Written by rygood

I’m pretty much addicted to photography. Methods, gear, news, you name it. It really is kinda scary. To keep my addiction in check when I’m not shooting or shopping, I need a steady flow of photo content to keep the shakes and withdrawl symptoms from popping up so I put together a list of what i consider to be some of the best photo-related content out there. Read on for more photo link porn than you can shake a stick at including 25 blogs, 20 AMAZING photographers, and some other fun stuff that will make those days you feel stuck at your desk wishing you were shooting go a bit smoother…

Photography Related Blogs

This makes up only about a quarter of everything I’m subscribed to in my Google Reader and are in no particular order. I tried to pick a well-rounded batch of sites to share and had to limit it somehow and it wasn’t easy. If you aren’t listed here, let me know in the comments!

1. A Photo Editor Blog by Rob Haggart, the former Director of Photography for Men’s Journal and Outside Magazine.
2. Digital Photography SchoolJust as the name implies… a blog by prominent blogger Darren Rowse focusing on the basics of Digital Photography.
3. Epic EditsA creation of Brian Auer, the most dedicated blogger I know.
4. f/1.0Photography by Ed Zawadzki. He REALLY loves prime lenses
5. Flickr Blog DO I even need to say? Keps me up-to-date with news from the best photo sharing site in the world.
6. Gizmodo Digital Camera NewsBigtime gadget blog, this is a direct link to their camera news feed… I really only use them for release news and they sometimes have and link to good hands-on reviews.
7. EngadgetAlong with Gizmodo, these two usually break the big camera stories first… which makes them worth mentioning.
8. L7 FotoA general photography blog, great tips and reviews.
9. Magnum Photos BlogNo this isn’t photos of Zoolander, its the blog of the legendary Magnum Photos Agency. If you don’t know what Magnum is, you should.
10. PhotowalkingTrevor Carpenter’s world of photowalking, a craze thats seems to be taking the community by storm.
11. PhotopreneurGreat content, mostly photo-business related.
12. Strobist If someone says the words ‘photography blog’ Strobist is probably the first name to come up. Amazng lighting tips and tricks.
13. What’s The Jackanory?The blog of Andrew Hetherington, editorial and commercial photographer from Dublin Ireland living in New York City
14. Thomas HawkBig name in the community and photowalking legend.
15. Rebekka Probably the most popular photographer on flickr, She is from Iceland and shoots AMAZING things.
16. Photoshop InsiderThe reigning king of Photoshop.. why? He is the best selling Photoshop book author ever, president of the NAPP an awesome photographer and retoucher and much more.
17. PhotoDotoPublished b the same guy who created BigHugeLabs, with well-rounded, fun content.
18. Jim Goldstein Ridiculous landscape photographer and blogger.
19. Photo Critic Another photography blog with great, well rounded content.
20. Stuck in CustomsProbably thebest known HDR artist out there. He creates amazing, artistic HDR creations.
21. Photography Bay My favorite site for photography rumors.
22. O’Reilly Digital Media Blogs Lots of blogs from lots of peeps, has great Photoshop and Lightroom content.
23. John Nack on Adobe Senior Product Manager for Adobe Photoshop. He knows his stuff.
24. Chase Jarvis Ridiculous pro photographer, breaking down the common barriers put in place by lots of pros, and sharing his mojo on his blog.
25. PDN PulseThe blog of Photo District News.

Amazing Photographer Portfolios

This list, in no particular order, makes up 20 of my favorite photographer portfolios out of about 60 I have bookmarked. Each and every one is frikkin ridiculous and I’m leaving out descriptions becasue the images speak for themselves.

1. Michael Muller
2. Eric Ryan Anderson
3. Kris Krug
4. Patrick Hoelck
5. Zach Gold
6. Vincent Laforet
7. Brook Pifer
8. Jeremy Cowart
9. Alberto Oviedo
10. Eoloperfido
11. Joey Lawrence
12. Philip Toledano
13. Matt Stuart
14. Dave Hill
15. Mareen Fishinger
16. Jill Greenberg
17. Branislav Kropilak
18. James Nachtwey
19. Andrew Zuckerman
20. Chris Jordan

Photography News and Post Aggregators

If you don’t have the time to subscribe to hundreds of sites, the sites below can keep you up to date on all the happenings in the photo world.

