The Worst Digital Cameras Ever

I just stumbled across an article by Digital Camera HQ talking about the worst cameras ever. Although written in October 2006, some of the cameras are still on the market so watch out! In no particular order, the writer calls out these cameras:

• Canon Powershot A70
• Sea Life DC500
• Kodak Easyshare One
• Polaroid PDC-5080
• Pentax Optio E10

While I was surprised by the Canon A70 (as I've always been happy with my Canon's), further details revealed a major glitch in the camera and Canon had to offer free repairs for it. It's the one camera that has driven many people away from Canon's ever since.

I'm certainly not surprised by the inclusion of the Pentax Optio E10 though. Of all the cameras on ProductCritic, it has the lowest ProductCritic Score of 63. Not surprisingly, the second lowest score on the whole site goes to its cousin, the Pentax Optio A10 which received a 69. That definitely tells me that Pentax doesn't know how to make a good point & shoot...although I believe that their dSLR's fare a lot better given that the Pentax K10D has a ProductCritic Score of 90 and is in the Top 5 cameras on the whole site.

Build A Website Using Ruby On Rails That You Can Be Proud Of

ProductCritic is developed with the Ruby on Rails framework. This entry will give some insight on how this came to be.

My experience with web apps started with ASP and later onto ASP.NET. I found ASP.NET a huge improvement over ASP but after working on a few sites I still found it lacking.

Specifically one thing ASP.NET does not have good support for is nice URLs. I'm sure there are ways to do it but I never found a good solution to removing those ugly .aspx page extensions. Also, the page/form centric model that ASP.NET uses is a bad design for medium to large sites I find. No matter how hard I try I've always found my ASP.NET based sites always becoming a bit of a mess if they take off in size. There were many other problems and things I just didn't like about ASP.NET so about a year and a half ago I began looking for an alternative.

I got interested in working with Ruby on Rails after seeing the original screencast. I'll never forget thinking "who is that crazy danish guy yelling 'whoops' every few minutes as he cranks out features on his demo app?" What impressed me the most was when I spent the time to duplicate what he was doing in the screencast and realized that this guy knew what he wanted when he built the framework. Pretty URLs? Yup. Organized directory structure? Yup. Support for automated tests? Yup. Database persistence layer without a huge amount of setup code needed? Yup. The feature list was just perfect except for one thing...I didn't know Ruby. I had heard of it before but never used it and coming from a C++/C# background it sure looked like Perl to me sometimes.

Luckily though, while Ruby can be as hard to read as Perl it doesn't have to be and if written well can be extremely easy to read. Once you understand blocks you'll be fine. I like to compare understanding blocks to understanding pointers in C/C++. The first time you see them they are odd but once you get the 'aha' everything starts to make sense.

After building a number of Rails sites and working with Ruby for more than a year I have become quite found of the language and the Rails framework had proven itself on a number of production sites in the past. So when it came time to pick a framework for ProductCritic there really wasn't any question that we would use Rails.

That said, there are a number of very good and sometimes overlooked features on Rails that are worthwhile to point out:

• Leverage an experienced web developer. DHH and the Rails Core team have a lot more experience than I do in web development. Using there framework allows me to leverage their experience on my projects.
• Deployment. Capistrano, the deployment tool that works with Rails is amazing for getting your site onto a production server in a safe reproducible manner.
• Free and open. Why pay for something when an equal or better solution exists?
• Fast enough. I've heard lots of stories of Ruby being slow but in all my tests and on all my sites it's never been an issue.

There are lots of web development frameworks that we could have used to build ProductCritic. We picked Ruby on Rails ultimately because I enjoy working with it. Picking what makes the development staff happy is ultimately the best deciding factor to use when all other things are equal. Happy developers are productive developers.

Second Worst Invention Ever? Cell Phones

IT Week has a summary of a survey done in the UK asking what is the worst invention ever. Believe it or not, Cell Phones came in second just after Weapons!

Here's the full list:

1. Weapons (35%)
2. Mobile Phones (17%)
3. Nuclear Power (9%)
4. Sinclair C5 (9%)
5. Television (9%)
6. The Car (6%)
7. Cigarettes (6%)
8. Fast Food (3%)
9. Speed Cameras (3%)
10. Religion (2%)

I have no idea what the Sinclair C5 is but obviously it's some British thing that's really bad! I also don't know the audience they were asking for this survey but I'm obviously different than that target group as I love my TV and my car.

