Being green is no longer a phrase associated with Kermit the Frog. We all know we really should do our part to keep the Earth from turning into one giant landfill. The good news is “it’s not easy being green” really isn’t the true, a little effort in all aspects of your life can make add up to one big difference. So how can you be greener in the photography side of your life? Here are a few suggestions to get you started:

Green Power: If you use a camera (or accessory such as a flash) that uses AA or AAA batteries make sure you’re using rechargeable batteries, not only will it help the environment it’ll help your bank balance too. NiMH or Lithium batteries are your best bet for hundreds of recharges without “memory effect” and generally cost $25-$30 for 4 batteries and the recharger. Cameras with battery types other than AA/AAA usually come with a rechargeable battery but if yours didn’t look into buying one, most type are available. And once you’ve got those rechargeable batteries make sure you recycle those old non-rechargeable ones! Many local supermarkets and camera stores will now recycle your batteries for free.

Green Storage: If you’re ready to invest in a new camera bag check out Lowe Pro’s Primus AW bag which is made of 51% recycled materials. To make it even better Lowe Pro say “funds raised from the sale of the Primus AW backpack will support Polar Bears International PBI, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the worldwide conservation of the polar bear.” And it’s as well designed and constructed as Lowe Pro’s other bags.

Green Recharge: Now that your using rechargeable batteries you need power to recharge them. If you really want to go green and eliminate the need to find an electrical socket you need a solar camera charger. A bit more of an investment, they cost between $130 and $250 depending how much power they provide.

Green Print: If you print photos on your own printer give GreenPix matte photo paper a try. 100% recycled, it’s available in sizes from 4 x 6 up to 13 x 38.

Green Display: Once you’ve printed your photos you’ll want to display them. If an album is your way to do that check out the albums available at One World Projects which use a combination of renewable bark cloth and recycled paper and have the added bonus of supporting the women in Uganda who make them. For something else unique Acorn Studios have recycled circuit board albums, or Pristine Planet have a variety of albums handmade from recycled/reclaimed materials. If you prefer to frame your photos Green House Framing have a selection of reclaimed wood frames. Uncommon Goods have reclaimed tin frames and for something truly one-of-a-kind reclaimed bicycle chain frames. Ten Thousand Villages have recycled paper frames, and for recycled mat board check out Green House Framing’s selection.

Green Awareness: Raise awareness of environmental issues through your photography by entering the Environmental Photographer of the Year 2008 competition. Closing date is 31st July 2008.

Green Giving: If you’re ready to upgrade to a new camera but your old one is still working consider donating it to a charity such as Global Classroom Connections or your local children’s hospital or at-risk youth center and give a new generation a chance to try photography. Or use your local chapter of Freecycle and find a deserving person to give your camera too yourself.

If you have green photography equipment experience let us know about it in the comments section.

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	This Photojojo made possible by… ~ Have a cool photo product or site? Reach 185,000 photo fans

Finding photos on the internet is like being a tiny spacecraft adrift in a vast, starry galaxy. How will you ever find what you’re looking for in that cosmos of tags?

What you need, weary traveler, is a guide.

We hear Carl Sagan isn’t taking much new work these days, so allow us to present an alternative. Follow us to Tag Galaxy, where swirling solar systems of Flickr tags abound.

Say you want to find a memorable photo of poodles. Type in “poodle,” and it becomes a fiery sun, orbited by related tags like “dog” and “silly haircut.”

Click on more tag planets to create new suns (”poodles+noodles+strudel”). Or click on the sun itself to see all of the photos tagged with your search terms projected onto a rotatable spheroid planet.

All you need now is a turtleneck for your computer, and it’ll be just like having Carl at your side.

Find Photos with Tag Galaxy

p.s. (5/29, 11:45 PST) Hi everybody! Looks like Tag Galaxy is having technical difficulties at the moment. Our happy swarms of Photojojoids seem to have taken it by surprise. Crossing our fingers that it will be up and running again soon.

Link to this | Filed under Websites.

Jared at Pro Photo Rental (prophotorental.com) just sent me some information about their rental business located in Boulder, Colorado. I’ve used a couple of these services personally (read reviews of Rentglass and Ziplens) and we also have a handy roundup of online rental services.

Pro Photo Rental—offering Canon, Nikon, and Olympus gear—distinguishes itself from the competition with the following features:

• They are one of the few services that takes reservations and the only one that I know of that has an online reservation system.
• You can rent gear for exactly as long as you need it with a 4-day minimum. Everyone else seems to rent in 1-week increments.
• Offer a selection of Olympus lenses and gear (including an E-3 body).
• They offer a good variety of lenses but also rent bodies and speedlights.
• Local pickup in the Denver metro area.

Pro Photo Rental has offered Photodoto readers a 15% discount off of any order over $40 (good through July 2008). Just enter code S-Photodoto08 during checkout. If you take them up on their offer, let us know what you thought of the service in the comments.