1. Photography VoterKinda like digg for photography. Post a story, and vote it up to the top.
2. Imaging InsiderHandpicked photography stories from around the web.
3. PicUrls Similar to popurls, aggregates photo content from all kinds fo different sources
4. AphlogPretty much the same as picurls, but with varying content.
5. 1001 Noisy Cameras Digital Camera NewsTons and tons of news, reviews and photo links from just about everywhere.

Photo News & Reviews

They aren’t blogs but they offer great photography related news and educational content.

1. PopPhoto Home of the magazines Popular Photography, American Photo and more. Dig in a bit and find great reviews, blogs and news.
2. The Digital PicturePut simply, the best Canon equipment review site by far. This guy goes into more detail and testing than i thought possible.
3. Photo.net Kinda old and decrepit at this point, but worth a mention because it has a ton of great content if you dig a little.
4. Rob Galbraith Another Canon site, Rob Galbraith has been arond for years and is often the first to get new Canon news.
5. Ken RockwellAnother old school photography ste. It has a jenky design but TONS of great information, including lots and lots of Nikon reviews.

Goodies for Flickr

I’m pretty much obsessed with flickr and these are some of my favorite toys that make it even better.

1. Big Huge Labs The original flickr goodies site, used by millions of flickr users worldwide.
2. Slideoo My favorite flickr slideshow widget.
3. Flickr Leech Ajaxy flickr exploration site, makes browsing images a fast, seamless process.
4. Pic LensSweet Firefox add-on that turns photo browsing into a full screen immersive experience. You really have to try it to understand.
5. Flickr RssMy favorite wordpress plugin for Flickr, allows you to ass your flickr stream to any wordpress blog.

Phew! That was a lot of clicking… I apologize if I’ve detroyed your productivity for the day, or caused arthritis in your mouse-finger… we both know it was worth it. Now it’s your turn. If you have your own site to share, or anything else you think is awesome, let me know in the comments. I’m always on the lookout for more.

*** Update: We have some late additions brought to you by CameraPorn readers

1. The Online Photographer
2. Photub
3. Fred Miranda
4. Manuel Librodo
5. This Week in Photography
6. DP Review - *note: I’ve gotten a lot of feedback about this one… I personally love dpreview, but didn’t include it because its always included in lists like this.. just wanted to be different

keep ‘em coming in the comments and I’ll continue to add to the list

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Written by Addy Dugdale

At a party once, Jesus was asked if he were a leg man or a tit man. The answer is neither. He’s a LEGO man. Well, to be honest, he’s all three, but rather like faith, hope and charity, the greatest of my husband’s loves is LEGO. I’m not bitter. The colorful, benippled bricks have just been around rather longer than I have. That’s not to say LEGO has never caused problems in our relationship. When it did, though, I came up with the following 10-point solution to cope.

To tell the truth, I was once as bewitched by the bricks as he is. We had a massive box at home, a hangover from when my brother, older than me by 11 years, was the snot-nosed kid of the house. (Well, I say massive, but it was barely Yoda-sized compared to J’s Millennium Falcon box of LucasTricks.) When I inherited the snot-nosed kid mantle, my brother having moved on to smoking dope and listening to Pink Floyd, I also inherited the LEGO.

And I loved it, back in the days when I was too small to see my father’s eyes roll when I begged him to help me make a LEGO pony. How fickle I was back then, however, and eventually lost interest-after all, there are only so many minimalist box-shaped houses you can make with a handful of hereditary LEGO. (I abandoned it for an Eagle-Eye Action Man I’d found, but even that obsession only lasted a few months, once I realized I couldn’t get his plastic shorts off with my teeth, a knife or even the help of the dog.)

Point is, I was not fully unaware of the issues when I married a LEGO maniac. I wouldn’t go as far as Lady Di did when she said there were three people in her marriage, but there was a point over Christmas when the whole LEGO thing became a bit of a nightmare. (It might have had something to do with the fact that we had become obsessive 24 watchers, and so, unconsciously, every time we saw the Millennium Falcon box, we could hear that bloody clock ticking down.) The pressure was unspeakable, from colleagues and commenters alike. Reader, I must confess that I threw one of the boxes on the floor, mixing up piles of bricks that he had spent hours sorting out.