I actually don't think Cell Phones are bad at all (which is why they are one of the products reviewed on ProductCritic)....what is actually bad are some Cell Phone users!

Not Sure What Type Of Camera To Buy?

I read a lot of forum posts on Yahoo and CNET and a lot of the questions are very general in nature and are usually of the type "What is the best camera?" or "What camera should I buy?"

This is a very difficult question to answer because, like cars, the type of camera you buy depends highly on what you will use it for, how much you want to spend, etc.

About.com has a very simple Digital Camera Selector Quiz that may help you by at least pointing you in the right direction about which cameras you should do some research on (of course, you should then do that research on ProductCritic). I tried the quiz acting as different types of buyers and I think it retured fairly decent advice...although it said I should get an advanced camera instead of the dSLR that I thought it would recommend given my answers to the quiz.

If you are looking to buy your first digital camera and are a little intimidated by all the choices, do yourself a favor and take the short quiz.

The Easiest Way To Understand All Those Camera Functions

Although many of us have digital cameras, how many of us really know what all those camera terms like f-stop, aperture, and ISO mean? I own a Digital SLR (Canon 20D) that has almost every imaginable setting but even on my pocket camera (a Canon SD500), I can adjust some of these settings.

It's taken me awhile to understand what all these terms are and how they affect the picture I'm taking (I still don't have a full grasp of it all) but that took a lot of time as I learned through lots of trial and error. Each of these settings affect the other settings and all these combinations can definitely be overwhelming to learn.

Photonhead.com has a load of fantastic tutorials on how to use a digital camera:

• Beginner's Guide to Photography
• Digital Camera Buying Guide
• Photography Tips
• Photo Editing

But, the very best thing on Photonhead is SimCam which is an online Film and Digital Camera Simulator. It gives you the ability to play around with things like f-stops and apertures, take a "virtual picture" and see what the results would be. I think you would find it very useful in learning how all the various settings interact with one another.

In the end, Photonhead has a great tip to learn to take better pictures...take more pictures! I couldn't agree more.

Get Full Referral URL's Despite Using Analytics

As I've mentioned in previous posts, I'm completely addicted to the stats generated by ProductCritic. Maybe it's just the fact that we gain knowledge on areas we need to tweak for the site (and we're tweaking on an almost daily basis).

Besides the server logs (which I don't check all the time), we use Google Analytics as our main source of information about visits to the site. Analytics provides a large amount of data and first time users of this tool can easily find themselves overwhelmed.

Although I look at almost all areas of Analytics from time to time, I mainly focus my daily stats fix on two areas. The first is Visitor Segment Performance/Referring Source. I want to know where visitors to ProductCritic are coming from. It's been quite useful as we've immediately been able to determine when someone links to ProductCritic and where that link exists.


The second area that I use in Analytics is Search Engine Marketing/CPC vs Organic Conversion. Although we currently don't use Adwords, this section is still extremely useful for us as it provides us with the ability to see what keywords people are using to find ProductCritic via searches (hence "Organic Convesion"). Since we get a majority of our traffic from search engines, the information here gives us some indication about whether we should concentrate more effort on aggregating reviews for digital cameras, camcorders, or cell phones.

So, what does all this have to do with getting full referral URL's? Well, that's one thing that Google Analytics does NOT do well. For example, last week, we noticed a sharp spike of referrals from the forums at dpreview.com. Although Analytics showed us the referrals, we couldn't tell EXACTLY where they came from (only that they came from forums.dpreview.com). We could check the server logs, but if you don't have access to them, there's an easier way.....sign on and use HitTail.com. It's an awesome free service and although most people use it primarily for keyword suggestions, the tool gives you every referral URL in full detail. Since it also does this for searches, you can click on the links that HitTail.com gives you to exactly reproduce the searches that people use (including ones from localized versions of Google).

Note that we're not affiliated in any way with HitTail.com....it's just a great FREE tool that everyone who's serious about tweaking their site for optimal revenue should use.

