• Scenes from Rio de Janeiro – The Big Picture – Boston.com – "A recent large-scale project by the photographer named JR has focused attention on women – relatives of victims of violence – by displaying their large portraits in one of Rio de Janeiro's hardest hit neighborhoods. Though Rio is blessed with natural beauty and climate, it still struggles with large disparities between rich and poor, and many of the six million residents reside in hillside slums called favelas. Here are some views of Rio de Janeiro over the past few months….”
• The New Low-Light Photography: ISO 1600 is the new 200 — PopPhotoJuly 2008 – Sharp, clean images lit by just a burning candle. Smooth, natural skin tones in dim, mixed lighting. Blur-free scenes shot handheld at 1/8 sec. Action frozen without a flash. Details in shadows without compromising color. Autofocus that locks on in the dark. Welcome to today's low-light photography.”
• Magnum Blog / Invasion 68: Prague – the photo blog of Magnum Photos – "In 1968 Josef Koudelka was thirty years old. He had committed himself to photography as a full-time career only recently, and had been chronicling the theater, and the lives of gypsies, but he had never photographed a news event. That all changed on the night of August 21 when the Soviet army invaded Czechoslovakia…."
• Beyond Megapixels: Macro Photography 101, Part 2 – "In Part 1 of Macro Photography 101, we discussed what a true macro lens is. In Part 2, we will be discussing depth of field, lighting, and specialist lens in Macro Photography…."
• Beyond Megapixels: Macro Photography 101 – "Macro photography can be a confusing topic for many beginners. For one thing, almost all the lenses nowadays have the word macro printed on the barrel. Does this mean that it’s automatically a macro lens? What is a true macro lens? These are some of the topics that we will tackle in this article."
• Moving Toward Manual Settings: Understanding ISO (a beginner’s guide) – "This is the third installment in a series by Hawaii photographer Natalie Norton on becoming confident with manual camera settings…. If you are new to photography, or don’t have a clean grasp of manual settings, I recommend that you go back and read the first two installments of this series: Understanding Aperture and Understanding Shutter Speed and then come on over to learn about ISO."
• Moving Toward Manual Settings: Understanding Shutter Speed (a beginner’s guide) – "This post on Understanding Shutter Speed, written by Hawaii photographer Natalie Norton is a follow up post to Moving Toward Manual: Understanding Aperture. The posts are being written as a beginner’s guide to gaining confidence in using manual camera settings."
• Moving Toward Manual Settings: Understanding Aperture (a beginner’s guide) – "In this tutorial Natalie Norton explores the topic of Aperture."
• Adobe launches Photoshop Elements 7 & Premiere Elements 7: Digital Photography Review – "Adobe has announced Version 7 of Adobe Photoshop Elements and Adobe Premiere Elements. Apart from a few new Quick Fix tools, Photoshop Elements 7 offers a new Scene Cleaner option that lets the user brush away unwanted objects from a scene and a Smart Brush which lets the user apply effects to a particular area of a photograph…."

• EchoDitto Blog: Following Online Media at the DNC – "At the Democratic National Convention next week, 125 bloggers will hold press credentials and hundreds more will be reporting from The Big Tent. You're probably wondering – how do I follow hundreds of blogs? …. You can download the full OPML file of DNC credentialed bloggers here. Once you have the file, re-upload the file to your RSS reader and you will have the 125 credentialed bloggers loaded into a folder…."
• Discovered Artists: Buy art directly from emerging artists – "Original art has never been more accessible and more affordable! Join smart, discriminating buyers who are discovering the fun and value of decorating their homes and offices with original art."
• Marketplace Magazine | Discover paper's history – "The Paper Discovery Center in Appleton offers more than insight into the science and art of paper…. The Paper Discovery Center … celebrates a cultural, technological and economic legacy…."
• The Austrian Economists: Joe Biden?! — Political, Not Economic Post – "… the election just got a lot closer. The Democratics have an amazing capacity to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and Obama choosing Joe Biden to be a running mate for 'hope and change' when he is the poster child for political divisiveness and smug (yet ignorant) arrogance in political/legal discourse is another case in point…."
• Lightning in sunset
• 15 Spectacular Lightning Images

