In the real world, we all make an effort to look our best when meeting new people. We make sure that we have on clean clothes. That we brush our teeth (mostly). That we look good. It all goes to show who you are, your personality, and your ability to not look like Pigpen with a laptop.

Not so surprisingly, this translates right into the virtual world, and it all starts with your profile picture. It says “This is me!” And, whether you like or not, people’s first impressions can be greatly affected by the quality of your photo. Too often, picking a photo results in a choice between some shot from a party that you don’t remember taking (or even attending), or some dated, blurry image from an event just to show that, yes, you …

If you think finding inspiration for complete strangers is hard, try thinking of something new to do with your kids! It would be easy if we went somewhere new every day (or even every week) like the zoo or theme parks but let’s fact it – most of our lives are spent in our town. Same old park, same old beach, same old playground. Here are some photos taken in the same location and my inspiration to go there with my camera AGAIN when my brain is telling me “been there, done that”.

We live one street from the beach. Pretty cool when we first moved here but there’s only so much you can do at the beach.

1. Typical – Naturally when you first meet a location, you’ll take …

At dPS we’re committed to helping our readers learn about different aspects of their craft. We do this primarily through the creation of tutorials here on our blog and via the occasional production of dPS e-books that explore topics on a deeper level than we can in a single blog post.

We’re not the only ones with this goal and love to promote others with a similar vision.

Recently we’ve been impressed by two new e-books that we think will help many of our readers. I particularly like both because they are not just about the technicalities of photography but hit the heart with their approach – inspirational stuff.

The Magic of Black & White Photography (Part 1)

This newest addition to David DuChemin’s Craft and Vision range of e-books is by Andrew S. Gibson.

As

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In this post Amar Ramesh introduces us to the mystical world of smoke photography.

After I got hooked to smoke photography, the one question that has been constantly running through my mind these past few months has been ‘What else can I do with smoke?’. Smoke, otherwise an unwanted by-product of combustion, is actually a great subject for photography.

Image by karolajnat

Late last week I talked about how many of us need to pull back a little on ‘reading’ about photography and actually start ‘doing’ some more of it.

This struck home for me recently while at a George Michael concert here in Melbourne. OK – don’t mock, I was there with my wife, a big George fan…. I promise.

The concert was a stadium gig and we were a LONG way back in the crowd (yep… I was too cheap to get seats up close… who would pay $500 per seat for that?).

Seated directly in front of us were a couple of women (actually there were a couple of thousand of them) – one of whom took literally hundreds of photos during the night.

As someone with

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