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Use Your Cell Phone Without Getting Irradiated

Since my previous post on Highest and Lowest Radiation Cell Phones, CNET has updated their Lowest Radiation Cell Phones list. I've listed them below along with any relevant ProductCritic scores:

1. LG KG800 Chocolate (ProductCritic Score = 66)
2. Motorola Razr V3x (ProductCritic Score = 81)
3. Samsung SGH-t809 (ProductCritic Score = 73)
4. Bang & Olufsen Serene (Samsung SGH-E910)
5. Sanyo RL-4930
6. Helio Drift
7. Nokia 3250
8. Samsung Sync (SGH-A707)
9. Samsung Jitterbug Dial (SPH-A120)
10. Samsung Jitterbug OneTouch (SPH-A110)

Samsung is obviously doing something right with 4 out of 10 spots on this list. Although the LG KG800 Chocolate generates the least amount of radiation, maybe you get what you pay for as it currently sits near the very bottom of all the Cell Phones on ProductCritic.

Kodak Is Struggling...Is It Really Surprising?

The BBC website has a short article with the headline "Kodak to cut an extra 3,000 jobs". The article notes, "Struggling US camera company Eastman Kodak is to cut at least 3,000 extra jobs this year as it continues efforts to fully adapt to the digital age."

Since they made all their profits on film, Kodak was slow to warm up to the digital camera age. Instead of jumping ahead of the pack, they spent more resources on advancing the quality of film (and, in my opinion, proceeded to stick their head in the sand).

Still, once a giant like Kodak decided to get into the digital camera business, you'd expect that their brand alone would sell cameras...and it does (although not as well as Canon or Nikon).

Given the quality of Kodak cameras, is it really surprising to anyone that Kodak has the lowest workforce they've had since the 1930's? I've listed a couple Kodak cameras that we've aggregated reviews for on ProductCritic:

• Kodak EasyShare C743 - ProductCritic Score = 63
• Kodak EasyShare Z650 - ProductCritic Score = 73

These two cameras currently hold the distinction of being the worst and third worst rated products on ProductCritic.

While Kodak has targeted 2008 to be the year that they are back in the game, although they've recently had their first quarterly profit in two years, my take is that the lead that the other companies have in the digital camera market may be too much to overcome.

The Secret Behind "More Megapixels"

When I bought my first digital camera, I didn't know much about how many megapixels the camera should have. I went for the most megapixels I could get within my budget.

Now that I've bought a few more cameras, I've learned that how many megapixels a camera has plays a very, very tiny part in the final quality of the pictures. I currently have a Canon SD500 (7.1 megapixel) and a Canon EOS 20D (8 megapixel) but when I look back at the pictures I took with my Canon G1 (3 megapixel), it's interesting to note that the pictures are every bit as good as my current cameras (I've included one with this post...the elephant scared the crap out of me). I took my Canon G1 to Africa in 2002 and of course I would have rather have had something like my Canon EOS 20D but I'm not disappointed in the resulting pictures that I have from that trip.

The NY Times has a good article debunking the megapixel myth. As they state:

But one myth is so deeply ingrained, millions of people waste money on it
every year. I’m referring, of course, to the Megapixel Myth.
It goes like this: “The more megapixels a camera has, the better the pictures.”
It’s a big fat lie. The camera companies and camera stores all know it, but they continue to exploit our misunderstanding. Advertisements declare a camera’s megapixel rating as though it’s a letter grade, implying that a 7-megapixel model is necessarily better than a 5-megapixel model.

Read the full article to understand what I've learned through trial and error.

Block Your Ads. Get Better Stats.

As part of the added value of ProductCritic over other review aggregator competitors, we add reviews and products manually (instead of using a spider or bot to scrape review sites). We believe that the quality of review summaries, the overall coverage on a product, and the summary review scores (and therefore, resulting ProductCritic Score) are much higher than with automatic scraping.

On any normal day of working on ProductCritic, I probably reload the page 20-30 times depending on how many products and reviews I'm adding. This has a negative affect on the stats that you see on Google Adsense and Analytics because your pageviews are added to the total thus giving you inaccurate statistics. Since I'm such a stats addict, I wanted to remove my own pageviews of the site.

Since I use Firefox, I installed the Adblock add-in. It's a great add-in for blocking all ads or specifically chosen ones. I actually don't block ads from other sites because I want to see what ads other sites, blogs, and competitors are displaying. As long as you enable your filters correctly, the Add-in works great because I can choose specifically just to block my own Adsense or Chitika ads but still see those ads that are located on other sites. Furthermore, it is very easy to enable/disable the blocking of ads just by right-clicking the "Adblock" link located at the bottom right of the browser window (which allows me to easily see the ads on ProductCritic if I want to).