• CSS Reference | Stylegala
• CSS Tutorial – Table of contents | CSS Tutorial | HTML.net
• CSS Beginner Tutorial | HTML Dog – “[The] CSS Beginner Tutorial assumes that you know as much about CSS as you do about the cumulative effects of sea squirt discharge on the brain chemistry of Germanic ammonites. The purpose of this guide is to teach the bare essentials – just enough to get started. The CSS Intermediate Tutorial and CSS Advanced Tutorial go into more depth about CSS….”
• CSS Basics – Making Cascading Style Sheets Easy to Understand – Learn everything you ever wanted to know about the basics of CSS….
• History Of Photography — Blogs, Pictures, and more on WordPress
• How to Reduce Camera Shake – 6 Techniques – “In this post photographer Natalie Norton explores 6 ways you can hand hold lenses at low apertures and low shutter speeds and still avoid blurry images caused by camera shake.”
• Images Of Singapore
• Verve Photo: The New Breed of Documentary Photographers – “Photographer and photo editor Geoffrey Hiller has created Verve to feature photos and interviews by the finest young image makers today. Verve is a reminder of the power of the still image. Verve will also point you to new photo agencies, publications and inspiring multimedia projects.”
• Creating the United States - myLOC.gov (Library of Congress) – “Imagination and vision played critical roles in the creative act of forming a self-governing United States of America. The collections of the Library of Congress are unquestionably the worlds best source for documenting that process. This exhibition offers a remarkable opportunity to learn in a fresh new way how the founding documents that emerged from this period were forged out of insight, invention, and creativity, as well as collaboration and much compromise.”
• Exploring the Early Americas - myLOC.gov (Library of Congress) – “Exploring the Early Americas features selections from the more than 3,000 rare maps, documents, paintings, prints, and artifacts that make up the Jay I. Kislak Collection at the Library of Congress. It provides insight into indigenous cultures, the drama of the encounters between Native Americans and European explorers and settlers, and the pivotal changes caused by the meeting of the American and European worlds.”
• Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project, digital archive of video oral histories of Japanese-Americans incarcerated or interned during World War II – “Welcome to the Densho Website…. Densho’s mission is to preserve the testimonies of Japanese Americans who were unjustly incarcerated during World War II before their memories are extinguished. We offer these irreplaceable firsthand accounts, coupled with historical images and teacher resources, to explore principles of democracy and promote equal justice for all.”

• Frequently Asked Questions : Stumble Rush – “Stumble Rush is a home study course designed to teach you how to drive traffic to your website using StumbleUpon. There are two halves to the course: the first half of the course consists of basic lessons and you can receive these absolutely free! If you would like to continue your study once you have completed the basic lessons you will be invited to purchase another 10 advanced lessons for a small fee…. There are 20 lessons in all which are presented as an in-depth text lesson accompanied by videos. There are also 22 videos to accompany the text.”
• WordPress › Sociable « WordPress Plugins – “Automatically add links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites like Facebook, Mixx, StumbleUpon, Digg and many many others….”
• Stumble your way to a Rush of traffic at Hippo Web Solutions – “Various sources I have read observe that the traffic that comes from StumbleUpon generally has a different profile from that of other Social Bookmarking sites. Whereas for example Digg traffic manifests itself in a big spike (lots of visitors in a short space of time) that dissipates just as quickly, StumbleUpon traffic tends to be more sustained, and can often continue days, weeks and months beyond the point where an item first became popular.”
• Increase traffic to your blog with Social Bookmarking at Hippo Web Solutions – “Have you ever felt like you’re talking but no-one’s listening? I’m sure that’s something most bloggers can relate to (even A-list bloggers like Darren Rowse), especially when you’re in the initial stages of developing a blog. One way to increase your exposure is through the use of so-called Social Bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious, Stumbleupon, and many others.”
• The new employee connection: Social networking behind the firewall – “In industries from retail to high tech, banking and manufacturing, companies are increasingly building networks behind the firewall where employees can create profiles and connect with one another in ways first demonstrated by LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace.”
• Yahoo Buzz poses serious threat to Digg, some users say – “Yahoo Buzz, the social news site that Yahoo Inc. launched in beta form in February, may pose a serious threat to social news pioneer Digg.com, according to some industry observers and even Digg users.
  Yahoo late yesterday opened Buzz to all publishers. The company said that said since the beta program opened last winter with 100 users, more than 300 publishers have been added. The site already boasts 5 million users, it said.”
• The Next Social Networks Will Be Powered By WordPress and Movable Type – ReadWriteWeb – “Platforms like WordPress and Movable Type democratized the process of self-publishing. With these tools, everyone could be a publisher and it didn’t require advanced technical expertise to do so. Now, the next revolution for publishing is to bring that same ease of creation to the process of building social networks….”

