February 3, 2009

Travel Photography: What to Pack

Picking and choosing the photography gear you take with you on a trip is entirely dependent on what you want to get out of the trip and where you're going. However, here's a rough guide you can follow to pack exactly what you need for hassle free travel photography. daily dose cialis This list will cover you through rain, dark interiors and sandy beaches!

Bag It

Travel involves a lot more external factors than staying at home and venturing out without the basic infrastructure. Therefore, it's imperative to carry a proper bag that will protect your photographic gear. That basically translates to a backpack that's durable and water-resistant. One example of a bag like that is the Kata Rucksack. The main compartment has enough space for your camera, three to four lenses, speed lights and an external hard drive. Also, in the zippered top, you could keep lens cloths and cleaner, not to mention, a card reader, extra cards, a USB hub and any other small items you may want. The two zipper pockets on the outside could hold your cell phone and an iPod. Plus, the back has a secret zipper compartment that can hold your laptop, charger and a book for the road.

However, if you want to travel light and don’t need a laptop and several speed lights, you could opt for the Crumpler 7 Million Dollar Home. It holds your camera, all your lenses and its zipper top can hold all your little accessories, such as lens cloths, card reader and extra cards. Its front pouch can also hold your wallet, passport, phone and maps.

If you want to keep a lot of your photographic gear in your hotel room and only carry what you want, it's best to go with a shooter bag. Since your camera is on your shoulder, a shooter bag is good enough to hold essentials, such as an extra lens, memory cards, wallet, passport and a map.

Protective Gear

Since you're on the move all the time, it's possible you could lose small items like your memory cards. Therefore, it's important to keep all of your 1GB, 2GB and 4GB cards in one bunch in a little protective case that can be thrown into a larger bag.

Cleaning Cloth

Cleaning cloths are critical, but largely ignored by amateurs. Lens cloths are important to keep dust, sand and dirt away from your lenses. Similarly, a "puffer" will keep your mirrors and sensor spotless.

External Hard Drive

If you want to go to the next level of photography and really have enough time to take thousands of pictures, it's advisable to get an external hard drive to securely store your images.

Rain-proof Gear

You never know when it will rain and dampen your photo walks. Therefore, it's best to keep a couple of spare gallon-sized zip lock plastic bags to hold your camera and lenses. They work beautifully when you intend to keep shooting despite the inclement weather.

LED

Carrying too many flashes might not be such a good idea when you're traveling. Therefore, one weight-reducing measure would be to go for an LED (light emitting diode) to be used in low-light conditions.

Gorilla Pod

If a tripod is too cumbersome for you, try a Gorilla pod. They're easy to use when you're on the move and they don’t take up very much space.

Backups

If you're on a photo assignment, this is one extra rule you should abide by: have extra battery chargers, storage cards and two cameras. Also, it's important to buy two 4 GB memory cards instead of buying one 8 GB memory card, because the cards might crash, get stolen or go missing. Also, bring as many batteries as you can, especially if you're going to be in cold weather, because batteries tend to drain faster in the cold. Backup your photos as often as you can as well.

Card Reader/Data Cable

If you hate bringing backups, one work around is to simply shoot in RAW + JPEG and upload the JPEGs to Flickr or burn a DVD at an Internet cafe. To do that, you're going to need card readers or data cables. If you’re on a long enough trip, a card reader/data cable will help you backup all your pictures onto a DVD or upload them straight to Flickr or Gmail. So, if anything bad happens, you'll at least have a backup.

Shower Caps

If you're staying in a hotel, take the free shower cap when you travel. They're best used to cover your camera if it starts raining.

Knee Pads

This could be a rarity, but it's important nonetheless. If you happen to be doing a lot of photography from the ground upwards, you'll need some trusty knee pads. I suggest getting two of them: one for your elbows and one for your knees.

Camera to TV Cable

Of course, a camera to TV cable is important. It's useful to see the pictures you've taken without a laptop. Most hotels have a TV with an A/V input.

Battery Charger

Don’t forget to carry a battery charger so that you can charge your batteries every night.

iPod

Not only can you listen to music while you're on the move, but you can also dump the photos you’ve taken onto it, making it a spare memory card.

Conclusion

While all of the suggestions above are fairly comprehensive, it's best if you hand pick from them to go with your time, money and convenience. Happy traveling!

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Copied From Above

Here's a super quick copy trick for MS Excel!

Have you ever needed an exact copy of a cell's contents?

And I do mean exact. Even cell references won't be changed in your formulas.

Well, here's the trick: simply select the cell directly below the item to be copied daily cialis and use the Ctrl + ' (Ctrl + apostrophe) key combination.

Yep, that's all there is to it! The cell contents are duplicated and can now be moved to whatever location you choose.

And those cell references in your formula? Well, unlike the results from the usual copy/paste, this method leaves them exactly as they were.

Now, that's what I call a true copy!

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What is an e-mail header and should I pay attention to it at all?

Q:
What is an e-mail header and should I pay attention to it at all?

A:
That's an excellent question! When you hear the word header, you may start to think about a subject line. Well, that's not the case when it comes to working with e-mail. A subject line is what you see when your e-mails first arrive in your Inbox. The actual header can be found when you open up the e-mail to read it.