Once you install Adblock, you will need to add filters. Here is what you need to add to your filters in order to block Google Adsense and Chitika ads:

google_ad_client="pub-XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"
http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/ads?client=ca-pub-XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX*
ch_client="productcritic";
http://mm.chitika.net/minimall?*&client=productcritic*

*Note that you'll need to replace the bolded parts above with your own client number or text. Don't forget to keep the "*" that's at the end of some of those lines as they act as a wildcard (which tells the filter that you don't care what is after that text).

So far, it's been working great for me as my Adsense and Chitika stats for Page CTR and Page eCPM are much more accurate (since my own pageviews are not watering down the results).

Finally, an added bonus of blocking your own ads is that you don't accidentally click on your ads (which can get you kicked out of the Adsense program by Google). Overall, a fantastic add-in and another reason to use Firefox as your default browser.

CNET's Top 7 Megapixel Cameras - January 2007

CNET's Editors' Top 7 Megapixel cameras are listed below along with their ProductCritic scores:

1. Canon Powershot SD800 IS (ProductCritic Score = 81)
2. Sony Cybershot DSC-T10
3. Sony Cybershot DSC-T50 (ProductCritic Score = 79)
4. Canon Powershot A710 IS (ProductCritic Score = 83)
5. Sony Cybershot DSC-T30
6. Nikon Coolpix S7c
7. Kodak EasyShare V705
8. Sony Cybershot DSC-H5 (ProductCritic Score = 78)
9. Canon Powershot SD550 (ProductCritic Score = 85)

Unfortunately for us at ProductCritic, this list highlights all the work we still have to do as four of the nine cameras on this list do not yet have their reviews aggregated on ProductCritic. We'll be working to get these onto the site as soon as possible.

Startup Lessons From ProductCritic - Why We Run Linux

This is part two of Startup Lessons from ProductCritic. Part One can be found here.

Deciding on the operating system that will host your application has a huge ripple down effect on the rest of your system. There is effectively two options you can choose. Windows or not-Windows which is effectively Linux but not always.

Choosing Windows will almost certainly lead to IIS, SQLServer, and C#/VB.NET and choosing Linux will almost certainly lead to Apache, MySQL/PostgreSQL, Perl/PHP/Python/Ruby. Yes, you can run ASP.NET under Mono and you can run Ruby on Rails under Windows but doing so I find is an uphill battle. If there is anything that I have learned is that working in the preferred environment makes life a lot easier.

The preferred environment means using the software in the same environment that it was built in. If you work in QA this is a bad idea because little bugs will go unnoticed but as a user it makes things far easier.

Luckily, both OS's have platforms for their preferred environment that are equally capable. There are different costs and skills associated with Windows and Linux but neither will prevent or enable you to be successful. Picking the OS is not a make or break decision.

This means that choosing the OS is probably going to come down to which is the preferred environment for the platform and probably even more likely which OS the developers like more.

For ProductCritic we used Ruby on Rails as the platform. Since Linux is the preferred environment for Rails, the OS decision was pretty much made for us, but there were a number of other reason why I think Linux is a superior platform for startup web sites:

* free and open, why buy an OS when one is free?
* reliable and lightweight, can run on small servers and slices, great uptime
* low cost Virtual Private Hosting is available

These are totally subjective and any strong opinionated Windows developer will come up with an equally favorable list for Windows. Hence the factor of developer preference. Ultimately we picked Linux because I like it more and that should make sense to anyone!

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Follow up to Memory Cards for Digital Cameras

As a quick followup to our previous post on Fast Memory Cards and Digital Cameras, I wanted to call attention to an article by The Photography Bay that provides all the details that you should need about which memory cards to purchase to get the most out of your digital camera.

It's a very well written post that's clear and concise. Whether you're a beginner or a "prosumer", I think you'll get something out of it.

Startup Lessons From ProductCritic - Save Server Costs

We thought it would be interesting to share some of the technical decisions we made with creating ProductCritic. In this first of a series we talk about the hardware running the site.

ProductCritic runs on its own VPS (Virtual Private Server) supplied by SliceHost. A VPS allows a single machine to emulate multiple machines. What this allows is a service provider like SliceHost to own a high end server and then slice it down into any number of smaller less powerful servers and then rent those out to customers.

