This post is a part of our weekly photography inspiration series. Each Friday we showcase some of the best photographs captured by talented photographers from all around the world.

Here are latest 26 beautiful photographs for your inspiration, if you like this post feel free to share it on Twitter and Facebook.

Photography Quote of the day:

“The camera sees more than the eye, so why not make use of it?” -Edward Weston

Helvetica is one of the most popular print fonts around. A big reason for that is the clear, easy-to-read nature of the overall typeface, which can give a great look to any design without effort. It’s no surprise that so many people choose it for posters, pamphlets, album covers and calendars.

These six calendars manage to show off perfectly why typography enthusiasts spend so much time focused on this font. They also illustrate that Helvetica seemed to be a big trend last year and can give us some ideas on how to utilize the font for the coming 2012.

1. Retro Roll Calendar

I love roll calendars, and they are fairly uncommon in today’s digital world. This one uses a completely retro design that still maintains some of the modern cleanness of black on white. It gives the day, month and numerical date in Helvetica. But otherwise there are no frills to distract from the font itself.

2. EffektiveBlog Calendar

This was an interesting second-version design of a Helvetica poster with a lot of promise. There is an overlap to the letters, months and days that show in the background with the changing days. But with the black-and-white color scheme it doesn’t look messy – just complex. Since it comes in three different parts – the day, month and number each with their own calendars – you can change the hanging arrangement.

3. Wall Calendar

This one is cool, but it has some flaws. First of all, the colors really aren’t very attractive. While simple contrasts are great in typographic pieces, this time it just doesn’t work. The brownish gray color reminds me of mud, and the slightly off-white grayish of the numbers reinforces that impression pretty strongly. Plus, the numbers aren’t properly aligned, which ruins the overall design. But the actual construct is good, appearing retro and interesting.

4. Daily Tear Calendar

This was just like the EffektiveBlog calendar above in general design. The sketched letters with the black and white are identical. The difference is that this is a rip-a-day style, with the month, day and year all on a single page. It looks good, but I prefer the hanging calendar idea, which allows you to rearrange the sequence of the month, day and year. On this version, there is something a little too cluttered about the design.

5. Quick App Calendar

If you want something digital in Helvetica, this is the calendar for you. It is a mobile app that lets you set events on certain days and then tells you that you have a notification. It is quick, sleek and very simple. The interface is hideous, but if you want an iPhone app for keeping a schedule, this will get the job done.

6. Helvetica Calendar

I have seen this one on every top 10 typography list on the web, it seems. That isn’t a shock, considering how well made and cool it is. The whole design mirrors the periodic table, but presenting dates. The lettering is all in Helvetica, and it looks nice and clean. They even keep the bar color scheme.

You could find endless examples of Helvetica being used in calendars, and some of them are better than others. But there is no denying that there is a trend emerging with this font.

What are some your favorite examples of Helvetica calendars? Let us know in the comments.

Photography has its challenges like any other medium. Finding a unique voice or angle is the key in separating that work from others. In the process, many artists lose themselves to the techniques that overcompensate for lack of voice and angle.

Here are five overly used photography effects that artists should avoid.

# 5 – Long Exposure

This is seen most often with streams of water and traffic. A photographer sets up a camera near a waterfall or rapids or a busy road, sets the camera’s exposure a couple of seconds, or minutes, and waits. What happens next is this or this.

It’s a nice effect and can make someone think twice about auto insurance.

But, it’s overused. Instead of searching for a new angle on traffic, or something that captures a story, this technique is assumed to be inspiring and/orbrilliant because it’s used.

Why to Avoid It

Everyone uses it for water and traffic. There’s nothing genuine or original about it. It might sell pictures, and it might even grab a few comments, but it shows a lack of ingenuity.

Mix it up with original angles and ideas to build depth to a picture and it might work, but avoid it when possible.

#4 – Vignette

Like long-exposure, this technique has benefits to photography. Used lightly, it shifts the focus of an image, softens and/or accentuates colors, and brings out the object of the picture.

When overused, it detracts from the picture and makes it part of the focus, like this picture of a church.

Notice how the church is centered in a patch of white, almost as though someone is shining a flashlight directly on the picture. It draws attention to the church, but it also draws attention to the dark shading around the corners.

Sometimes people apply this effect so much that the corners become pure black.

Why to Avoid It

Often, a photographer or editor is trying to direct focus to the subject and heighten its detail. This can usually be achieved by a strong crop and editing to contrast and color.

This effect is so overused that it becomes the center of attention and actually detracts from the photo. It becomes the center of attention. Some people might even rave about its use.

