While I love creating images for my clients, I admit that the retouching phase of my workflow can be a little tedious. The key to turning a profit is minimizing the time you spend behind the computer. But you also want to turn out an amazing final product. We all struggle with finding that a fine line between perfection and “good enough no one else will notice but you.” Fortunately, Digital Anarchy has developed Beauty Box to help you accomplish practical retouching without spending hours fine tuning things for minimal improvement.

If you’re like me, you may have a drawer full of rechargeable batteries somewhere in your studio. Mine used to be unorganized and jumbled… but now, thanks to PowerPax Battery Caddies, that drawer is organized.

The battery caddies are easy to use — you can insert the batteries in either direction. I discovered that while in the field, I keep track of used batteries by re-inserting them the opposite direction. So, in the picture below, the + side is being inserted, which I did for all fully-charged batteries. Once used, I reinserted them putting the – side in first to designate those batteries need recharging. This allowed me to keep my camera bag clutter free, but also let me still know which batteries were usable.

Overall, I really enjoyed testing out the PowerPax Battery Caddies. They are a great organizational tool, and help your batteries to retain their charge from the time you charge them until you need to use them. Not to say that these devices will actually charge your batteries, but when batteries are stored loose, they can lose their charge if the contact points end up touching another battery’s contact points.

PowerPax has a range of products — I found the AA battery holders most useful (12pack, 4pack), as those are the type required by my Speedlight flashes. You can order them in a variety of colors, from black, yellow, military green, and even glow-in-the-dark “moonshine.”

I found that the glow-in-the-dark battery caddies did make it easier to find my batteries when digging through my equipment bag …especially compared to the black batter caddy. If you decide to go for a glow-in-the-dark variety, do expect to pay a few dollars more (the material costs more to produce). The 12pack AA Battery Caddy retails for $6.95, or $9.95 in moonshine; the SlimLine AA Battery Caddy (4pack) retails for $4.95 ($6.95 in moonshine). For a complete list of products and prices, please make sure to visit powerpax.net.

I admit, the primary reason I ended up with this particular phone unit was because of the cell linking capability. But, the secondary features that sold me on it were the included voicemail system, and that the main unit base has a speakerphone unit. Finally, you can even *block* calls from those annoying telemarketers that always seem to interrupt you at the worst times.

Once the handsets finish charging (initial charge time takes about seven hours), I’ll test this thing out and see how good the cell phone call functionality actually is. I’m expecting good things… hopefully I won’t be disappointed!

If you need a simple, easy-to-use gallery interface for your portfolio, you should really look into SimpleViewer… and svManager. The management interface is really easy to use, and makes it much much easier to create new galleries on the fly.

Hello, this is a friendly reminder from the ProPhoto theme that now would be a good time to back up your blog.

We recommend doing a complete backup of your blog, including the database and files, once a month. Remember, as the owner of a self-hosted WordPress blog, you’re responsible for your own data in case something goes wrong.

This email is generated automatically each month to remind you to perform a backup. If you would like to stop receiving these emails, you can turn off this feature on this page of your blog’s admin area.

When you’re relying on dynamically generated pages, such as those created by WordPress, backing up regularly is definitely a must. In the off chance your database were to become corrupted, you would have a restore point. Trying to restore a site that’s down can be a frustrating experience — so give yourself some peace of mind by setting up a schedule for backing up your data.

All the students have been learning a lot, and it’s great to see people getting more comfortable with lighting techniques that were previously outside their comfort range.

If you are looking for continuing education opportunities, you should really consider attending GLIP (or another PPA affiliate school) — you’ll receive merits for attending class, and ample opportunity to ask your instructor questions that will help you grow as a photographer.

When it was still version 2.0, I recommended ProPhotoBlogs to photographers as a nice WordPress blog theme… but they’ve made so many changes and improvements with version 3.0 that you simply can’t make a straight comparison.

New in version 3 of ProPhotoBlogs:

• Flash and HTML Gallery options
• streamlined admin interface
• TONS more options for customization

Even a geek like me appreciates the simplicity that you’ll find in version 3.0. If you want to see how it looks in action, customized, take a peek at Betsy’s Photography.

In all honesty, I was very thrilled to be able to deactivate over half of my 15 plugins that were needed to make my previous design “work.” With ProPhotoBlogs version 3.0, I’m now down to a mere 5 plugins running.

Remember, the nice folks at ProPhotoBlogs have given me a discount code to share with you (BETFIN233)… it will take $10 off your purchase.  By the way, there’s no harm in giving ProPhotoBlogs a try, as it has a 110% satisfaction guarantee.

UPDATE: Version three is compatible with WordPress 3.0

New Features

• Line Inspector
• Sync Buttons in Directory Comparion — awesome feature, this will make my back-up check even easier
• Windows 7 Support
• Email HTML reports
• Reorganized view menu
• Improved handling of empty directories
• …and much more

There are too many changes to list here, so take a peek at the change log to see everything that’s new and improved in ExamDiff Pro version 5.0.   Plus, if you purchased ExamDiff Pro after May 28, 2009 (note the year), you won’t have to pay a dime to upgrade to version 5.0!

PPA will be reorganizing the International Print Competition this upcoming year — we will be making the switch from regions to districts.  For example, instead of submitting my prints to the Mid-East States Regional Print Competition before sending them on to International Print Competition, I will now submit my prints to the Northeast District.

Below, you’ll find a map of how the states have been split up.  Canada’s provinces, Mexico, Japan, China, Korea, and Australia have also been added to various districts.  I will also list those out (as posted on the Print Competition District Map on PPA’s site).  The only crazy split, at least in my opinion, is for Michigan.  The lower peninsula is part of the Northeast District, while the upper peninsula is part of the North Central District.  I’ve been told that most UPers (upper peninsula folk) would participate in the correlating regional due to it being less of a distance than the Mid-East regional.  So I guess I understand that.

Anyhow, without further ado, here is the map of the new districts for PPA Print Competition.

PPA Print Competition Districts:

• Western District (USA: AK, CA, HI, ID, MT, NV, OR, WA, WY; Canada: AB, BC, SK)
• Southwest District (USA: AZ, AR, CO, LA, NM, OK, TX, UT; Mexico)
• North Central District (USA: IL, IN, IA, KS, MI-upper peninsula,  MN, MO, NE, ND, SD, WI; Canada: MB, ON)
• Northeast District (USA: CT, MA, ME, MI-lower peninsula, NH, NJ, NY, OH, PA, RI, VT; Canada: NB, NL, NS, PEI, QC)
• Southeast District (USA: AL, DC, DE, FL, GA, KY, MD, MS, NC, SC, TN, VA, WV)
• Asia Pacific District (Japan, China, Korea, and Austrailia; obviously not pictured on the map)

So, there you have it, a brief summary of the new PPA Districts for Print Competition, and which states (and countries) belong to which districts.

[...] The tedious way of doing this involves manually opening each folder, counting the number of files, and cross-checking creation/modification dates. With 900+ GB of data, I knew there had to be a better, more efficient way.

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ExamDiff Pro allows you to compare not only files, but even entire directories.