Now, you may not see it right away, because most of us don't have the option selected to see the header all the time. The headers can be quite lengthy, because they contain a lot of information about the sender, the receiver, etc. Here's an example of what an e-mail header looks like:

Return-Path: <g@worldstart.com>
Received: from gary (worldstart-gw.customer.amplex.net [64.246.98.197])
(authenticated)
by worldstart.com (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id l0TKe6Z26933
for <e@worldstart.com>; Mon, 29 Jan 2007 15:40:06 -0500
Message-ID: <008201c743e5$a66754b0$6401a8c0@gary>
From: "C" <g@worldstart.com>
To: "E" <e@worldstart.com>
Subject: Flash drive info
Date: Mon, 29 Jan 2007 15:40:01 -0500
X-Priority: daily cialis results 3
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2900.3028
X-Antivirus-Status: Clean
X-UIDL: [Hb"!d"S"!T_<!!ZZ[!!
X-Antivirus: AVG for E-mail 7.5.432 [268.17.14/657]
Mime-Version: 1.0

See what I mean? It can all be a bit confusing, so allow me to explain everything to you just a bit more! Your headers may look a little different than the one above, but all of the information is similar, so you'll be able to at least get the gist of what I'm talking about today.

Let's begin with the Return-Path line. If an e-mail ever has trouble going through (in the sending process), the Return-Path e-mail address is the one that should be used to try sending the e-mail again. Next is Received. That one shows all of the e-mail servers the e-mail had to go through to get to its destination (your Inbox). They usually include the server location and the IP address information. It also lists the date it was sent. That information is helpful in troubleshooting why an e-mail didn't go through in the first place.

The next line is the Message-ID and it's the assignment that was given to the e-mail from the first e-mail server. Up next, you'll see the From: option. That's simply the e-mail address of who sent the e-mail and the To: line is who the e-mail is being sent to. The Subject: line just states what the original subject line was. Again, that's what you see in your e-mail Inbox before you ever open a message. After that, you'll once again see the date the e-mail was sent.

Now, the sections after that can be a little more complicated. For any lines that start with the letter X, different things can be of importance. Here are some examples:

  • X-Priority – This is the priority of the e-mail that's been sent. Whether it was a high priority, low priority and so on, it will be indicated here by a number.
  • X-Mailer – This is simply the program that was used to send the e-mail. For example, Outlook Express.
  • X-Antivirus-Status – This lets you know if the e-mail was free (clean) or not of any viruses.
  • X-UIDL – This is what is used when e-mails are distributed through a POP3 e-mail program.
  • X-Antivirus – This just states what the sender's antivirus program is. For example, Norton, AVG, etc.

So, there are a few examples of the X factors you may see in your e-mail headers. The last thing you will see in the header is Mime-Version:. That's just a context used by MIME to help understand and display the e-mail for the recipient. It's generally just recorded by a number. For example, 1.0, as you can see above.

Now, there may be some situations where you'll want to look at an e-mail header, but honestly, most people don't pay too much attention to them. If you do however, want to check something out in a certain e-mail you get, you can do so by activating the header. To do that in Outlook Express, just right click on the message you want to see and choose Properties. Then choose the Details tab and all of the information will come up for you to see.

You can do that in other e-mail programs as well, but they're all a little different. Under the Options menu in your e-mail, just look for something about the headers. For example, Yahoo!'s mail has a whole option for the headers. You can either show a brief or full header in all of your e-mails. That will be a similar option in most other e-mail clients as well.

Like I said, it's not very often the header information will come in handy, but when you do need it, it's nice to know where it can be found!

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Lost Icons

How much do you depend on certain icons on your desktop? I'm talking about the icons from the likes of My Computer, My Documents, My Network Places and so on. Those are a few of the icons you probably use on a regular basis, so if they're not there, what are you supposed to do? Well, the best answer is, "Get them back!"

Now, there are a couple different ways you may have lost the icons. They could have disappeared when you installed a certain program or even when you upgraded to a new operating system. Either way, you need them, so let's find them again! To enable those icons and more, right click on your desktop and choose Properties. Click on the Desktop tab and hit the Customize Desktop button. Next, under the General tab, check any of the icons you want to appear on your desktop.

Once you do that, they daily cialis dose will all be returned to your desktop in full view. You can choose from the icons of My Documents, My Computer, My Network Places and Internet Explorer. Now, on the other hand, you may want to take some of those icons off your desktop. If that's the case, just uncheck them and they will then be out of your way. Easy enough, don't you think?!

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Microsoft confirms no more betas for Windows 7

January 30th, 2009

Posted by Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft officials on January 30 reiterated that there will be no public Beta 2 of Windows 7 and the next milestone will be the Release Candidate (RC) test build of the operating system.

On the “Engineering Windows 7″ blog, Windows development chief Steven Sinofsky reiterated what officials stated less plainly at the Professional Developers Conference last year: There will be just one beta of Windows 7.

Sinofsky emphasized in his new post that cialis without prescription color=”#004d99″>Microsoft is not sharing any new ship date targets for Windows 7. As has been known for a while now, Microsoft’s delivery plan for Windows 7 is to deliver a public beta, an RC (it’s not clear at this point if that will be public or private) and then release to manufacturing (RTM). The RC will be”Windows 7 as we intend to ship it,” Sinofsky blogged. More about the RC from his post:

We will continue to listen to feedback and telemetry with the focus on addressing only the most critical issues that arise. We will be very clear in communicating any changes that have a visible impact on the product. This release allows the whole ecosystem to reach a known state together and make sure that we are all ready together for the Release to Manufacturing. Once we get to RC, the whole ecosystem is in “dress rehearsal” mode for the next steps.”

Microsoft’s “official” response when asked for a ship-date target for Windows 7 remains three years after Vista’s general availability date (which was January 29, 2007). Many customers and partners believe Microsoft is continuing to target Q3 of this year as its RTM date.

For those hoping Microsoft might rush Windows 7 and release it now? Don’t hold your breath.

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