A report from my intrepid boss, Executive Editor Steve Weiss, who's at PhotoPlus in NYC this week: The 2006 O'Reilly Photoshop Cook-off Awards ceremony took place last night, held at Javits Center in NYC, as part of the PhotoPlus Expo. Many thanks to a long list of generous co-sponsors, who donated prizes totaling in the tens of thousands of dollars,...

There is no shortage of opinions about the fate of television - be it professionally created or user generated content (UGC.) Views range from the misguided "UGC has changed TV forever! Power to the People!" — to the pensive "TV ain't what it used to be... where's Milton Berle?... I want my MTV!" To say that the future lies...

Motion DSP's new Ikena system, announced today, looks to perform some astonishing cleanup on cruddy-looking, overcompressed videos. The initial Linux-based product (including hardware) will set you back $30,000, but this type of interpolation-based cleaning will certainly trickle down into affordable systems before too long. Check out the examples at MotionDSP.com and prepare to be amazed. I particularly like how the...

Some things are just basic, and you do them daily right? Like showering, flossing your teeth, locking your front door (unless you live in one of 'those' small towns where that's still not necessary). Right in line with this list should be backing up your hard drive regularly. It's one of those things that's just absolutely necessary, especially if you...

No matter how good your camera is, no matter how pretty you are, no matter how great your script, it's the audio that will make or break your video podcast. We can suffer through bad lighting, a poorly scripted joke, an ugly background, etc. But if we can't hear or understand you, you're podcast is going in the trash.

Recently I installed Microsoft Vista Release Candidate 2 on my MacBookPro using Paralells. So far it seems to be fast, stable and very attractive. So far I've only been running Office 2007, FrontPage 2003 and Firefox, but I plan on installing a 3D CAD program soon to really stress it out. I must say that I'm just doing this because...

A lot of people are shooting in the RAW fromat, but a lot of people are still asking why they should. I shoot almost exclusively in RAW and recently I was shooting in what Derrick Story calls "Stupid Mode", not paying any attention to my camer's settings and RAW saved me. I think this shot really demonstrates the power of...

While I was packing for my recent trip to Ireland, I mentioned to Derrick Story that I had three fully charged (proprietary) batteries ready for my Canon point-and-shoot. When he asked if I'd packed my charger, I said I thought that three batteries should be enough, but he insisted I take it. (His words, I believe were, "Wrongo.") I'm writing...

Here's a couple of images from the CD my dear old Dad is making of the plants in the Coffs Harbour Botanical garden, for release next month. The Wombat Berry is the sole member of the genus. Also, here is perhaps the only photo on the internet of the fruit of the Grease Nut Tree, which rejoices in the name...

O'Reilly author Stephen Johnson did a lively, compelling presentation based on his book Stephen Johnson on Digital Photography Tuesday night at the SFDIG meeting. At the outset, Steve told the audience of 100 or so photographer-types he was going to base his two-hour talk on the book. (I admitted to Steve later that this made me a little anxious...