3 Reasons Why You Should Switch To Back Button Focus

James Brandon writes,

Over the past couple of years I’ve become a huge advocate for making the switch to back button focus. It was one of the most revolutionary changes I ever made to how I take pictures. It seems like such a small thing, yet it’s such a huge difference in the way your camera works. I honestly don’t know why this isn’t the standard setting on all cameras because after getting acclimated to this setting, I honestly can’t understand the meaning for or use of the ‘shutter half way down’ method.

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Wiki Loves Monuments Photographic Competition

We have been asked to share the following communication with our members.

I would like inform and encourage you and your society to take part in the Wiki Loves Monuments photographic competition being run by Wikipedia with the support of Heritage Western Cape, the South African Resources Agency and Arts South Africa. The competition requires, simply for a photograph of a monument to be taken and uploaded to Wikipedia.  This competition is currently under way and will run throughout the month of September, with a special upload marathon taking place on Heritage Day 24 September at all museums.

There are prizes for the best provincial and runner up photograph with the winner vying for the national prize. The overall winner for South Africa will then be considered with the best from the rest of the world for the overall, global Wiki Loves Monuments prize.

Besides the prizes this competition will greatly aid in the documentation and protection of our heritage resources, so, again I urge you and you society to take part.

For more information please follow the link below
http://wikilovesmonuments.co.za/?pk_campaign=Centralnotice

Kind regards,

Troy Smuts

Heritage Officer (Archaeology)
Heritage Western Cape
Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport

ImageMagick: a simple, scriptable tool to convert, edit and compose Images

ImageMagick screenshot

There lots of software for customizing image files, but most of them are not simple and user-friendly. So if you’re looking for a simple and free customizing tool for images, check this one out. ImageMagick is a tool that can convert, edit, and even help you create image files, and supports tons of image formats including jpeg, gif, png, tiff, and many more.

I have been using ImageMagick for a number of years for various tasks, both by running the tools directly from the command line, and via scripts that I use to automate image processing tasks. I have been considering writing a script that you can use to automate resizing your images for submission to the club. Please comment and let me know if you would find this useful.

Visit freewaregenius to read more about ImageMagick

Wiki Loves Monuments launch event in Cape Town this Saturday

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Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM) is a public competition where you can photograph the monuments that symbolise our cultural heritage (buildings, statues, shipwrecks, etc.) and share the photos with the world by uploading them to Wikimedia Commons: a database of freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute and which anyone can use. In 2012, the very first South African WLM competition will take place, organised by Wikimedia ZA.

Find out more here

Faststone Image Viewer

Those of you that attended the Black & White meeting last night will have seen this application in action.

Faststone Image Viewer is a free Windows application that is not only a viewer but provides fairly extensive editing features too. It’s perfect for playing around and experimenting with different processing ideas. While the old favourite IrfanView provides similar functionality its user interface has a dated feel. Faststone Image Viewer on the other hand has a modern user interface with innovative features like hot edges in the full screen view. Moving the mouse pointer to the screen edges triggers pop up interface panels that let you interact with the application when you need to but otherwise stay out of the way, leaving the entire screen for viewing your images.

Go ahead and download the application and start discovering all its great features.