I use a Huey Pro but if you don’t want to buy additional equipment, here’s a quick way to make sure your brightness and contrast look right.

Photo Friday have produced a neat page to test and calibrate your monitor. Follow the link below to check your monitor.

Photo Friday: Monitor Calibration Tool

I’ve long thought it strange that whenever you add a link in Flickr, either as part of your profile within a caption for one of your images, they rewrite it to add in a rel=”nofollow”. The effect of this tag is to stop a search engine (which obviously ranks Flickr quite highly) from following the link and therefore helping your own site’s search ranking.

This is a common thing to do in comments (in fact this blog’s comments do that) as a means to avoid spammers improving the search ranking of their phishing sites. However to do it in my own profile and captions has always struck me as ungenerous and somehow against the community spirit of the web.

The above issue aside, as you will know I have this site, and my portfolio site www.importedlight.com and recently I began experimenting with adding links from some of my travel photography to one or other of these sites. However I ran into a problem.

Working in the web analytics industry and using Google Analytics on both my sites, I of course wanted to include the Google Analytics utm_source, medium and campaign tags on the links so I could see how effective they were at driving traffic to my sites. The problem is, if you do this and then make the linked text anything that looks like a URL or domain (i.e. www.importedlight.com) Flickr would rewrite the linked text to be the same as the actual link href. Linked text that didn’t look like a URL (i.e. “My Site”) works just fine.

For example, if I wanted to add the following:
<a href=”http://www.domain.com?utm_source=flickr”>www.domain.com</a>

Flickr would convert it to:
<a href=”http://www.domain.com?utm_source=flickr”>www.domain.com?utm_source=flickr</a>

Which is not very pretty!

Despite the issues Thomas Hawk has had with Flickr help (example here) and the general bad reports of staff that don’t really help, I decided to have a go at raising what I thought was a bug in the Help Forums. It seems everyone’s reports of how bad Flickr help is were true!

You can see the post I made here. Within seconds the response from one of the Flickr staff was it wasn’t a bug, it was that way by design to stop phishing and the thread was closed denying me any chance of responding! Frankly the phishing argument is bull!

So what they are saying is that I can post a link which says something like “Follow Me” and gives no clue what-so-ever as to where the link is going and that all fine. But if I actually try to be helpful and say use my domain as the linked text its a massive phishing risk and is not allowed. This just doesn’t make sense. If it was for phishing then they certainly wouldn’t let me use text such as “Follow Me” or “My Site” either.

So come on Yahoo – either sell Flickr to someone who cares and wants to develop and grow the service. Or pull your finger out and start spending some money on it yourself. Its definitely starting to stagnate!

Firstly, there’s a great write up over on the X= blog about why you should import and convert your photos to Adobe’s DNG format. Definitely worth a read.

Secondly, apologies for it being a little quite round here of late. I’ve been working on a new site that I will be moving all my travel photography over to in due course and it took slightly longer than anticipated. Although its not 100% complete yet it is now open to visitors and you can check it out at www.importedlight.com. Be sure to check out the galleries option which displays a world map showing where each of the photo sets were taken.

If you’ve got any comments on either using DNG (are you a fan or not?) or feedback on the new site, add them below!

In the current economy this can be expensive (unless you stand around the bookshop and read them there!). Thankfully Photojojo has come to the rescue with a list of their top 10 free online photography magazines. These are:

1. 1000 Words
2. Ahorn
3. BlueEyes
4. Burn
5. Deep Sleep
6. Flak Photo
7. Lens Culture
8. MakingRoom
9. Purpose
10. Vewd

For more information, previews and links to each of these, check out the link below.

10 Online Photography Magazines We Love (Photojojo)

To celebrate they’ve posted the top 10 articles ranked by views. The top ten are:

1. 10 Ways to Take Stunning Portraits
2. Long Exposure Photography: 15 Stunning Examples
3. How to Make Digital Photos Look Like Lomo Photography
4. 15 Stunning Images Using Blur to Portray Movement
5. 4 Easy Photoshop Techniques to Make Your Pictures Pop!
6. How to Make an Inexpensive Light Tent
7. How to Photograph Fireworks
8. Rule of Thirds
9. 11 Surefire Landscape Photography Tips
10. Wedding Photography – 21 Tips for Amateur Wedding Photographers

To read any of these articles just follow the link below.

Top 10 Articles from our First 1000 at Digital Photography School

If so, the then Digital Photography School has just posted a glossary or key jargon often encountered when dealing with digital photography. Follow the link below for the full list.

Digital Photography Jargon (DPS)

I’ve now implemented the FeedBurner WordPress plug-in, FeedSmith, so I’m hoping things will settle down a bit.

If you’re still having problems with the feeds, then feel free to contact me and I’ll look into it further.

Thankfully this is all done now and things should be roughly the same. I have taken the opportunity to add in some minor tweaks (such as moving the menu to just under the banner) but hopefully you should still be able to find everything.

There’s still a few things I need to tidy up around the edges but if you find there’s really an issue then please feel free to add a comment to this post or use the contact link above to let me know.

From just a quick review of his Flickr photostream this passion is obvious, however with the launch of notsowildlife.com he’s collected all his (really rather good) shots in one place for your viewing pleasure.

I take photos of animals that aren’t exactly wildlife and more often than not, are so friendly that they’re up close trying to sniff or lick the camera.

So if you’re a fan of sheep, dogs, donkeys, and especially cows, then I would heartily recommend you follow the link below!

Not so wild life

Although still in beta, the site lists various mini-challenges for people to try and then vote on to highlight the best shots. No prizes as far as I can see (other than the adoration of your peers) but a nicely designed site. I particularly like the fact that the camera and lens used for each shot are not shown during voting. It will be interesting to see if certain equipment performs better than others.

DP Review Challenges