• Make sure everyone is smiling and pretending to be happy before taking the picture. Candid photography? Never heard of it.

• Don’t take photos of people; they don’t want you to take their photos anyway. Just stick to rocks and plants.

• Make your rocks blurry and your flowers over-exposed. Then claim it’s art.

• Pump up the saturation and contrast on that rose, so it’s just (255,0,0) all over. Then everyone will appreciate the beauty.

• Print your photos, then scan the prints at 600 pixels per inch. Now you have 48 megapixels!

• Never switch from auto mode. Only scary people use aperture priority. Manual mode is for the fully insane.

• Or, switch to manual mode, and refuse to use auto-focus. The camera doesn’t know how to focus. It’s just blocking your artistic vision.

• Always talk about your artistic vision, and the wonderful community of photographers your a part of. Maybe people will start believing it.

• Say a 12 megapixel camera is 20% better than a 10 megapixel camera.

• Buy a $2000 DSLR, then stick a cheap lens on it.

• Set your new $2000 camera down to go to the bathroom. Follow the advice in 10 Ways to Get Your Camera Stolen. Why would anyone want a camera?

• Refuse to use anything but a prime lens. Those zoom lenses are too modern and convenient. They’re not sharp enough either. It’s settled. You’re not a real photographer if you use a zoom lens.

• Constantly talk about “real photographers” versus the non-real photographers that are pervading your art form. Make sure some reference to film vs. digital is included.

• Say that film is useless, because digital is magical and does everything.

• Say that digital is useless, because film is the only true photographic medium.

• Assume you should always keep your camera zoomed out, …

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Hello again. I’m back from my exciting four-day vacation. I stayed around Palm Beach for three days with my aunt, uncle, cousin, and grandma. It was 200 miles down there. We had a lot of fun, my aunt cooked great food, there was a cool storm, and we played volleyball in the pool. Afterward, I stayed with my Grandma for Sunday and part of Monday, and my Dad brought me home three hours ago. I’ve been unpacking and clearing out emails.

Here’s some photos. I won’t show family because they don’t want to be shown.

The portrait is me. I’ll be cooking up some edited versions which you’ll see over the next few days. It was hard not having Internet for four days; no computers or Wi-Fi with the family, and all the neighbors had passwords on their networks. I’m glad to be back working on the mission here. I wrote two photography articles I’ll be polishing up tomorrow.

This site and the thripp.com network chugged along fine while I was gone. 2000 unique visitors across both. The HTML caching + gzip compression is working great. I had about 60 new users, but 30 were blatant spam by the same person, which I deleted on the spot. Two-thirds of the rest are non-blatant spam, but I don’t mind that.

The total number of thripp.com blogs is 115, and the MySQL database is up to 40MB. Still working fine on SYN shared Hosting, fortunately. I’ve used 4GB of bandwidth in my 10 days with them. I have 120GB/month, so I’m at 10% capacity. Most of the bandwidth is from my …

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