The Idea

The Photoshop contests at PhotoshopTalent.com work in two different manners. There are themed contests, in which you are provided with just a theme to base your entries on and then there are source contests. In source contests you are provided with a source image and your entry would be some alteration of that.

The contests are also moderated by different talent levels. Certain contest’s entries are limited by the user’s talent level. Each user’s talent level is determined by how many contests they’ve won and their placement. Along with talent points, you can win credits, which can be used to enter other contests or be exchanged for some cold, hard, cash.

The Execution

After browsing through the contests you can tell that there is an eclectic collection of talent levels participating in these contests. You can usually tell the beginners from the experts in the free-for-all contests, but the higher-level contests can usually provide some stunning entires.

The talent, voting and credit systems are pretty intuitive. The idea of users having a “votepower” rating really allows the contests to be judged more fairly. If a user votes a “1″ for all entries except their own, you can tell that they’re a careless voter and their votes will matter less and less. And being able to cash out your credits or winnings for actual cash is, well, what could be better?

The biggest qualm I have is the actual website. For a Photoshop-related website, it’s not designed or layed-out very well. The contests are messy and confusing at first. The navigation is barely useful and not intuitive. It also took me a few tries to complete the registration, as I wasn’t getting my confirmation email. Since the core idea of the site is done well, it makes it even more of a shame the website around it isn’t all that you would expect, or all that it could be. Of course, I may be a bit more biased since I build websites for a living.

So, if you’re interested in tweaking your skills or just looking for a good Photoshop challenge, the Photoshop contests at PhotoshopTalent.com are a good place to start.

What is Web Hosting?

There’s basically three levels of website hosting:

1. Co-location
   You provide the server, they provide the location and the bandwidth
2. Dedicated
   They provide the server, location and bandwidth. Your site lives on your machine(s).
3. Shared
   Your website shares server(s), location and bandwidth with a bunch of other websites.

The cheaper and more common method of hosting is in a shared environment. A shared hosting plan can usually provide more than enough resources for most websites. In fact, as of this writing, Photoshop Lab is using a shared hosting plan.

Shared Environments

A downfall of shared hosting has always been reliability. With so many different websites sharing the same resources, the likely-hood of something bad happening always increased. That’s where grid-style hosting comes in. Grid hosting is a new approach to a shared hosting environment. Instead of a few websites sharing one server, in the more classic shared environment, grid hosting is a bunch of websites all sharing a bunch of servers. With this architecture, any heavy loads or problems can be spread across a huge network of resources, lessening the more common negative effects.

Enter Misk.com Domain Essentials

Misk.com Domain Essentials web hosting plan is a grid-style architecture that is very, well, cheap. At $25 per year, it is a fraction of the cost of some of the other more popular grid hosting plans. Around since 1998, Misk.com lives on a popular Internap hosting facility.

A Unique Approach

Misk.com provides the basics at a basic price. Where most other hosting companies try to one-up each other in storage, bandwidth or extra features, all of which 99.5% of their users won’t use, Misk.com Domain Essentials just gives you the bare minimum. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

They don’t provide dynamic technologies like PHP, ColdFusion or ASP. They don’t provide massive database storage, or 10,000 email accounts. They provide reliable, static, simple hosting at a very simple price of $25 per year or $2.09 a month. Whoah!

A Perfect Fit?

As someone who builds websites for a living, I get a lot of requests for work from friends or family or friends of a friend of someone who knows a cousin in the family that just wants a “simple” website to show photos of their wedding/birthday/baptism/dog/real estate or maybe just a little information about their construction company. These are the type of people who would fit into the Domain Essentials hosting plan perfectly.

They don’t need a dynamic website with rotating banner ads. They don’t need a massive user registration database. They don’t need 10,000 gigabytes of bandwidth a month. And they definitely don’t need a $45 bill for hosting that they’re only using 10% of. They don’t need a $25 per month plan from Yahoo!, they need a $25 a year plan from Misk.com.