It becomes the problem when it becomes the focus.

However, when applied correctly, a vignette is barely noticeable, unless searched for, and creates a wonderful picture.

#3 – Tilt-Shift

All overused effects earn their fame because they look cool. Tilt-shift is no different. Some people might not be familiar with this term, but it’s the act of creating a photo so that it looks like a miniature set.

If you’re curious, have a peak here and here.

Why to Avoid It

It’s becoming popular – so popular that many camera companies are including it as a feature on their cameras. It won’t be long before this technique is featured everywhere.

Like the other effects, this takes away from the true beauty and imagination that photos can bring. It also wrecks the quality.

Creating a tilt-shift in Photoshop uses a heavy dose of blurring and gradient application. It removes the extra details of a photo, heightens colors and shadows beyond realistic levels, and reduces the view of otherwise, average pictures.

#2 – Grunge

Vintage photography brings out nostalgia. It can incite deep emotions and illicit wonderful feelings. There’s nothing wrong with old photos.

However, applying a grunge overlay to the photo has become redundant.

There are decent grunge photos and then there are overdone grunge photos.

The grunge effect has merged with unimaginative photography and portraits, especially of the homeless and blue-collar workers. Its purpose is to bring out definition in and highlights of grime.

Why to Avoid It

There are few editing effects that cause as much change to a photo’s structure and composition as the grunge edit. It takes photos and forces them into an unnatural setting.

Just seeing an old barn slopping over on its sides, or a bicycle covered with cob-webs demonstrates time passed and time forgotten.

Grunge editing de-saturates a photo of colors and over-accentuates the lines and shadows through high-passes and curve adjustments.

It tries to supply character where there is no character, especially when the setting and structure don’t match.

#1 – High Dynamic Range

No effect has the potential to bring out the amazing qualities of a photo, or destroy its very existence more than HDR.

HDR was developed to bring out all the colors, shadows, and textures of a photo so that nothing was left underexposed or dull. When used appropriately, the final results are stunning.

When liberally applied, the effects are cartoonish and animated, and unapologetic.

Why to Avoid It

The first time it’s ever seen, it has a nice appeal. Maybe even the next nine times, too. After a while, it becomes old, and fast.

When used appropriately, photos are more vibrant and lively. There are already wonderful images made mind-blowing through this editing technique.

Often, it’s overdone, and the emphasis is on the odd sensation of hyperactive colors, enhanced shadow depths, and foreign lighting. It leaves nothing for the art of photography and the stories behind a single image.

Photography isn’t easy, it shouldn’t be. There should be stories behind the objects, angles to portray it, invention behind the lens, originality in the concept, and depth in the subject. What the five techniques above do is create a cheap way to be noticed.

Although there are some altered photos on this page, there’s a reason why some of the simple photos will always be more visually captivating than anything ever overly touched up.

About Guest Author: 
Hannah D. is an auto insurance specialist. Hannah has a passion for helping everyone she meets find the cheapest car insurance possible.

MachoArts readers here’s another opportunity for you to win a custom postcard printing order.  To celebrate the grand opening of their new printing facility on the East Coast, the folks at Next Day Flyers are offering three sets of custom postcards as prizes.

About Next Day Flyers:

Next Day Flyers is an online printing company offering custom printed marketing materials of all shapes and sizes. Some of their offerings include business cards, greeting cards, brochures, and posters.  They have been based out of Los Angeles for over thirteen years. With growing demand they’ve added a second printing facility in New Jersey. This new facility allows them to better serve their customer base with lower shipping costs and greatly reduced shipping times.  Faster and less expensive, that’s a wonderful added value.

Next Day Flyers has created an incredibly efficient printing process and offers quick turnaround times including next day printing, and even same day printing for when you’re really in a hurry.  Their speedy service doesn’t neglect quality. Both of their facilities incorporate a 33 check point quality control system to ensure you get your materials just the way you designed them.  Their efficiencies allow them to pass on incredible prices.  Local printers watch out…their prices are tough to beat.

The prizes:

Three sets of 100 4×6 postcards. They’ll be printed on 14 PT card stock and in full color on both sides.  (This contest is open for US residents only)

Entering this contest is simple. Share this contest on Twitter or Facebook and leave a comment at the end stating how you would use these postcards if you win. The giveaway will close on February 4, 2012. Best of luck to all!

A practical article detailing how to identify (and fix!) pages that are buried on your site.