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Keyboard Shortcut Skins Become a whiz at Photoshop, Aperture, FCP, Pro Tools, and Logic with these pre-printed keyboard skins. Buy now! As seen on Boing Boing Gadgets, TUAW, CrunchGear, Swiss Miss, Subtraction, and JoshSpear.com!

Until recently, if someone said the word “sharpening” to us, we’d whimper and hide under the table.

We mean, what the #$% is a threshold anyway?

Well, we finally got fed up with it, so we did some research. And you know what? Sharpening’s actually not that bad, and it makes a HUGE difference on digital images.*

Here’s our no-nonsense, jargon-free guide to sharpening your photos using Unsharp Mask. It’ll change your life. We promise.

*If you’re printing directly from film, feel free to be smug at this time. You don’t need to sharpen a darn thing.

Photojojo’s No-Nonsense, Jargon-Free Guide to Sharpening with Unsharp Mask

p.s. Hey San Francisco! Wanna help us out with the Photojojo Book? We need people to photograph and places to photograph them in. Check out our wishlist! We’ll make ya book-famous, baby!

(Continued...)

Link to this | Filed under Tutorials, Post-Processing.

I like to look.

The other day my friend, Yinni (nee Enid), asked me to help her to take good photographs. It’s flattering of course, but I am sure my answer was not so helpful.

I loaned her a copy of Taschen’s Icons book.

To know how to take good photographs, you need to know what a good photograph is. To know that you need to look and learn.

It’s a simple idea, but in today’s world where the woman next to you at the internet cafe in Florence has a laptop full of craptastic photos of herself and friends in a panoply of drunken poses it’s becoming more difficult. Basically, like everyone is a writer, now with digital cameras everyone is a photographer. Uhhh…no. People get lucky. Take 1000 photos and yes, out of the shit, there will be gold. It’s statistics but not talent. A good photograph is not an accident. A great photographer getting an great photograph accidentally (see Robert Capa’s photo of the soldier being shot) is not as accidental as Mary Myopia getting one – he knows where to be and where to point the camera and he waits. It’s a fine point but think about it for a second and you will see what I mean.

Reverse what I wrote in a piece about equipment: take the digital camera away and put an old manual Pentax with a 35mm lens in the accidental photographer’s hands and see what happens. The gold disappears because AP will take only 36 photos. Do the same with someone who has a developed aesthetic and he will still get gold, and you will see a series of thoughts being worked through on the contact sheet, not a random exploration of stuff like an idiot running pell-mell looking for shiny things.

People ask me how to write better. I say read. Ask me how to take better pictures my answer is the same. Look at good ones and study them. Why is it good? If you don’t like it, why?

If you look at much contemporary art photography you may be at a loss, too, for a lot of it is pretty rarified and obscure (see what I wrote about George Rousse for an example of what I mean). I am far from knowledgeable about contemporary photography but I want to know more because I want to be better.

I go to galleries and, because I don’t live in Paris or New York or London, I buy books. Not too many but I am getting over the hiccup I get when I see the price of a photo book. Amazon is great, unless you accidentally order two copies of a $45 dollar book - thankfully, I caught it in time. I recommend books that don’t rely on pictures but talk about the essence of a photograph – Sontag, Barthes – and books that do.

When I was about ten and started to take pictures and develop them (Kodak Brownie from a pawn shop for $5 which I worked for. Took 620 film which I developed and contact printed using a kit my parents gave me that came with teeny tiny trays and a little box that used an incandescent bulb for the contact print box. I think it cost $15 way back then from Consumers Distributing which had a catalogue that caused me to dream of getting a Praktica SLR for $150 but I ended up moving to a simply Instamatic that took 110 film - which I don’t ever recommend trying to hand process even with a ten-year old’s hands – and with which I tool pictures of telephone and power wires) I went to the library and looked at photo books. Granted, naked women was an impetus – thanks Ralph Gibson – but I just looked and looked.

When I returned to photography after a long hiatus – when my parents gave me a Pentax K1000 for Christmas – I returned to the library. And used book stores.

I am constantly amazed at people who want to be photographers but don’t know who Robert Frank or Cartier-Bresson or Irving Penn. They all know Ansel Adams and Robert Doisneau and Brassai from postcards and they may recognize Annie Liebowitz and Richard Avedon, but that’s usually the extent. It’s like a filmmaker who has never seen a Godard film or Citizen Kane or a writer who has never read Tolstoy or Lolita.

The problem nowadays is how to choose. Galleries are easy. It’s not a big investment. But photo-books are. Space and money.

I found this great website the other day – www.5b4.blogspot.com. It's all about and only about photobooks, written by a compulsive buyer who really knows his stuff. I can’t remember which blog turned me onto it, but one thing that impressed me was that the site was so good that Alec Soth, a photographer whose excellent work I was lucky enough to see at the Jeu de Palme in Paris, sought out the author who goes by the name of Mr. Whiskets.

