Home Video and Photography Tips and Tricks

LifeHacker presents how to take Great Digitial Portraits . This is a nice quick little tutorial with some great tips like forcing your flash to stay on even in bright outdoor light, how to set your camera to portrait mode (and why it helps), etc.

email from Kodak points us to the Kodak Easyshare Gallery Family Story Photo Contest. Enter your favorite photos (1 per day) and vote every day. You could win a $25,000 family reunion from Kodak, complete with a LIFE photographer to capture the event.

I remember sitting in class in grade school drawing stick figure movies at the bottom of my notebook. You know, draw one per page, flick it with your thumb and it makes a little movie? Well now that I am older and playing with more expensive toys, comes FlipClips.com. Upload a short (30 seconds or less) video and they'll turn it into a paper flip clip movie. Looks pretty cool and not too expensive. Looks like starts at $9.99 and goes down from there...can buy in bulk for party favors, etc.

The DSLR Blog looks pretty cool and I'll have to check it out in more detail. Meanwhile, this post about a guy who creates 3d pictures using animated GIFs that quickly flicker between the right and left images....resulting in a 3d look. Its pretty cool and I want to try it out for myself soon.

Meanwhile, here is an article on about.com about how to create stereograms using your digital camera, photo printer and any photo imaging program....combine that with how to create an animated GIF and I would guess you'd be able to get pretty close. Looks like a pretty fun project.

Scoble is a Microsoft employee with a well-read blog. Interesting take on things and alot of internal MS squabbling in the comments. He points us to this new digital photo site, Just Show Me How To, but you have to pay to get the tips. (looks like $1.99 - $3.99). Interesting Site. Scoble says they have a blog but I don't see that anyway on their site. He also says "Done by award-winning photographers. Pulitzer-prize winners and all that." but that's nowhere on the site either...all it says it "...from world-renown professional photographers." So how does he know all this? I guess I'll have to take his word for it. I guess I'll start with their free video of the week, 'Take Great Sunsets' if it ever completes downloading.