For anybody who is looking for cheap, basic hosting without all of the overhead and excess, Misk.com’s Domain Essentials is a perfect package.

This latest Photoshop editorial offering is from Corrie Haffly of SitePoint. In the age of broadband and gigabyte hard drives, I opted for the downloadable PDF version of the book, which is not only convenient, but also allows me to follow along easily while having Photoshop open. For those of you old-fashioned type, who like filling their shelves and have the patience for shipping, there is a hard copy available.

The Photoshop Anthology is very well written with great, plain-English explanations, allowing you to dive right into Photoshop’s vast feature-set. I was especially impressed with the immediate attention to keyboard (and other) shortcuts which are re-iterated throughout the book, which, when mastered, can increase your Photoshop productivity immensely.

The graphics for the lessons and solutions provide great depictions for what you need to do. In some instances, you can just skim through the images for a technique without ever having to read. Everything is clear, concise and to the point. Precisely how I would imagine my book to be, if I were to write one.

My only minor complaint is that the book seems to lack a bit of structure. The techniques are brilliant and infinitely usable, I would have just liked them to flow together a little better. Maybe present it in the fashion of somebody working on a real-life project.

The Photoshop Anthology: 101 Web Design Tips, Tricks & Techniques is available for order online at the SitePoint Book Store. You can order both tree-friendly and non-tree-friendly versions there. Of course, you do save a little bit of money by getting the PDF Download for only $29.95, but the Professional Pack is very tempting also.

The UrbanFonts.com website proves to be one of the most friendly font-browsing websites I’ve ever come across. You can, of course, browse by font name but unless you know the exact name of the font you’re looking for, it won’t be much help. Luckily, they make it easy for you to browse by font style, like: 3D, Comic, Handwritten, Retro and Typewriter, to name a few. This makes it much easier to get to what you’re looking for.

Once you get to browsing their massive font list you’ll notice even more great features. When you mouse over a font name, the entire alphabet list appears, this way you’re not guessing as to what the whole font set looks like. Even better than that, is the text area at the top for you to type in whatever text you want to preview (ie. Photoshop Lab) and have EACH font face display your text how it would look. This takes sooo much of the guesswork out of downloading (or even buying) the font(s) you need and will save bundles of time.

I would have to say that UrbanFonts.com is going to be my new favorite font site. It’s going to go directly into my toolbox bookmarks and is probably going to become a large asset to my design projects from now on.

Why I Chose the D40
I work in an office with about 4 or 5 semi-pro to pro-level photographers and they all use Nikon. It would be silly of me to ignore the availability of the vast resources of these people, their experiences, and most importantly… their equipment. Once I had the brand settled, I started looking into the D50. I was pretty set on buying it, but then I got wind of Nikon releasing their D40.

I started making a check list of what I wanted in a DSLR. Since I had never owned or shopped for one before, my check list was pretty small. I wanted:
- compact size
- SD card format (my laptop has a built-in slot)
- better photos than my Canon SD400

Most of the other items on the checklist are just inherent to Digital SLR cameras. Like, quick to start, quick to shoot, good quality, etc. The rest of the specs I didn’t know anything about and probably wouldn’t know the difference anytime soon.

I walked into my local electronics retailer to pick up a Nikon D50. On their display stand, they had a D50 directly next to a Canon Digital Rebel XT. I held the D50. Then I held the Rebel. Wow… there was quite a size difference. The D50 felt rather large, comparatively. I researched the new D40 a little more and found that it was, in fact, smaller than the Rebel XT. Nice.

Now, it has been explained to me that the D50 isn’t a large camera for a DSLR, and that small DSLR cameras were pointless because they’d “never feel right”. I ignored those explainers (that a word?) and decided to order me up a D40 as soon as possible.