So, if you want to take better pictures, read and look. And if you want to know what to read and look at, ask Mr. Whiskets.

I have five friends who have birthdays in late May/early June and are photography enthusiasts so I have been keeping an eye open for gift ideas. So far, through random stumbling about on the internet I have come across these rather cool looking photo-related gadgets:

Keyboard shortcut skins for Photoshop, Aperture, Final Cut Pro, Pro Tools, After Effects, & Logic Pro. They’re $30 for laptops, $40 for desktops at Photojojo although they’re only available for Macs.

Giottos Rocket Blaster looks like an easy, safe way to clean dust off the important inside parts of your camera. Plus it looks like a rocket, which is cool. Cost about $11 from Amazon.

Eye Fi Wireless Memory Card so you can upload photos without digging through a mass of USB cables to find which one you need. Especially cool for traveling. Photojojo and Amazon both sell them for $100 for the SD card and Photojojo has the SD card with a CF adapter for $130.

Lowe Pro Photo Gloves if you’ve lived in Alaska (like me) or anywhere else cold you’ll appreciate the dilemma of choosing between frostbite or an inability to manipulate your cameras dials, buttons, and other delicate parts. These are designed to keep your hands warm and cable of operating a camera and tripod. Lowe Pro have them for about $30.

Magnetic Photo Rope because what’s the point in taking all those photos if you don’t display some of them? And this is a pretty cool way to display them. Photojojo has rope with 8 plain magnets for $12, Wrapables has rope with six scotty dog shaped magnets also for $12.

What’s your favourite  photo gadget? If you’ve got one of these or any other cool photo gadgets let us know in the comments which one you feel coolest playing with.

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This Photojojo made possible by… ~ Have a cool photo product or site? Reach 185,000 photo fans

You know that Photoshop whiz kid friend of yours? The one that plays his keyboard like a Steinway as he dodges and burns his way to photographic perfection?

That could be you.

When we saw these custom-fitted keyboard skins for Macs*, we knew we had to have ‘em.

The color-coded covers show you all the hard-to-remember shortcuts for your favorite apps and are available for Photoshop, Aperture, Final Cut Pro, Pro Tools, After Effects, and Logic Pro.

You wouldn’t learn how to type with a keyboard with no letters on it.

So why learn key commands without seeing them right on your keys?

Photo App Keyboard Skins
$30 - $40 in the Photojojo Shop for Apple Laptops and Desktops

* Prefer Seattle to Cupertino? We’re on the lookout for something similar for you guys.

Link to this | Filed under Buy This, Gifts.

Saw this amazing new-to-me video of people being punched in the face this morning (via Waxy). (More footage here.)

High-speed photography, to me, is amazing. Typically we photographers deal in stills but the line between photography and video is blurring. Manufacturers have been adding video capability to still cameras and vice versa for a long time. Photographers have been known to spend ungodly amounts of time putting together video from still frames. And very slow video like the above has a very photographic feel.

If you fancy trying your hand at high-speed photography, Casio may have just the (affordable) ticket. Their recently released (March 2008) Casio EX-F1 is a 6.1 megapixel camera capable of shooting at up to 1200 frames per second. Play that back at normal video speeds (24 fps) and you’ve got home-made slow-mo movies for around $1,000.

The EX-F1 is also able to capture full-resolution stills in 60 frame-per-second bursts. And they provide an innovative mode that allows the camera to capture shots you missed. In this mode, holding down the shutter half-way continuously captures 60 frames and then discards them each second until you press the shutter fully. This is perfect for capturing unpredictable action. Now you can go back in time 60 seconds and pick the right moment as the keeper.

It’s not widely available yet (you can get it from B&H but you have to make a phone order). If anyone out there has got one of these babies, let us know what you think. I’m especially interested in thoughts about the 60fps capability for capturing action.

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In the past, all I wanted to was to runaway from my troubles.

Recently, I've come to realize that they were running to me all along.

Extra photos for bloggers: 1, 2 This Photojojo made possible by… ~ Thanks to our returning sponsor Squarespace for supporting Photojojo!

The white walls in your place have begun to loom, haven’t they?

Glaring down at you, bare as the Gobi Desert when the camels are on holiday.

And hark! That box of photos in the closet that you’ve been meaning to organize is starting to whisper to you. “Put me up,” the photos mutter. “Show me off!”

Of course, hearing these things means you are probably insane. But before the funny farm comes to take you away, you might as well sort out your wall and photo problem.

Grab a handful of bulldog clips and a few nails and put up some pictures. That’ll show those imaginary voices who’s boss.

Poppytalk and amberminty gave us the idea.

(Continued...)

Link to this | Filed under DIY, Photojojo Original.