The Problem

One way to improve your site’s performance in the search engine is to address buried pages on your site. By buried pages, I mean pages that are less frequently referenced, harder to get to, and not often linked to. These pages are viewed as less important to the search engines for – they’re not a prominent part of your site and there isn’t much internal link juice flowing to them. Sometimes this is OK – for instance, if the pages aren’t important or have little to no opportunity to bring in search traffic (e.g. a page that listed the terms and conditions for a one-time contest). Many times, however, these pages were simply overlooked when designing the site and represent an opportunity to improve rankings and grab some additional traffic from the search engines.

The Solution

First we’ll identify problem pages using a free program called Xenu Link Sleuth and Microsoft Excel (the free Open Office works too!), then I’ll give suggestions for how to create a plan to fix them. You can get Xenu Link Sleuth at http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html – while the site is a bit ugly & outdated the tool itself is invaluable.

Identifying Problem Pages

Assuming you have Xenu installed, the first step will be to crawl your site. Go to File -> Check URL…, type your homepage URL in the first field, then hit OK. Xenu will spider your site and collect all sorts of useful information that you can use to troubleshoot your site.

After crawling your site it will ask if you want to run a report – we’ll say no. Instead, we want to do File -> Export to TAB separated file… Save the file, then open that file in Excel. It should look something like this:

This is a lot more data than we need for this exercise. The next step is to distill this down into only the information we need. Delete all the columns except for Address, Type, Level, and Links In. Your spreadsheet should now look something like this:

We’re only concerned with pages on our site, yet this list shows everything – images, scripts, pages, pdfs, etc. So the next step is to sort the Type column A-Z to clump everything together by file type, then delete everything except for text/html.

After that we sort by Address A-Z to clump everything together by domain, and delete all the pages that aren’t on our site. Once this is all done, you should have a list of all the html pages on your site, their level, and links in – and nothing else.

And, just to keep things clean, we can now delete out the Type column, since we know everything that’s left is text/html:

Identifying Pages Deep in the Site

There’s two pieces of data that we’ll use to troubleshoot this specific issue. The first is page depth. Page depth is how many clicks it takes to get from your homepage to this page – your homepage itself will show 0 in this column. 1 would mean it’s one click away from the homepage (e.g. it is linked from the homepage), 2 is two clicks, meaning you have to click from the homepage to an interior page before you can get to this page.

The next step is to sort the Level column by highest to lowest. The further a page is from the homepage the harder it is to get to the page and the less important the page seems. For the most part, on small sites I aim for 2 as the max, and for a very large or ecommerce site I try to keep it within 3.

Our example site is fairly small, so I flagged the one page that was level 3:

The way to increase the page depth is to link from a page 1 less than your max page depth. For example, if you want to have 2 be your deepest page, then you need a link from the homepage (0) or a 1 page depth. A 1 click depth linking to this page will make this page a 2. If 3 is your max depth, go for a 2.

Make a list of all the URLs with a high page depth, then look at the list of pages with 1 page depth. Which ones are related? Add a link (where it makes sense) in the body content of a related page. Problem solved.

Identifying Page with Few Links In

The next piece of data we’ll look at is Links In.

Since Xenu is only crawling your site, links in is only measures internal links (links from your site to your site). For this data point we want to sort smallest to largest. This is because pages with few links coming in will have less link juice coming in, and are also viewed as less important because they’re not referenced much.

For that reason, our next step is to sort the Links In column smallest to largest.

The site with the most are going to be pages that are linked to sitewide. In this case, the number of links in will be the same as the number of pages on your site (or at least the number of pages that share the same template). I don’t have any specific guidelines on what is a good number – overall I’d try to look at what other pages on your site are getting and flag the ones that stand out. Often times on a small site I’ll see most pages being linked site wide and then 2 or 3 pages with 1-2 links. Those are the ones we want to rectify.

At the bottom of the screenshot you can see all of the pages have 32 links in – so we know this is a 32 page site. I highlighted the pages with 1-4 links in as ones with opportunities to for more internal links:

Here, the fix is the same as above. Find other pages on the site that are relevant to the page with few links, and add links in the body copy of that page. If the page is particularly important, you might want to add it to your sitewide navigation. If it’s not as important, then only link from the on-topic pages.

That’s It!

After walking through the process you should now have a list of pages that are buried in your site, as well as a plan for how and where to link to those pages from elsewhere in your site. Or, at the very least, you’ll have a reason to pat yourself on the back for having a flat site structure.

Once you’ve implemented the fixes, I recommend going through this process once more to verify that everything’s looking good. Once you get the process down double checking your site should only take 5-10 minutes.

About Guest Author:
Jason Stinnett is a search engine marketer at Internet Exposure, a Minneapolis web design agency specializing in SEO, content marketing and interactive web development.