Post processing for digital photography

I am sure many purists and photographers used to film, new to digital would argue that a photo processed on a computer is not the original photo. Some may even go as far as exclude it from any kind of competition, or mark it off as art and not photography.

I know this is a discussion causing huge amounts of debate in the photography community. I have very strong feelings about this.

In my mind, there are two basic kind of changes you can make to a photo. The first is to try and enhance it until it resembles the image you saw most closely. The second is to artistically change it to represent the image you felt most closely.

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Do you need an SLR??

Most people believe that the better your equipment - the better the photos will be that you can take. I have heard many times before comments such as "Wow - your camera takes amazing pictures". I am a firm believer that your equipment enables you to have more control and achieve some effects otherwise difficult or impossible to achieve - but it does not define how good photographs you can take. That is up to you - and only you. To see why I say this, look here...

Bad Practise: Sending back read only HTML form fields

If you had ever written HTML pages sending back form data to a backend server, you must have come across the need to sometimes restrict the user from changing a value - therefore you used a read only form field. This can cause serious trouble...

As an example, consider a system that displays user profile information for editing. Lets say you have a combobox containing roles, and only if you have a higher privilege than the user's record you are trying to amend may you change the field's value. It is nice to display it this way since it takes care of three aspects - firstly, the user's role is displayed (which is nice), secondly if the user editing the record has lower privileges then it is as simple as making the field read only to disable any value changes, and thirdly if the user editing the record has higher privileges then just do not set the readonly flag.

Considering good programming practises, you would normally have one backing object representing the user's profile as an object. This includes the role value. For displaying the record, it is passed to the HTML page (more specifically - the scripting language such as JSP/ASP/PHP/etc) for display. Once the user made all the required changes, all the data is bound to the form backing object and written to the database.

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Mac OS X Project Management Software

I was looking for some years now for a Microsoft Project 2000 compatible project management application for Mac OS X, which can import MPX and MPP files and also export data in at least MPX format.

So I was delighted to discover this neat application. Try it out!

Zapping Earth

Do you have a delinquent child? Are you frustrated with life? Then you'll enjoy this.