10 Beach Photography Tips

Just in time for my vacay

Digital Photo School:

Here in Australia we love to hit the beach.

We’re one big island and most of our population is scattered along the coast line so the beach is a natural place for us to go both on day trips and longer holidays.

Beaches present digital camera owners with a number of wonderful opportunities as they are places of natural beauty, color and interesting light. However they also present a variety of challenges including camera damage, privacy issues and making large open spaces interesting.

While it’s not really beach going weather at present here in my part of the world I know that many readers of this site are getting close to Summer and beach photography will be high on the agenda of many (I’m so jealous).

Here are 10 tips for when you head to the beach with your digital camera next…

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OC Team Italy takes P4 to 8.18GHz

Engadget:

“Nah, 8,180MHz can’t hold a candle to 500GHz, but on the long road of overclocking Intel’s Pentium 4 where there is an increasingly brief amount of time available to brag before being trumped, the zany Italians have crowned themselves champs once more. Not content with just hitting 8GHz
with a “Cedar Mill” Pentium 4 631, OC Team Italy managed to push that
very model an additional 179MHz by tweaking the FSB. The final results
yielded a 173-percent overclock, and while this here setup may run
stable for a continued period if placed at the depths of Antarctica, we
can’t imagine this being too feasible for the common man to replicate
and actually utilize.”

Apple TV gets 160GB disk… and YouTube too

Engadget:

“That’s right, Google’s YouTube is coming to Steve’s little AppleTV “hobby” as he described it during his gig at D.
The little treat Steve left out at the show is a new build-to-order
160GB disk; 4x the original capacity offered by Apple at launch. Of
course both of these hacks
were already available for you DIYers. Still, it’s always good to get
it via official channels, eh? The new AppleTV with beefier hard disk
will be available tomorrow for $399 while the free YouTube update will
be available in mid-June.”

Apple offers free iTunes U content

iLounge: “Apple has announced the launch of iTunes U, a new dedicated area of the
iTunes Store offering free content from top US colleges and
universities, including Stanford, UC Berkley, Duke, and MIT. The
content includes course lectures, language lessons, lab demonstrations,
sports highlights, and campus tours. “iTunes U makes it easy for anyone
to access amazing educational material from many of the country’s most
respected colleges and universities,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice
president of iTunes. “Education is a lifelong pursuit and we’re pleased
to give everyone the ability to download lectures, speeches and other
academic content for free.” Stanford Provost John Etchemendy added,
“From its earliest days, Stanford has sought to serve the public by
sharing the knowledge generated by our faculty and students. Our
partnership with Apple and iTunes U provides a creative and innovative
way to engage millions of people with our teaching, learning and
research and share the experience of intellectual exploration and
discovery that defines our university.”

Apple releases iTunes 7.2, with iTunes Plus DRM-free music

Could this be the beginning of the end of DRM? I hope so….

iLounge:

“In advance of Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ appearance at the D: All Things Digital Conference tomorrow in Carlsbad, California, Apple has released iTunes 7.2,
an upgrade to its free digital media management software. Version 7.2
adds one feature—previously-announced support for the downloading of
DRM-free songs, now dubbed “iTunes Plus,” which as noted by Apple in
iTunes Help “have no usage restrictions and feature higher-quality
recording.” Initially spearheaded by the music label EMI, but also
backed by independent labels, the songs sell for $1.29 each and use
256Kbps AAC encoding for superior sound quality than standard iTunes
Store music downloads.

As of press time, iTunes Plus songs are not yet available for
download in the iTunes Store. However, according to Apple, “[t]he first
time you buy an iTunes Plus song, you specify whether to make all
future purchases iTunes Plus versions (when available). … If you
already have iTunes Store purchases that are now available as iTunes
Plus downloads, you may upgrade your existing purchases.” Both
features, and changes thereto, can be accessed through your account at
the iTunes Store.”

Microsoft Surface - surface and gesture based computing lands

The video of this is frikkin sweet…

Engadget:

Over the years we’ve seen plenty of surface and gestural interface
computing systems and prototypes, but nothing mass-market — nothing
consumable, if you will. Microsoft aims to change all that with
Surface, its first foray into surface / gestural interfaces;
arriving in the form of a 30-inch table-like display, Microsoft
envisions its eventual uses as pervasive as imaginable, like ordering
beverages from your restaurant table and silently scanning your wine
bottle’s RFID tag to automagically present information on the vineyard
and vintage. Sure, some of it’s pretty pie in the sky, but Microsoft is
touting Surface’s multi-touch, multi-user interface, object recognition
and gestural interaction, and it’s out to dispel myths of vaporware
with limited 2007 rollouts in T-Mobile stores, Starwood hotels, and
even Harrah’s in Vegas.

As for the consumer end of things, it’s
estimated that we’re still a number of years out on the technology (for
starters these Surface units are estimated to cost up to ten thousand
bucks). Pretty steep for what ultimately amounts to being an underbelly
projector with digital cameras that track surface interaction (all of
which running on a stock 1GHz Vista box), but the focus of any nascent
technology is never price, it’s function.

P.S. -If you’re feeling this thing check out the 18 minute demo over at Microsoft’s On10.

Google Maps adds Street View

Holy frak is this awesome….look at the googlemap line and arrows going down the actual street! And it rotates! They need to add more locations ASAP!

Lifehacker:

Google Maps adds a new perspective to the urban landscape: Street
View lets you navigate down the streets of big cities like New York,
Denver, Miami, Las Vegas and San Francisco. Go to Google Maps and hit
the “Street View” button to check it out. (Amazon’s A9 was the first to release this kind of street-level mapping almost 2 years ago, and then Microsoft followed suit last year.) —Gina Trapani

Google Maps, now with Street View

Unreal Tournament 3 release date revealed!

w00t!

Digg: “For those of you gamers who’ve been patiently waiting to get your hands
on Epic’s upcoming frag-fest, Unreal Tournament 3, industry insiders
are now stating a September 3rd release for the US and September 28 for
Europe.”

How To: Close chip bags without the clip

Lifehacker: “If you ran out of clips to close all those half-eaten bags of chips
leftover from the weekend barbecue, Instructables demonstrates a useful
chip-clip-no-more bag fold. Hit the video to see it done, and the link
for the step by step. —Gina Trapani

The End of the Chip Clip [Instructables]

Too Sexy For World Of Warcraft

Neatorama:

A mashup of the multiplayer online game World Of Warcraft and the
early 90’s song “I’m Too Sexy”, by the British pop band Right Said Fred.