Black Friday is the day following Thanksgiving Day in the United States, traditionally the beginning of the Christmas shopping season. On this day, most major retailers open extremely early, often at 4 a.m., or earlier, and offer promotional sales to kick off the shopping season. (learn more at Wikipedia)

This coming Friday is Black Friday and Craft&Vision, publishers of photographic ebooks, are joining in with their own special offer. Their already inexpensive books will be available at considerable discounts. An email from them said,

Special Offer this Friday Only
On Friday, November 25th at 12:00am PST we’ll be updating our website and launching a 24-hour promotion that will give you 50% off our new PDF eBook bundles, collections, and gift coupons.

We’ve packaged up a whole bunch of eBooks into discounted bundles that we know you’ll love – such as Ten and Ten More, The Inspired Eye 1-2-3, Chasing the Look and Drawing the Eye, Making Light 1-2, All Black & White. There will also be a few select collections available like The Print & The Process Collection and author packages.

And to help you with your gift-giving, we’ll have a $40 Gift Coupon that you can purchase for just $20!

The Deal
The 50% discount codes will be distributed by email and through our social networks. This promotion will expire November 25th at 11:59pm PST and are for PDF purchases only.

Happy Thanksgiving!
– The Craft & Vision Team

So make sure you visit their web site and sign up for email updates (at the bottom of the page) or subscribe to their Facebook page or Twitter stream so you won’t miss out when they send out the discount codes on Friday.

CJ Chilvers has published his manifesto as an ebook and started a blog under the title A Lesser Photographer. He says,

Photographers are being bombarded by content that has only further removed them from their creativity (and money). They’re aching for something to cut through the nonsense and remind them of why they fell in love with photography in the first place.

This is my manifesto; universal truths I’ve learned since selling off my fancy cameras and challenging myself to maximize my creativity by minimizing everything else.

If you find yourself nodding in agreement with these principles, I’m relying on you to pass the manifesto along to everyone you know who loves photography!

Download the ebook, then visit the blog.

Harry, a member from France suggested that members may be interested in this information blogged by CreativePro.

CreativeLive is offering a three-day online workshop that takes photographers through the steps of building a customized website using WordPress. Amazingly, the entire course is free.

WordPress is the same engine that runs our club web site.

Read the full article

A panoramic photo is capable of showing a 360° angle-of-view all around. Such an image is difficult to print and see as a whole due to its extreme aspect-ratio. One way to show everything at once is to transform the panorama into a wee planet. This creates an unusually interesting image that looks like a small planet shot from above using a fisheye lens.

Read the full article

A site I just discovered that has much useful information laid out nicely by category. Visit the page at exposureguide.com or follow their Twitter account @ExposureGuide.