Mind Your Own Business

No Comments

It’s been said the most important thing to learn is how to learn.

Most people will do a Web search when they need to learn something because it’s fast and free. But search engines offer disconnected, unverified information in random order. The searcher has to know how to interpret and verify the found information. They have to know how to learn.

The purpose of search engines is to offer shortcuts to what you *might* want to know. This is okay when you just want some quick information but it’s usually not good enough when you want to gain knowledge.

By making it easy, search engines don’t really help us learn. Search engines tell us what we asked for and not necessarily what we need to know. Search results can make you think you’ve learned something when, in fact, you haven’t (link to PDF). There’s a difference between knowing a few facts and actually learning something.
Continue reading →

Fixing the Payfirma for WooCommerce Plugin

No Comments

This post is only for those who use WooCommerce as their eCommerce platform and Payfirma as their credit card processor. This means that 99.9999% of you can stop reading right now.

The Payfirma plugin (currently version 2.6) for WooCommerce isn’t fully compatible with WooCommerce 3.x and Payfirma has said it has no plans to update it. So if you’re tired of the plugin generating a ton of php errors, here’s the solution that will take just a couple minutes of your time.

In the Payfirma_Woo_Gateway plugin, go to class > class.payfirma.php and scroll down to about line 508. Look for the block of code that reads:
Continue reading →

Fixing A Hole

1 Comment

Photographers, do you recognize this little thing:

Hint #1: It costs about 40 cents.

Hint #2: If it breaks, it can prevent you from properly using your expensive long lens.
Continue reading →

Pelican Case Wheel Replacement

No Comments

If you don’t have a wheeled Pelican case then skip this post.

There are a lot of online instructions for replacing the wheels on a newer Pelican case, usually the 1510 model. But there’s no information for any of the original Pelican cases that came with a pair of one-piece, hard plastic wheels.

Here are some simple instructions for replacing the wheels on an original 1510 case and original 1650 case. Replacing the wheels on other Pelicans should be similar since all original wheeled cases were designed similarly. Just be sure you have the correct wheel size. Most inline skate wheels, skateboard wheels and luggage wheels use the same 22mm diameter x 7mm thick bearing size (more on all this in a moment).
Continue reading →

Reach for the Top

No Comments

A job search engine company published its annual list of top Canadian employers. A printed version was inserted in today’s The Globe and Mail newspaper.

Not all of the selected top employers were profiled in the (online and printed) magazine. But by some strange coincidence, every profiled company had an ad in the publication and, as of today’s date, 33 of the 38 profiled companies had employment ads listed on that job search engine.

If you flip through the magazine, you can tell which companies hired professional photographers and which decided to go with, uh, inexperienced photographers.

You will notice an awful lot of group pictures showing people doing nothing but standing or sitting around. There are also a number of photos that most professional photographers would’ve deleted. To be fair, there is one good group photo and several other acceptable images.
Continue reading →

Composition Wise and Whys

No Comments

There are many online photography tutorials offering technical tips and advice. Much of this information is simplistic and superficial.

For example, when doing a portrait, they’ll tell you not to have harsh shadows on the subject’s face. The problem with information like this is that it isn’t scalable. It’s more beneficial to have information that you can use in any type of photography no matter what your subject matter.

Why do people look at pictures and how do they look at pictures? If you can answer these two questions then you can scale this information across any type of photography.

This post is long but the concepts are simple. Spoiler alert: this isn’t really about photography but rather it’s about human nature and how we perceive things around us.
Continue reading →

Selfie Science

1 Comment

A scientific study released a few days ago confirmed what every portrait photographer has known forever:

If you take a picture of someone from very close up, it will distort their facial features.

Sadly this fact is not well known by people who take selfies which apparently is the number one cause of distorted faces. Some of these folks are going to plastic surgeons and requesting surgery to correct their distorted facial appearance.

Boris Paskhover, an assistant professor at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School’s Department of Otolaryngology who specializes in facial plastic and reconstructive surgery, frequently was shown selfies as examples of why patients were requesting surgery to make their noses smaller.

Researchers have named this horrible disfiguring issue as . . . wait for it . . . “The Selfie Effect.”

Dr. Boris Paskhover worked with the computer science department at Stanford University to develop a mathematic model to explain why noses look bigger when photographed close up.

Their mathematic model determined that most selfies are shot from a distances of about 12 inches which makes a nose look 30% wider. But, and here’s modern science in action, if a photo is shot from at least five feet away then the nose will look normal.

The researchers concluded that selfies are a public health issue. So please, for the sake of your health, hire a professional portrait photographer especially for your business headshots and other important portraits. Your nose will thank you.

 

css.php