Updated 11-5-2001

Meryl's Favorite Resources:

1. Digital Camera info

Magazine: PEI [Photo Electronic Imaging] (www.peimag.com). This magazine publishes a delightful array of imaginative, unexpected, images that were produced by professionals. It is a great source for innovative ideas. There are often articles on how the artist produced the digital composites, design tips, occasional product reviews. It is a pleasure to read through it. It provides guidance for trying new techniques.

Magazine: Digital Photo (www.digitalphoto.com) is much more oriented toward "product reviews" than PEI. It does a good job of providing the specs on each camera or digital accessory. I wish that it would provide a chart, like PC Mag, comparing the features on comparable-level cameras,--but then that might make the buying process too easy, and upset some vendors. The magazine does contain a wide range of digital-image related articles, from the simple and cutesy to the more technical. Both magazines are thin and easy to make my way through them.

Some favorite web sites:

For reference information:

Steve's Digicam's This has just about everything from a guide to digital photography, articles from over 300 publications, product news and reviews, links to dealers' web sites, a list of digital camera-oriented web sites to a discussion board. Through Steve's Digicam web site, I discovered an easier way than Nikon's method to upgrade the firmware inside my Nikon Coolpix from a tip posted on this web site. It is a site that is definitely worth repeated visits.

http://www.photo.net/ is the website of Phil Greenspun [http://philip.greenspun.com/] who graduated from MIT and teaches Computer Science. He has published a book on photography at his web site. It is printable, but over 300 pages long. He has product reviews that are honest and thorough, chat rooms, a place to post your photo/s and have it/them reviewed, etc. When I attended one of his (free) all-day workshops at CalTech, I found his presentation a bit scattered but thoroughly knowledgeable, which is the way I might characterize his web site as well.

http://www.computer-darkroom.com has Photoshop essays and tutorials, and several galleries of photos. It takes a while to load.

http://www.saycheese.com is an online (printable) book about digital (or regular, for that matter) photography. The first part is basic stuff, but it gets middle-range tougher as it progresses. Its table of contents allows you to choose what you want to read.

http://www.bh-video.com/ B & H Photo in New York sells everything under the sun in terms of photo, video and audio. It also has a "Photo School on the Web" page at http://bhphotovideo.webphotoschool.com/

Miscellaneous "other photography" sites:
http://www.411photography.com/

For product reviews and discussion forum try Digital Photography Review: http://www.dpreview.com/

For chatroom discussion of photos you share or others shared with you:

Shuttercity.com: as their banner says, "Shoot, upload and invite your friends to view." The level of quality is surprisingly good, and professional photographers often tune in and offer their opinions and advise, not all of whom agree, which makes it even more interesting. I sometimes do a search on the name of someone who had made an interesting comment (i.e. I felt I learned something new), and it turns out that the commentator has his/her own web site, with some pretty interesting pictures on it. It can become a time sink, so use it only when you have time.

http://www.photoforum.com is another forum for sharing photos and giving/receiving suggestions

http://www.photoforum.com is also a photo forum/chat room.

http://www.megapixel.net/cgi-bin/fs_loader.pl?p=http%3A//www.megapixel.net/html/articles/macrogallery-1101-01.html
This web site has dazzling macro photos. Gorgeous stuff.

http://www.leppinstitute.com/ George Lepp and his staff are in Los Osos.

http://www.natureimages.com/ has some very nice nature shots.

For the guys in the club who remember the glamor photography of the 50'ies (plus and minus), Peter Gowland is in his 80'ies and living in Santa Monica. His grandchildren put up a nice web site. http://www.petergowland.com/

2. Genealogy [one of the side wanderings of the discussion]

The Mother of All Genealogy web sites is: http://www.cyndislist.com/ What you don't find there, you might find by using some of the 107,750 links to other genealogy URL's.

Software and web site: Family Tree Maker has a web site that will tell you whether they have information about one of your ancestors, and just enough to let you know whether he/she might be in your family line, but they really want to sell you their cd's of data. You can go to the local genealogical society of Santa Barbara where they have the complete set of cd's if you find something that is of interest to you.

The Family Tree Maker program is simple and easy. The manual is well-done. The program prints out a nice array of charts and text. The program does not handle "interbreeding" very well,--I have a couple of ancestors who married into the same family name. The program goes a little bit crazy. Also, it is not very good at generations that go beyond Zero BC. The program that is superior, but more difficult to use, is called "Generations." Btw: most genealogy programs do have file translators that will save a copy as a "gedcom" (*.ged) file format established by the Mormon church. People can save a copy of their work in the gedcom format and email it to someone with a different genealogy program that opens the gedcom and saves it in its native format so that they can incorporate the data, if they want to.