General Technology

Archive for July, 2009

There are twp types of online roulette available. The European roulette that has 37 number slots and the American roulette that has 38 number slots. The extra number is the double zero pocket. The wheel of fortune is a great game to try your chance. The name casino brings to mind colorful lights, glamour, games and drinks and not to forget beautiful girls. But then a person had to plan and spend time visiting a casino and spend money for it.

Online casinos generally offer odds and payback percentages that are comparable to land-based casinos. Some online casinos claim higher payback percentages for slot machine games, and some publish payout percentage audits on their websites. Assuming that the online casino is using an appropriately programmed random number generator, table games like blackjack have an established house edge. The payout percentages for these games are established by the rules of the game.

Get many advantages from the online roulette that available, you can find much information about how to play online roulette, and how to choose best online casino. T hat should give you some relief. After a while you can log on to another game and try your luck. Some of the best casino games are slots, roulette and poker. You don’t need any expertise to play slots. Simply log on and try your luck. You never know; you may be in for a surprise.

The popularity of casinos across the land provides us with a parallel to what’s happening for on-line stock photographers. There are some big winners. We always hear about them. We seldom hear about the losers unless chat group members crow about their unsuccesses. However, few artists or photographers like to brag about their lack of sales.

The other parallel is related to how casinos seem to multiply across the country not only in locations but also in physical size. If you’ve ever re-visited a casino, you are surprised to see how the facility has been enlarged.

On-line photo-display websites have proliferated in the same way on the Internet. Not only the sites themselves are increasing, but also the numbers of images available are growing. Some sites boast that they receive 1,000 new pictures a day. My arithmetic tells me that’s 30,000 pictures a month, or nearly 11 million a year.

SOMETHING’s GOTTA GIVE.

Of course not all on-line venues receive 1,000 new pictures a day, but let’s say they receive 100 pictures a day. That ’s 3,000 per month, or 36,000 per year. And, let’s not forget all of those personal websites that provide a mini-on-line service to photobuyers.

Now if there were 350 on-line stock photography websites (which there are at the time of this writing), contributing 36,000 images per year to DigitalCasinos, plus all those personal sites, we would have a total picture count of…well, my pocket calculator can’t calculate that high.

Can the storage world of present-day servers handle these kinds of numbers of images? If they can’t today, we know that some way, somehow, they will figure out a way tomorrow to meet the expanding nature of DigitalCasinos.

And why do I say “Digital Casinos”? Because for a qualified stock photographer, it’s a big gamble to put talent and labor into an endeavor where the law of probability is not on your side.

Digital cameras and upscale scanners are driving the number of available images upwards. Anyone with a quality digital camera and sensitive eye for imagery and a desire to figure out the technicalities of uploading images to an on-line website(s), can climb aboard, and they are doing so in droves. With this on-line proliferation of images, the Internet has become a big gambling casino.

Why a gamble? Like with any lottery, your chances are diminished by the expanding number of entries. It always makes big headlines when a person wins a lottery. The rest of us dig into our pockets for the next try. Should this be discouraging to you?

Not if you look at this phenomenon as a purely artistic endeavor. More so than ever, specialization becomes a key to escaping the lottery factor and getting your images published. The specialization aspect is one that I have preached for thirty years, “Specialize and you will succeed.” Those that listened thirty years ago have built a deep collection of images, all focused on a few select subject — ones that they love photographing, and that build equity each time they are out photographing.

If you’re just starting out as a photographer, forget being all things to all people. Figure out what area of specialization you enjoy the most (education, medicine, auto racing, reptiles, skydiving, etc.) and concentrate on that area. Become a mini-expert. Become a monopoly with few competitors.

And why is this important? As the Internet expands and on-line image sites expand along with it, photobuyers find it more difficult to find that just-right photo. They no longer wish to surf through hundreds of nature pictures when they are looking for a photo of, and I’ll use a keyphrase here, ‘Tapping Rubber Trees Rugen Island.’ Are there many on-line galleries that can indicate to you the source of that photo? Only those that have required their contributors to use key phrases to describe their images.

In the last century, locating a hard-to-find image was a luxury. Most researchers settled for “good enough for government-work” – and books and magazines from that era reflect this. Today, for photo researchers, Google and other search engines have become a magic wand for finding that hard-to-find image. Using a word-search feature on their computer, they are able to sift through hundreds, even thousands of keywords to locate the source of that exact photo – in just seconds. The laborious search process of the last century is over. Search engines are teaching us that finding the exact location of a specialized photo quickly and easily is only a matter of learning how to do it.

If this new era of stock photography has made photographers become pre-press specialists, it has also made photo researchers become library scientists.

Photographers are unique in their style and picture content. By specializing in your photographic interest area or areas, you can escape the big digital-casino-in-the-sky and become an important resource to specific photobuyers, who will discover you thanks to search engines.

If you are like other amateur photographers who go to a local photo studio to get your negatives developed or have a digital camera and only visit the studio in the neighborhood when you have decided on the best ones worthy of printing, or even if you send the photos online to a web studio service for sending you the positives, you may have often wondered what it would be like to have a photo studio of your own. It is only natural to think about this if you are passionate about going click and snap every now and then; however, if your work is mostly outdoor shoots, the need for a photographer’s studio is very limited especially if you do not have the time and energy required to invest in running the studio by yourself – not to mention the dough!

On the other hand, if you are basically an indoor shoot preferring person, you may be taken in by the benefits of mood lighting, perfect background setting, least disturbance work and controlled environment offered by your personal photography space so you can work in a focused manner with the model and get the perfect shot by adjusting studio lights to suit the ambience needed, which is so difficult during outdoor shoots that can be ruined by unexpected bad weather or other unforeseen circumstances. It is easier to achieve right lighting for the perfect shot in a studio rather than on an outdoor shoot where a photographer is at the mercy of Mother Nature and many a time, tourists or public gathering to see the shoot, which can be distracting as well as a waste of time.

So, even as the realm of photography has become so vast and varied that hobby photographers are taking to understanding the various nuances of this specialized field in order to become professionals or at least, trying to make some money off their interest, which many teenagers and young adults have been doing in the recent past, there is a lot to be attributed to the multi-dimensional features of new-age cameras in popularizing this hobby – along with the need for having a personal studio. When using cameras with video and audio features, photo-storage features (digital cameras and cell phone cameras) as well as those with additional photo-share abilities, the role of the humble camera when used with computerized gizmos that allow for alternations and touch-ups is a truly varied one that can best be utilized in a studio environment. But, one must not forget the challenges of taking to new technology such as required by setting up a photo studio with the latest digital photo alteration machines that allow one to make calendars, print stickers, stationery, gift items, use software like Photoshop to add or delete subjects in the photograph as well as refine their features to make the end result look fantastic; the amount of business coming in must decide the need for the hobbyist for setting up shop.

If renting out a small place for a few months shows good results, it may be a better to stick around with a rented studio or even a room in your house before taking the plunge to buy a studio as a lot of equipment and support, such as studio lights, backgrounds and perhaps even photographer’s assistants may be needed to build the business and the budget must be ready to accommodate these needs, so make one out first before considering other frills.