Basic Photography

The book I read to research this post was Basics Of Photography by Irene Sheerow which is a very good book that I bought from kindle. This book is only around 30 pages so is quite short. This is a basic guide to photography and making money from your photos. There is also websites like twitter, flickr and instagram where you can display your work. It generally is best to specialize in one aspect of photography ie fashion. You can also display your work in a blog. There is a wide variety of types of cameras. Many use a camera phone for normal use like when out. When you are posing for photos women should keep hair away from their face and can sometimes play with it to get a nice effect. You can tilt the head slightly and have the subject slightly off the centre of the picture. Men can part there legs slightly and women can cross their ankles for full length shots. If you cross your arms it looks defensive. Men can put their weight on the front foot and women on the back foot. This gives men a more masculine appearance and women a more feminine one. This is a very interesting book I do recommend. I certainly enjoyed it and did learn a lot from it. A telephoto lens if used wrongly can decrease pixels in image and you should consider just coming in a bit closer if possible to get the subject.

Writing About Food

The book I read to research this post was How To Write About Food by SJ Sebellin-Ross which is a very good book that I bought from kindle. This book is written by a published food writer and critic and covers the whole gamut of food writing from blogging to writing articles for food publications. One thing SJ stresses is you should always be paid for any writing you do after all they pay the janitor. People in the know are aware that when writing for a publication you sell the idea to the editor then write the article not the other way around. For all you know the editor might have certain requirements and ideas for the article which you might have to follow. Especially for a larger article you must plan what you are going to write which means jotting down some notes. You should also summarize in one sentence what the article is about. If you need experts to interview there is http://expertclick.com where they have a database of experts in any given field. Alternatively you can do a search in Google. This book is around 100 pages so is fairly short. If you have a blog you should look for an angle like local restaurant reviews or indian cuisine that you are going to write about. This will help attract people to your blog as they will hopefully see you as an expert in a niche field although don’t pick so narrow a niche you have trouble finding what to write. Ideally if you are doing any writing on food you are best off finding a niche you can become an expert in. I did thoroughly enjoy reading this book and would recommend it.

Budget Astrophotography

The book I read to research this post was Budget Astrophotography by William Becker which is a very good book that I bought from kindle. This book has lots of useful information but is only 49 pages and I think is priced at around £6.00 which seems a bit steep to me. I think the author should have made the effort to write at least 100 pages. I have to admit though a lot of the books on astrophotography are too pricey. I have a review of another book called Astrophotography which you might find interesting at http://claireabella29.com. Anyway this book does focus on doing astrophotography on a budget so in that regard does a good job. The author does suggest a DSLR which will handle the long exposures often of at least 30 seconds and should give good results unlike a compact camera. He does suggest using a 2x barlow lens & also you can buy adaptors for connecting them to a telescope. If you buy a heavy duty telescope capable of seeing other galaxies and nebulae you are looking at around $2,000 so that is probably too expensive. You probably have to make do with the Milky Way and planets. Having said don’t buy a christmas junk scope as they call the cheapest ones. You can use a webcam which there are instructions for modifying to either attach to a telescope or use with astronomy software like Registax & Astroart. Typically your camera will be set to a shutter speed of 30 seconds, an ISO of 1,600, an f-stop as low as possible and a distance rating of at least 200 yards. The stars often become distorted with a wide angle lens although that might be good for special effects. I did enjoy reading this book and will do more posts on this subject.

Robot Building

The book I read to research this post was Robot Building For Dummies by Nancy Stevenson, which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. Just like computers have gone from being something strictly for hobbyists in the 70’s to the mainstream nowadays, robots are set to do the same in the near future. At the moment robots tend to be a bit limited in what they can do, but especially for the more common serious hobby ones you often download controlling programs from the web and transfer them to the robot. Part of the A+ exam is that you have to control a simple robotic arm or similar from a computer. An important point they make is that you must read the instructions even if construction seems simple as there can easily be something important you miss out and it won’t work. Often you need to things like wires and it’s important the solder melts properly to make a proper connection. They look at constructing a robot called Soccer Jr. which is a basic one and one called Arobot which is a more expensive and complex one. They also look at adding things like temperature and motion sensors. A couple of good robot products website is http://robotstore.com & http://jameco.com. It’s interesting to note the military are heavily into developing robot technology and drones and other robots have actively been used for surveillance in Afghanistan. Many people like to build a robot and a perspex semi circular cover on it which looks good but hinders access if it breaks down. Of course having robot wars where robots smash each other up in a duel is big business and there are even tv programmes devoted to this. I did read in another book that it will be possible to buy a computer that will be able to match the processing power of the human brain by 2030 which is very exciting and gives you an idea of what can be achieved with robots. In all probability we will have robot assistants to do things like housework by then. I did really enjoy this book and there are shopping chains like Radio Shack & Maplins that carry extensive lines of robot project parts. At least to start off with you are probably best off assembling a kit rather than designing and building one from scratch.