It's a really great because you get your own rock solid piece of (virtual) hardware running in a secure data center with fast network connections at a very reasonable cost. Since you own the entire slice you can install anything you want on it. You also don't have to worry about anybody else wrecking the server when they install something because only you have access to it. Since the service provider is running very little software itself not much every changes on the server causing a crash or reboot. The result is great uptime as can be seen here:

  % uptime
16:55:55 up 76 days, 20:47,  0 users,  load average: 0.08, 0.02, 0.01

But one of the greatest reasons to use a VPS is because it allows you to grow your hardware needs as your site grows. Instead of investing thousands into your own dedicated server and that is basically just going to sit idle 99% of the time you rent a slice of the size needed for your site. This is less expensive, more flexible and very cost effective. Zero upfront costs and very low monthly costs. ProductCritic is running on the smallest slice available and as you can see from uptime report has a very low load. I find that a sustained load > 1.0 results in slower response times.

Disclaimer: We have no affiliation with SliceHost other than being a happy customer. If you signup with them and want to send us some love enter 'gerry_shaw@yahoo.com' in the referral email field. We'll get a credit but it won't cost you anything.

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Kill Bad Ads From Your Site And Increase Your Revenue

I can't stand all those Made For Ads (MFA) sites that are all over the internet. You know the ones I mean. They are sites that have nothing on them but more ads. These sites are absolutely content free and add nothing to the Internet community. They are the cockroaches...wait, leeches is better, of the Internet. I don't even want to link to one of them here because I can't stand giving them any more attention then they deserve.

Don't you hate it when you look at your Adsense stats and see clicks that pay you less than 10 cents? Sometimes, you'll get clicks that pay you 1 cent! I've learned that many of these clicks come from ads that are actually MFA sites. You only get a certain number of people clicking on an ad in a certain day and you definitely don't want that click wasted on an ad that pays 1 cent!

So, what can you do about them? First, you need to find them. Maybe there's an easier method to do this but I do this manually. I reload my page (at ProductCritic) and view the Adsense ads that are displayed. While some of them are quite obviously real sites (not MFA) like sonystyle.com and nytimes.com, you will also see some sites that you may be suspicious of. I open up a separate browser tab and type that link into the address box (NEVER click on your own ads) to double-check that my suspicions are correct.

For ProductCritic, because it is a review aggregator site for digital cameras, camcorders, and cell phones, I seem to get lots of ads that look very relevant to the content but are actually MFA. An example of one of these sites (check it out if you want but don't click on an ad), is digital-slr.info. Sounds relevant to cameras, right? Nope, it's a horrible, waste-of-time, Made For Ads site. The people who run these sites buy up a ton of domain names, stick on a template (most of them look identical) and then just load the page with ads. Once one of your visitors reaches that site, what's the most natural way for them to exit it....click an ad! After all, there's nothing else to do on those sites.

My sense is that these MFA sites pay low prices per click for long tail keywords, hope to get some visitors to their sites (which they set up for next to nothing) and then get paid a lot more for ads on their site. This is called "Adsense Arbitrage" and I'd write a post about it but there's plenty of good posts already like this one.

Now that you've found one of these sites showing ads on your site, what do you do? Login to your Adsense account, and click the tab entitled "Adsense Setup". Then click on the link marked "Competitive Ad Filter". Enter the url of the site (you don't need the "http://" or the "www.") into the Content Filter box provided. For the above example, I'd add in "digital-slr.info" and then click "Save Changes". Now in about 12-24 hours, ads for this site will no longer be displayed on your site.

One additional step that everyone should take is to help out the community. Head on over to AdsBlackList.com and set up and account. Submit the URL of the MFA site that you just found and after approval of 4 other readers (who confirm that it is indeed a MFA site), it will be added to their blacklist. Blacklists from AdsBlackList can be automatically generated for you to add to your Adsense Content Filter.

How's my success been so far? Well, since I started doing this, I've had zero clicks that have been low paying (e.g. 10 cents or less). Every day, I watch new ones pop up on ProductCritic and need to add them to my content filter on Adsense. It takes some diligence but I believe it is well worth it. First, you get benefits because you are increasing the quality of the contextual advertising on your site and you are not "wasting" your site's ad clicks. Second, the visitors of your site don't get transferred to one of these MFA sites and when they actually click on an ad, they are more likely to find what they are really after.

Too bad Adsense Content Filter only allows 200 URL's. I'm sure I'll find more than 200 MFA's to block from advertising on ProductCritic. Try it out yourself and let me know how it works for you!