The look in Jesus’ eyes. You may say baleful, but I see your baleful and I raise you pure, unadulterated, naked hurt. A lot of humble pie was eaten that night. I vowed to change, so I came up with a ten-point plan with which to sink my irrational plastic jealousy. Here it is:

1. Have a Spare Room
A man needs a shed-a place his tools can call home, and where he can potter about in undisturbed for hours and hours. Since we’re still waiting for LEGO to bring out its life-sized LEGO Shed kit (estimated completion time 4-6 weeks), J keeps the bricks to his Millennium Falcon in the spare room. If we have friends to stay, the boxes are placed reverently on the floor of the office, until the room is vacant again. Blam can attest to this, as he found some LEGO under his pillow when he came to stay in February.

2. Keep the Dog in Plastic Chew Toys
I haven’t yet noticed primary colored bricks in the dog’s poop, but when I do, I know that we need to go to the pet store again. And if Jesus notices, it’ll be time to get a new dog. Joke.

3. Never Hoover
Now, this rule I absolutely love. I have also glued LEGO bricks and mini-figs to the ironing board, the washing-up gloves and the family silver.

4. Always Wear Shoes In the House
Have you ever stepped on a LEGO brick? I know a guy who had to go to hospital to have one of those little one-row brickettes removed from the ball of his foot after he stood on it by mistake. I think you know him too-he writes for Gizmodo.

5. Vote Denmark During Eurovision
I believe there is a trip to the LEGO factory in Denmark coming up in June. Did I want to accompany him, he asked me tenderly months ago? What, and stand in the way of a man and his first love? Feel like a gooseberry as he fingers and fondles the bricks in the factory? No, no, no, no, nonononononononono. No. NO. But do I tell him I don’t want to go and get nipple marks on my fingers from obsessive brickplay? Of course not. Anyway, someone has to look after the dog.

6. Regular Visits to the Local Toy Shop
“Have you got that one? Thought so. And that one. Oh look! It’s a singing Freddie Mercury doll. Now why don’t they do a Freddie Mercury LEGO? Or Bowie? Yeah, come on then, let’s go inside.”

7. Never Write a LEGO Post for Giz
I value my marriage above all things.

8. Laugh Every Time He Makes You Watch the “Death By Tray” LEGO Skit
This is not exactly a hardship, as Eddie Izzard is funny as fuck. Jesus did actually manage to recite the whole skit when he was drunk in a taxi a few weeks ago. The long, 4am journey home was, believe it or not, alleviated by a slurred version of “Jeff Vader? Runs the Death Star?”

9. Agree That the World Would Be Better If Totally Made of LEGO
How simple life would be. A couple of tiles came off your roof? Buy them from the LEGO store, then go up a ladder and clip them back on again. Kids, we’re going to build a swimming pool this weekend. A leaky one, but still, a swimming pool. No, honestly. Imagine, if the world was made out of LEGO you would just be able to unclip rogue states from the globe and dismantle them before putting them back in the cupboard, and then the world would just be a safer place. And what if everyone’s hands were shaped like those of the LEGO figures? Well, you wouldn’t get any work done, for a start.

10. Try to Relate and Even Join In
Just after his Millennium Falcon arrived, J bought a TIE Fighter LEGO set. “It’s for you,” he said. “You can do that while I assemble the Falcon.” A month later, I had to go back to Britain for a long weekend, and when I came back, I found the TIE Fighter sitting, assembled on his desk. “Oy, I was meant to do that,” I said. Jesus shrugged. “I missed you. And I was bored,” he replied.

So, there you have it. While it may not be as life-changing as AA or NA’s 12-Point Plan, my LEGO-acceptance program keeps us on the straight and narrow. And I know you’re all wondering when Jesus is going to present his newly-clicked Millennium Falcon to the world, well, hell, so am I. However, I think he needs an incentive. Any ideas?

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Written by Jeff Giles, Tim Ryan, and Sara Schieron.

RT celebrates Mother’s Day with our favorite good (and evil) cinematic moms.

Mothers are precious. In fact, they’re super-heroines…except when they haunt you, beat you or sell you into government office. (And even then, there’s some love there.) From nurturing and strong to manipulative and murderous, moms do some crazy things in the interest of protecting (or betraying) their brood, and this list — hotly contested in the RT office, by the way — features five good eggs and as many rotten, with a few honorable mentions and iffy selections thrown in for good measure.

