This really fascinates me.

Day and Night

Although we can include text in vectors, we can't leave it as it is. Just in case the person who downloads the vectors is in Mongolia and they only have Mongolian fonts installed in their computer. They won't be able to see the text properly. So we need to convert them to outlines. Quick way to do this is to right click on the text and select Create Outlines. Now every literate person can read your text.

That extra pocket money that it provides is fantastic (although I do hate those cheap 0.30cts sales). Pushes me to learn and improve on photography. Taught me about vectors which I knew nothing about a year ago.

Hopefully I see more sales here.

These are the top 10 "hot bikini girls" in DT ranked by the most dls.

Do you know that by pressing Ctrl + H you can toggle show/hide selected path. This is useful to see your artwork without the selected paths obscuring your view, especially useful when coloring your objects.

Do you know that by pressing Ctrl + U you can toggle on and off the smart guides feature. Smart guides are very useful if you want to move objects around and line it up against another object. But can be very annoying to have it on all the time. So Ctrl + U is a quick way to turn it on and off.

When clicking around using the pen tool, before you let go of your left mouse button, you can shift the point by holding the space bar and moving your mouse. Very convenient and handy for that extra precision when drawing ...

Everyone feels excited when they find their images being used somewhere. Unfortunately those designers aren't going to send you a postcard telling you where they used them. But here is a well known trick that you can use to find your images on the internet.

Google one of the following:

1. copyright (your nickname)

2. copyright (your real name)

3. photo credits (your nickname)

4. photo credits (your real name)

For example, I would google copyright shuttlecock and see what comes up. Sometimes you have to wade through all the stock sites with your images before you find the gem. Almost like digging for gold.

Recently found this on the web.

So what do you do with pimply faced, snort nosed wannabe models? Although you can tell him or her to *bleep* off, a photographer has to always be polite (most of the time) to the models. So next best thing to do is to focus on a smoother body part and give it a good background blur with shallow DOF. And for good measure crop out half of the face like so. You won't have to spend the next 2 weeks smoothing out the face in Photoshop. This technique only works for stock. If you're commission to take portraits shots of someone say for a wedding then it is a different story ...

If you constantly get rejections for blurred and noisy images, why not try your hand at Vectors. It can be a pain to learn but once you have gotten the basics you can really do wonderful things with Vectors. Almost lifelike 3d stuff.

Here's a sample of what you can do with an old blurred photo and some time to kill. Took me around 20 minutes to do it.

Every year, during the last week of January, the Swiss alpine village of Chateau d'Oex (pronounced "day") organizes a Hot-Air Ballooning event with hundreds of colorful balloons participating from many countries. Rides unfortunately costs a bomb.

These were shot with a 70-200 mm f/2.8 L IS and 24-70 mm f/2.8 L. The two best lenses that any Canon owner can have.