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Now I Remember Why I Chose Canon Over Nikon

I have a Canon 20D, a DSLR, and a Canon SD500, my pocket camera that I can carry around with me everywhere. I've always been partial to Canon digital cameras ever since my first one, the Canon G1 (of the G-series, I still like the G6 better than the G7).

While working on ProductCritic, I've read almost all the reviews for the latest Nikon cameras and, given their fantastic reviews, I had started getting a little nervous that maybe I should be switching brands. On ProductCritic, Nikon has currently captured 3 of the top 5 ratings spots:

1. Nikon D200 (ProductCritic Score = 92)
2. Canon EOS 20D (ProductCritic Score = 91)
3. Nikon D80 (ProductCritic Score = 91)
4. Nikon D70/D70S (ProductCritic Score = 89)
5. Canon Digital Rebel XT (ProductCritic Score = 88)

A post on Engadget entitled "Nikon fesses up to new CCD malfunction problems" shook out the remaining doubt in my mind. It details the latest CCD failures with some Nikon models. Granted that in 2005, CDD problems hit almost all major brands (including Canon and Nikon) but for now I'm sticking with Canon as I've been extremely happy so far with their cameras.

Your Rank In Search Results...How To Compare Against Competitors

Since launching ProductCritic last month, I've learned a lot from other bloggers about various terms and tools that you should use to optimize, improve, and gather information about your site or blog.

What is SERP? It stands for Search Engine Results Pages. SERP tools help you gather information on where your site ranks on the search engines for various search terms. My favorite SERP tool is Shoemoney's Serps Script. It's really free, fast, has nothing extraneous, and works great for comparing where ProductCritic ranks against its competitors. I also use it to compare the rankings for ProducCritic against one of the largest technology review sites on the Internet....CNET.

Not surprisingly, for a site that only launched a month ago, ProductCritic doesn't rank at all for the generic and most popular keyword searches like "digital camera review". What is surprising to me is that some of the "long tail" terms (I'll post a blog entry on short tails, long tails, and hittail next week) rank incredibly well for ProductCritic and we actually beat CNET for those terms!

For example, using Shoemoney's SERP tool, I found that for the search term "vpc-hd1a review" (one of the camcorders on the site), ProductCritic ranked #4 on Google and #8 on MSN while CNET, for the same search term, ranked #9 on Google and #22 on MSN. Disappointingly, for the same search term, ProductCritic doesn't even rank on Yahoo! but CNET is ranked #1 on there. Nevertheless, I'm greatly encouraged that, for some terms, a new site like ProductCritic can rank higher than a site like CNET for the same relevance of content.

Even more encouraging for me is that the same searches for ProductCritic competitors (like wize.com) show up at #41 on Google and don't even rank on MSN (some didn't rank on any search sites). We obviously still have lots of work to do for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) but Shoemoney's SERP tool helps us quickly compare ourselves against other sites and gauge our progress as the months go by.

Shoemoney is one of the most successful Google Adsense publishers on the net with hundreds of sites and thousands of domain names. Providing something like his SERPs tool is impressive to me as he provides it for free and it helps many other bloggers and site owners using his success as inspiration to continue to work hard.

Get The Most Out Of Your Digital Camera...Take This Free Course

The original motive for starting ProductCritic was because we were tired of the hassle of keeping track of all our research before we bought a product. In fact, the current three categories of consumer electronics that we provide review aggregation for on ProductCritic were chosen because we had recently bought a camera, camcorder, and cell phone.

So, part of this blog is also about the products that we cover. I definitely consider myself a very amateur photographer who really enjoys the creative outlet that photography brings. Although I'm not sure that my own photography skills have improved a lot, my pictures have turned out better just because of my current camera, the Canon 20D.

In order to actually improve my skills (and not just my tools), I've recently started going through one of the best free online photography courses I've found. From instructor, Jodie Coston, it's very well written and gives good background information behind the instructions.

The 10 lessons are broken down into:

1. Composition and Impact
2. Aperture and Shutter Speed
3. The Lens
4. ISO, Grain, & Transparency
5. Fun Effects
6. Landscape, Nature, & Travel Photography
7. Portraits and Studio Lighting
8. Studio Lighting
9. Tying It All Together
10. Special Requests

If you want to be happier with the pictures you're taking from that fancy new digital camera you bought, I suggest reading through the course. Also, be sure to check out the best DSLR Tutorial that I wrote about in a previous post.