Creativity

For a recent project involving biodiversity surveys, I wanted an inexpensive and lightweight camera with which I could photograph subjects ranging from landscapes to birds. I checked out the "super-zoom" digital cameras, which include lenses that can zoom from wide-angle to powerful telephoto - and settled on Nikon P100.

I'm using the Olympus M.ZUIKO DIGITAL ED 75-300mm f4.8-6.7 micro four thirds lens with my E-PL1 and E-P3, chiefly for photographing wildlife, especially birds.

After reading strong reviews of the Olympus M.Zuiko 45mm f1.8 lens, I decided to buy one - for a mixture of portrait, street and low light photography, along with occasional wildlife and landscapes.

It's an excellent lens: compact and lightweight, as well as fast.

Below are some of the shots I've taken with the 45mm lens, which on micro four thirds cameras is equivalent to a 90mm lens in a 35mm camera system.

You will be amazed at the quality of the pictures you get with compact cameras - both film and digital - if you keep in mind the following points.

Here are a few suggestions on how to use the Sanyo Xacti HD2000, which is certainly a nifty little camera.

Here's some brief advice on ensuring web pages rank well in search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. While I don't claim to be an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) hotshot, even some webmeisters can get a bit bamboozled at times.

Written after I had problems with rampant spiders on my websites, and used a script to ban bad bots.

I've been using Drupal 5, which has a nifty module for using Google Adsense. However, on moving sites to Drupal 6, found this module was yet to be upgraded. I tried Adsense in a block within a Drupal 6 site, but it didn't work. So, searched for answer, and found in a thread on Drupal site.

I've written in another article on this site re my gradual disillusionment with Joomla!, and of considering switching to Drupal for some time. This had seemed a daunting prospect; there was an article on Drupal site about converting from Joomla, but involved digging around w MySQL databases - not something I felt up to.

Here are several of the Drupal 6 modules I'm using.

From a post I made to Drupal site, to thread w some people confused re using GMap and Location modules, which are a great help with adding Google Maps to a Drupal site, but seem sparsely documented.

Looking for info on ways to enhance a Drupal website's speed, I found methods tended to be for hotshot developer types, perhaps in charge of their own dedicated servers. But there are methods, including using Drupal's own caching plus the Boost module, that work on shared hosting.

I had long thought Drupal's Views module could help power a photo gallery, but was daunted by the prospect of actually creating one. Happily, though, KarenS has created the Views Gallery module - which makes it relatively easy to start a gallery.