Not that this list could (or should) change your Sunday plans, but it might make you feel differently about your where your mom lands on the tolerability index. She may not be Mrs. Incredible, but your dear old mom can’t be so bad she doesn’t deserve a call on the one day a year that’s dedicated especially to her, right?

Well, maybe you’ll feel differently after you read about Bad Mom #1.

Good Moms

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Helen Parr (aka Elastigirl)
Appears in: The Incredibles (2004)
Portrayed by: Holly Hunter

Moms perform superhuman feats every day. They dispense valuable advice. They’re protective of their children, but know when to let go and allow them to forge their own paths. And they’re always true to their own values. Thus, Elastigirl (voiced by Holly Hunter) in The Incredibles is the distillation of maternal excellence — and she’s great at crime-fighting to boot. (Alas, she probably shouldn’t have left the poor babysitter alone with super-infant Jack Jack.)

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Mrs. Gump
Appears in: Forrest Gump (1994)
Portrayed by: Sally Field

Six years may not seem like a long time, but for Sally Field, they were the difference between playing Tom Hanks’ friend (in 1988’s Punchline) and playing his rock-solid, long-suffering mother (in 1994’s Forrest Gump). From the film’s first act, in which she does some implied horizontal boppin’ with the dean of a private school to ensure her son’s admission, you know you only wished your mom loved you as much as Mrs. Gump loved Forrest. For Field — who is, for the record, only 10 years Hanks’ senior — the role capped a string of positively received roles that brought her back from the squishy rom-com territory she’d wandered into during the mid-’80s (1987’s Surrender, anyone?).

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Peg Boggs
Appears in: Edward Scissorhands (1990)
Portrayed by: Dianne Wiest

How’s this for maternal instinct? Tim Burton’s 1990 suburban fable hinges on Peg Boggs, the housewife/struggling Avon lady played by Wiest, and her impulsive decision to enter the local Creepy Old Mansion on a Hill on a sales call. She doesn’t sell any makeup, but she does wind up adopting the house’s sole resident, a lab-created boy with scissors for hands, and taking him home to live with her family. It sounds positively daffy if you’ve never seen it — or even if you have, actually — but all of Burton’s best movies need a sweet anchor to keep them from drifting completely off into Weirdsville, and Wiest — whose early addition to the cast Burton credits with helping to get Edward Scissorhands made — plays that role perfectly here.

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Sarah Connor
Appears in: Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991)
Portrayed by: Linda Hamilton

It’s easy to forget now, but before Linda Hamilton’s bicep-flexing turn as Sarah Connor in Terminator 2, women in science fiction films — heck, in pretty much all films — were relegated to stereotypical domestic support roles, or damsels in distress (Ripley excepted). Hamilton may not have been the first of the fairer sex to hit the gym and kick a little bad-guy tush in a major motion picture, but she was certainly one of the most convincing — and the film’s $500 million-plus gross helped convince filmmakers all over Hollywood that maybe the time had come to write female roles that involved more than screaming and baked goods.

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Elaine Miller
Appears in: Almost Famous (2000)
Portrayed by: Frances McDormand

Early on in Almost Famous, Mrs. Miller’s hard-nosed mothering is hard to read; however, when she lays down natural selection to a presumptuous Billy Crudup, you can’t help but marvel. She doesn’t just protect her 15-year-old son, a rising celebrity music journalist; she extends the stern rules to his possible bad influence. Even a rock star can become a “person of substance,” if properly guided. Lioness mothers don’t typically quote Goethe, which is only a tiny part of why this one is so memorable.

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To Be Determined

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Bren MacGuff
Appears in: Juno (2007)
Portrayed by: Allison Janey

Okay, so her dialogue during the first third of the film drifts perilously close to the brink of the stilted, see-how-hip-we-are patois traditionally favored by screenwriters putting words in the mouth of “real” teens — but Diablo Cody’s script quickly redeems itself, giving Ellen Page the rare opportunity to play a pregnant teenager whose journey to delivery avoids all the stereotypical Afterschool Special plot devices that Hollywood can’t seem to live without. In fact, Juno’s decision to give the baby up for adoption is one of the least dramatic decisions she makes during the course of the film; it takes her no time at all to decide that she is, in her own words, “ill-equipped” to give her progeny the life she wants for it. If that isn’t motherly love, folks, what is?

