Does Your Make Money Blog Really Teach People How To Make Money?
A few months back, I read a blog entry on the issue of whether ‘make money’ bloggers really tell people how to make money online. I tried to search the article today but couldn’t find it. If anybody knows which one I’m talking about, do inform me ya? Thanks
Anyway, the author did some research and found out that recent posts (at the time of the article was written) of the top ‘make money’ bloggers don’t really talk about how to make money, instead most of them talk about pagerank, traffic, paid posts, reviews etc. Well, I can argue that at that time, everybody was furious about Google PageRank updates so it’s not a surprise if people were talking about PR all the time up to 2-3 posts one after another.
Some of the bloggers mentioned in the post commented on the article. Some argued that talking about traffic, pagerank, how to blog efficiently etc. can also help people to make money online since if you want to make money online, you have to have a high traffic and high pagerank blog or website. In my opinion, this is true but it’s not always the case. IF they’re talking about making money from blogging or using Adsense, then traffic and pagerank plays a significant role, well probably the most important role, in order to generate money. But making money online is not just from blogging or Adsense.
ECS Photography Competition : I got 2nd Place!
This was my first photography competition that I entered since I started using a DSLR. It was sponsored by ECS department in Southampton University. There were 4 categories to compete for and each participant can enter 2 photos max for each category. I of course submitted 8 photos in total. But it was a tough competition, and I managed to get 2nd place for ‘Highfield Campus’ category and a commendation award for ‘Life in ECS’.
You can view all my other entries at my flickr account
This is just another perfect way to make extra money with photography!
Make Extra Money Online From Micro Stock Photography Part 3
Many have asked me on how to take photos of a subject with seamless white background that makes the subject stands out and isolated. Most of the time, this type of photos sell very well since the one buying them can easily cut out the subject from the background. In short, it can easily be manipulated, and that’s why people love photos of subject isolated on white or black background. If you want to make money online from selling photos, this is one of the types of photo that you must include in your portfolio.
Since I don’t have the money to buy all those hi-tech stuff such as the lighting probes and softbox, I ended up constructing my own home made studio using items already lying around in my house, with some extras of course. What you need is basically
1) A box
2) Tracing paper
3) Sticky tapes/glue
4) Construction light/tungsten light
5) Cardboard paper for background
6) Knife/scissors
Since I got this idea from Johan Mattson’s blog, I think it’s better to go to his blog and follow the steps that he describes there. It’s basically the same thing that I did, and I even bought the same construction lights. To quote what he said
Step 1:
Cut out three sides of the cardboardbox. (see images below)Step 2:
Cut and tape the white translucent paper on the sides that you juts cut out.Step 3:
Put the background paper in place, you can use a bit of tape to kind of “hang it up” in the back of the box.
Here are some pictures of my setup
The background of the photo that you get from this setup is not completely white, so you need to tweak the level a bit in photoshop by following these steps
1. Open up your photo in photoshop
2. Next, select ‘Layer’ -> ‘New adjustment layer’ -> ‘Level..’
3. Give your level layer a name, any name will do
4. When the level dialog is opened, select the white point sampler tool as shown below
5. Next, left click on the background so that the background is set to become THE white (in technical terms, the background is set to the value of 255 and everything else is sampled accordingly)
6. The image below shows the result after setting the area circled in red as the white point
You can try clicking around different areas of the background to get the correct brightness and exposure. You don’t want the photo to be too bright or overexposed otherwise you’ll lose a lot of details. Getting the right exposure while shooting the subject is essential. Normally, I purposely set the exposure to be +1 stop or +2 stops overexposed depending on the subject.
Hopefully I’ve explained enough in this post. I would’ve made a video of my workflow if I have the right tools (i.e camcorder and software like Camtasia) but I think you get the picture. Good luck and happy shooting!
