For all you budding foodporn snappers - how about a holiday (sorry, vacation) in Tuscany taking pics of food.

Thanks to Still Life With... for the details. You can have, in exchange for $2950, 5 nights and 4 days at il Bareto, 14 kilometers southwest of Siena in Italy. Each day an indepth look at a different aspect of food photography and cooking is covered. The course is run by Ignacio Urquiza (aka Nacho) who is an established photographer with over 60 books under his belt, including several award winning cookbooks. Details in the downloadable brochure,

Canon are to host a series of free shows aimed at photography enthusiasts focusing on using their EOS camera system ,

The shows will take be at London's Business Design Centre in Islington. There are two sessions planned - Thursday 3 August at 6.00–8.00pm, and on Saturday 5 August at 9.00am–12.00pm or 2.00–5.00pm.

Presented by various experts including celebrity and music photographer Andy Earl (www.andyearl.com) they will demonstrating how professional photographers use EOS in their work. Nature, fashion, sports and reportage photography are all to be covered and will supply tips and techniques to help amateurs extend their photographic skills. Post-shoot possibilities will be demonstrated with iPhoto and Aperture image processing applications from Apple.

With the 4th of July (and Bastille Day, and a whole host of other regional  excuses to set off large explosions in the Midsummer sky) in the offing, John Watson has a short tutorial on shooting fireworks. there are thousands of tutorials on this subject out there, but he boils it down to the essentials: use a reasonably slow ISO setting (100-200); don't forget the tripod; exposure = length of trail; aperture = brightness of trail.

Working out the timing so that the starburst is centered wherever you've aimed the tripod is left as an exercise for the reader.

I have little exposure to disposable cameras; so the brands RitzCamera, CVS and Walgreens mean absolutely nothing. Apparently though you can take these cheapy little fillies and dispose of the disposable moniker and make them reusable.

TopTenDigitalCamera supplies all the details - from which connections to make through to where to download the software to turn "a disposable 10 dollar digital camera from RitzCamera, CVS, or Walgreens into one you can use over and over, just like a normal digital camera". I just wonder though if all the trouble is actually worthwhile. The images, such as the one to the right, seem reasonable enough though.

As I was browsing through the DPGuru Flickr pool looking for a photo of the day, I came across the image to the right. I put it on my "further consideration" list, scanned down quickly to see whither it had embedded EXIF, said to myself "oh, that's nice, he's using a Canon Holga," and moved on. You can tell I hadn't had my coffee yet; it took about 45 seconds before I sat straight up in my chair, said "waiddaminute, an EOS what?!?" and clicked back.

It turns out Joachim Guanzon had the bright idea to mount a Holga lens on his 20D. He even put the directions online so the rest of can do the same. The Holga lens gets destroyed in the process, but it's probably $19.99 well spent. The real stroke of genius, as far as I'm concerned, was using a white film canister for the lens tube so you get that authentic Holga light light bleed.

Ever wanted to convert a holiday snap or stunning foreign vista into a picture that looks like a model? No me neither. But in case you hanker after model railway shots or have an odd hour to fill you too can play with photoshop to create just that type of image.

Receding Hairline: the website of a London Wannabe supplied all the instructions and tips on how to go about just such a task. It seems you need Photoshop CS or newer (I haven't tried this out myself so can't comment). Just three steps are required - gradient mask, lens blur,  and adjust curves. And thats it! Selecting the right photography is important though as Receding Hairline explains.

[found via Scoble]

 

A quick way to straighten images in photoshop.

Take one wonky image -

 

Right Click the eye dropper icon and select the measure tool

Draw a line across the image

At the top menu select Image/Rotate Canvas/Arbitrary

The adjustment should automatically pop up

You will probably have to resize the image to remove any revealed white space.

[Photo Andrew Barrow]