Bad Moms

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Joan Crawford
Appears in: Mommie Dearest (1981)
Portrayed by: Faye Dunaway

If Christina Crawford is to be believed (and some claim she isn’t), her adoptive mother Joan was a better actress than a parent. Much better. Frank Perry’s camp classic Mommie Dearest shows Crawford hacking off Christina’s hair, giving away her birthday presents, slapping her, using her (and her siblings) for public relations purposes, and tackling her with a force that would make Lawrence Taylor wince. (And let’s not even start on those wire hangers.) In a scenery-chewing — nay, gobbling — performance, Faye Dunaway became one of cinema’s most notorious examples of bad parenting.

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Mama Bates
Appears in: Psycho (1960)

Poor Norman Bates. All he wants to do is listen to Beethoven and devote time to taxidermy. And yet his mom nags him all the time into maintaining his failing motel. (Spoiler Alert!) No wonder business is slow; Mrs. Bates demands that Norman take a Ginsu to anyone foolish enough to stop by. (At least she taught him how to do housework, since the shower in room #1 is clean as a whistle.) A lot of moms are possessive of their children, but most are at least kind enough not to take up residence in their sons’ brains — or badger them from beyond the grave.

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Eleanor Iselin
Appears in: The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
Portrayed by: Angela Lansbury

It’s never a good thing when parents try to live out their ambitions through their children. It’s especially uncool to use your kids as pawns in a plot to overthrow the government. In the chilling Cold War drama/satire The Manchurian Candidate, Angela Lansbury plays Eleanor Iselin, the wife of a bombastic senator and fellow communist sleeper agent, uses a deck of cards as a trigger to control her son, Korean War vet Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey). Raymond is forced into a plot to assassinate a presidential candidate (and his mother even kisses him far too deeply, just to prove how much she loves him). Lansbury was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, but it’s unlikely she’d get a seal of approval from Parenting magazine.

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Margaret White
Appears in: Carrie (1976)
Portrayed by: Piper Laurie

You thought your mom was a pain in the neck during high school? She was June Cleaver compared to Margaret White. Carrie’s backwoods fundamentalist mother believes just about everything is sinful — including puberty, the act that conceived Carrie, and, well, Carrie herself. She isn’t terribly fond of the prom, either — and although she ends up being proven more or less right on that count, that doesn’t exactly help her case in the end. In giving life to one of Stephen King’s most hateful characters, Piper Laurie holds nothing back; watching her performance, you’d almost never know she viewed Carrie as a comedy, or that her ill-timed laughter ruined several shots.

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Beverly R. Sutphin
Appears in: Serial Mom (1994)
Portrayed by: Kathleen Turner

In her defense: She just wanted to keep order. It’s crucial, after all, that fashion rules (no white after Labor Day!) are upheld, and pesky neighbors are dealt with accordingly (Mrs. Jensen deserved to be clubbed like a seal with that leg of lamb). This Martha Stewart of Murder is part homemaker, part Waters-Guttersnipe-Baltimorean. Her kids were ideal, and she was too — until a parent teacher conference gone wrong sent her perfectly coiffed suburban existence into a life of celebreality violence. Like Birdie said: “You know, Mrs. Sutphin, you’re bigger than Freddy and Jason now, except that you’re real.”

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The Honorable Mentions

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Elaine Robinson and Mrs. Stifler
Appears in: The Graduate (1973), American Pie (1999)
Portrayed by: Katharine Ross, Jennifer Coolidge

Mrs. Robinson didn’t just personify the cringe-inducing ideal of the sexually aggressive mom, she was the original cougar, hunting for prey her daughter’s age. She was sultry, “mature,” had some righteous lingerie — and then refused to share her lover with her daughter. Does this make her a bad mother? Technically, loverboy Ben (Dustin Hoffman) had little association with Elaine (Katharine Ross) prior to his affair with her mom. It’s not as if she actively seduced her kid’s buddy — that was the work of the first-ever MILF, Stifler’s mom (Jennifer Coolidge in American Pie). She did more than contribute a new category to porn. She was unabashed (on the pool table!), indiscreet, and unlike Mrs. Robinson, unwed. Then again, it’s not like she would ever stand in the way if her son ever wanted to get it together with Finch.

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