Where I got it
I highly recommend B&H Photo for anything digital camera-related you might want. They gave me a great price and with my NAPP discount, shipping is FREE! Of course, I completely lack patience, so I paid the extra shipping cost for UPS overnight.

Out of the Box
The setup was pretty easy. Remove the lens and plastic covers, attach to camera battery, insert battery, insert memory card (not included) and shoot. I was amazed with the quickness of the camera. From power-on to shutter click is very quick. The automatic shooting mode was nice but it definitely wants to use the flash a lot. The rest of the modes take a little getting used to, but a quick browse through the manual will quickly enlighten you.

The greatest feature is the continuous shooting. This allows you to hold the shutter button down and have the camera just keep snapping photo after photo. It’s pretty fast with my Ultra II card as a faster memory card will help with faster shots. It’s great for an amateur like me who isn’t sure of their shots and may have a bit of an un-steady hand. A wise co-worker told me that with continuous shooting, if you take 5 shots of the same thing, one of them is bound to turn out better than the rest. Your photos are nice and easy to review (and maybe delete) on the 2.5″ LCD, which you might find yourself doing often to free up some room on your memory card after a few series of shots.

Another speed-tip I was given was to turn off the Noise Reduction built-in to the camera. Most software packages will offer better noise reduction and having the option on just slows everything down.

Sample Photos
Now that you’ve made it through all of my banter, I’ll show you some of my highlights from the thousands of photos I’ve taken the last month. Be nice, I’m still a noob.

The Accessories
My favorite accessory, so far, has been my backpack. It’s a Lowepro CompuDaypack that I picked up at the local big box. It has a perfectly sized compartment for the D40, lens, charger and cable. It also fits my 15.4″ widescreen laptop and all of my laptop accessories WITHOUT putting any pressure on the camera. The camera is stored in an easy-to-access compartment on the lower front of the back.

I also strongly recommend the SanDisk Ultra II PLUS USB SD memory card. The beauty of this card is that it is built to be plugged directly into your USB slot. No bulky card readers. No messy camera cables eating your camera battery. It splits in half and plugs right in. It’s one of those products that makes you smile every time you use it.

Another companion I got was the Western Digital 120GB Passport external hard drive. It’s a 2.5″ portable drive that’s completely bus-powered, which means no power cables or large adapters to lug around. It’s great for storing all of my photos in an uncompressed format so I don’t have to worry about losing quality or even losing the images. It also looks great with it’s gloss casing and fits perfectly in the extra room I have in the bottom of my camera bag.

123RF Stock Photos is one of the companies that allows this great, inexpensive exchange to happen. While the business model isn’t exactly revolutionary, they do provide more options than most. You can buy images individually by purchasing credits, with the cost varying by photo resolution. Or you can subscribe to one of their available Plans, allowing you to download 5 Ultra HiRes images per day (Basic Plan) or 20 Ultra HiRes images per day (Premium Plan). The subscription plans last either 30 or 90 Days. The option of buying credits or subscribing to the site is something that allows 123RF Stock Photos to cater to any level of stock-photo consumer.

The other way they cater to the consumer is by having a great selection of photos. At time of writing, they advertise having over 500,000 stock photos. The photos have a nice quality with a range of styles which can be attributed to having a variable collection of contributing photographers. The website is clean and simple to use, with the large-thumbnail-preview being unintrusive, unlike other stock photo sites. The “Similar Search” feature functions wonderfully and allows you to pinpoint that exact photo you want easily.

Another innovative feature of 123RF Stock Photos is their Rewards program. With every photo or subscription you buy, you get “RF Points”. It’s kind of like airline mileage. They then offer you a great list of products you can purchase with your points, such as: iPods, Wacom tablets, digital cameras, even a Sony PSP. This a great way for designers in large corporations to “reward” themselves while expensing the photos to the company. Very slick, maybe even a little sneaky. I like it.

Whether you’re on the photographer or designer side, 123RF Stock Photos is a great website to get whatever it is you need.