So… I think I’ve finally gotten this site and afewgoodlenses pretty well situated, and it’s time to switch my focus back to the kind of content I’ve wanted to develop all along. As my regular readers might have guessed from the flurry of activity around here lately, I’m between classes. I won’t be starting up again until mid-October, so that has given me a few months to do all this, and hopefully crank up a regular level of writing (and photoblogging!) that I can maintain fairly well once classes resume. I’m not sure if it will actually work out that way; I find it pretty hard to keep the blog updated when I’m in a class, so let me just say I have a goal of trying to do that, and we’ll see what happens. Priorities, you know….

I had forgotten about one last plugin that I had already deployed on afewgoodlenses until this evening when I was reading some comments left on my most recent delicious links post by Cooper and Rod. The Get Recent Comments plugin by Krischan Jodies lets you embed code in your sidebars (or elsewhere on your site) that fetches and displays as many comments as you want from your posts. As with many of the great plugins I’ve written about so far, Get Recent Comments provides a comprehensive set of configuration options you can use to tailor the appearance of the comments. Among other things, you can configure the number of comments you want to appear, the maximum number of comments to display from any single post, and the number of characters to show per comment. You can also restrict comments to only those posts from certain categories and display Gravatars for folks that have an account there. You have complete control over the appearance of comments via several templates provided with the plugin that you can change as you wish or just use the defaults. In my implementation in the sidebar to the right of this article, I’ve used the default templates, and selected my favorite setup option — which groups the comments under the post title so that visitors can see the flow of comments on a particular article and get there very easily. This is definitely one of the top plugins in my opinion, especially because of the options it provides.

In the coming days, I’ll pick up up on a a couple of article series that I’ve not finished yet. I developed a number of articles (already posted here) from my research into Oakland Cemetery,and have one more that’s nearly complete and will appear here shortly. I doubt that this next one will be the last one, since my explorations extended out into my neighborhood and took me down several paths into Atlanta’s early history, and I doubt that that I can stop writing about it all any time soon.

I wrote an earlier article on the book No Time: Stress and the Crisis of Modern Life by Heather Menzies, which examines the relationship between time and technology, and discusses its effects on modern life, modern society, and culture. I finished the book a long time ago, and many of the author’s ideas still resonate for me. From about twenty notecards I accumulated while reading the book, I plan at least two more articles. There are some areas where I disagree with Menzies’ conclusions that I’d like to explore also, and I’ll be interested in any reactions my assessment of this book generates here. It will be fun to debate what Menzies has to say, since she puts forth some very compelling questions about how technology effects us that I believe should be explored. I also stumbled across a companion book along the same lines, but with a more personal focus, called The Secret Pulse of Time: Making Sense of Life’s Scarcest Commodity by Stefan Klein. I will play those books off each other, so to speak, and see where that takes me.

I also just finished reading Animal Attractions: Nature on Display in American Zoos by Elizabeth Hanson — a really fine exploration of the genesis and history of zoos in the United States from the early American Victorian period through the end of the twentieth century. Zoo Atlanta gets several mentions in the book, as its history is very typical of zoos throughout the country. Discussion of zoos, American culture, American interest in animals and nature, and the rise of leisure time in the Victorian period are deftly woven into the story of zoological history, in this very unique book. I think I’ll attempt a traditional book review and post it here, just to see how that goes.

I’m also planning a series of articles that will contain reflections on my undergraduate history classes and the amazing learning experience that has turned out to be. The series will be called “Excerpts from My Education” — where, at least in part, I’ll use many of the forty or so papers I’ve written for the classes so far as starting points for articles. The first one, possibly two weeks down the road, will cover the class I just finished, Pacific Asia: Culture and History.

As always, thanks for stopping by, thanks for reading … and … stay tuned!