Outdoor Photographer is mostly just inspiring with some sprinkles of technique. Both magazines, I think are geared more towards learning than say, American Photo or any of those artsy or journalism ones. (Note: I love "artsy" photography, I just don't subscribe.)

However, the purpose of this blog isn't necessarily to point out good magazines that you can get in print, although I guess that might not be a bad idea for a future article about off-screen learning, but in fact it is about the numerous resources of the World Wide Web. There are many great blogs out there that update their content much more regularly than I, and in fact with much more insightful and useful tips and articles. That isn't to say that you should stop reading Photub of course. If you've been a reader of Photub for any length of time, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

The blogs that I am listing in this post, are blogs that I consider great additions to your RSS subscriptions—those blogs that probably have enough new content for books or bi-monthly magazines in themselves:

In no particular order...

1. The Online Photographer: The Online Photographer packs a wallop of new commentary, reviews, techniques and personal adventures into a blog that is updated fairly frequently.
2. Photocritic: Perhaps one of my favorite blogs, is this one. The authors always have something interesting to share, and do a good job presenting it. The critiques that are occassionally done are quite helpful to new and upcoming photographers, and the DIY attitude helps create some really useful and fun tools. Of note is the DIY Pringles can macro lens, that I have been wanting to try out.
3. Strobist: Everything you'd ever want or need to know about effective flash photography is right here in this blog. Literally courses of information are contained on the pages of this blog. It's also not all about flash photography. Consider the recent series about Flickr and what it can do for your photography career. Insightful articles, interesting topics and amazing techniques make this truely one of the best photography blogs on the internet.
4. Photojojo: While not really a blog per se, Photojojo's unique style and unique media (email newsletter), make it in a class of it's own. I include it in this list because they do have an RSS feed, making it "blog like." I have just one complaint about Photojojo and that is that they often seem to post stuff late, after it's already been posted elsewhere. Nevertheless, Photojojo has knocked my socks off more than a few times with interesting ideas, it's creative writing style and overall growth.
5. Digital Photography School: Anyone looking for tips can always find something at DPS. Choose a "Random Tip" or read them all. It's easily becoming an encyclopedia of techniques, buying tips, etc. for the beginner, casual student and the advanced amateur.
6. Andy Frazer's Night Photography Blog: Taking pictures at night can yeild some extremely interesting results, but not many will give you insight on creating breathtaking images at night without the flash. Andy Frazer does. You'll see lots of examples of compelling night imagery, if nothing else.
7. After Capture: The only site listed here, that actually is a monthly publication, actually has a decent blog. The blog talks, interestingly enough, about post production of your images. Becomming a "post production prince" might not happen overnight, but it'll probably happen faster with the reading of some of the articles here.
8. DIYPhotography.net: Face it, photography equipment is expensive, and we see time and time again, that a cheap light tent provides excellent results. DIYPhotography.net is all about creating cheap equipment to aide in the creation of great photographs. It's a wonderful collection and continues to grow.

The web is full of great content, and with RSS being used by nearly everyone, there certainly isn't any reason (other than time) that you can't be informed of the latest photography happenings, techniques and ideas every 15 or 20 minutes. Surely there are other great blogs out there that I did not address, but these are the ones I read on a semi-daily basis. If you think your blog should be on this list, please submit it for review, and I'll take a look.

Shorpy

Photoblogs are usually known to display recent work by a particular photographer. Shorpy, on the other hand, is The 100 Year Old Photoblog and so the work displayed there is much older and from a variety of artists. I find it interesting that the only thing different about portraits then and now is the clothing.

greyscalegorilla, which happens to be an amazing photo blog, has been posting only portraits for the last couple of weeks. They're incredible, as are most of his pictures.

Digital Photography School's blog shows us 4 Ways to Make Your Photos Pop.

Running From Camera

Running From Camera is a photo blog in which the photographer runs as fast as he can from his camera, before the 2 second self-timer captures him.

His other blog, though less unique is equally interesting.

Fauxto

Finding Fauxto this morning was a bit of a shock. I'm not one for this whole revolutionary phase where we put huge applications online and use them over the web, especially a real image editor like Photoshop or The Gimp. I'm also not a huge fan of things written in Flash, and Fauxto is that as well.

Though it's in it's beta form, the early release of Fauxto is pretty impressive. It looks and acts like a real image editor. It's definitely one of the most impressive Flash apps I've seen in recent history. Check it out. Also be sure to check out there blog.

My view from my window looks like.... this. Interesting blog with pictures and descriptions of other people's views from their windows. (I haven't submitted)