I know it is obvious I love photography but, if I have to be completely honest, it is a real love/hate relationship.

IT IS DANGEROUS

I often find myself, while driving, looking around identifying potential locations or admiring the colors of the sunset just to wake up at the sound of the honking car behind me who’s driver started to get impatient. So far I’ve been lucky with these moments

I CAN’T QUIT IT

And God knows I’ve tried. Every now and then I feel that photography is taking too much of my time I decide to quit but, no matter what, that urge to shoot and look at pictures always comes back even stronger. And when I finally give in and go out and shoot it feels like a mouthful of fresh air and I think to myself, “what have you been doing to yourself!”. I can, wholeheartedly, say that photography seems to be the only thing I am addicted to. Gosh how I hate to feel I am dependent of anything!

IT IS EXPENSIVE

I don’t think that there is a lot to explain here, photography is not exactly a cheap hobby. Cameras are expensive and good glass sure is expensive and when you have spend all that money and think you have all what you need there is always a new gadget that popups and I start trying to justify this new expense. For a person without any income from photography I spend too much on it.

IT IS TIME CONSUMING

I have a full time job that requires from me more than a full time schedule which leaves me with little time to spend with my wife and children. This makes me feel guilty when I share, what is already limited, between my family and my hobby.

IT CAN BE DEPRESSIVE

To be very honest I don’t always feel good with my own results, and coincidence wants it that, every time I feel I made some progress in photography, I come by these pictures that keep me stunned and show me how long the road is still ahead of me.
There are so many different styles of photography I’d like to experiment that sometimes I feel I should just quit.

COLOR MANAGEMENT

I hate color management! I find it so complex, every time I want to print a picture or even look at it on a monitor different than the one I edited it on I find myself looking at completely different colors and, no matter what, I can’t get to find a way to get consistent results. Well that surely looks a good reason to shoot in black and white but, even then, contrast changes.

IT IS OFTEN FORBIDDEN

Sometime you want to shoot and you can’t because, for a reason or another, that one place you’ve been longing to capture is a photography restricted zone. The first example I can think about with this matter is Jeita Grotto that is only at 30 min drive from where I live but I can’t take pictures in.
10. when you want to have you’re camera and you can’t (restricted places)

SOMETIMES I JUST DON’T WANT TO SHOOT

If it is frustrating to want to shoot but not to be able to, it is even more frustrating when you don’t want to shoot but you find yourself compelled to do it just because people are expecting you to do so!

Sometime, when invited to events/weddings, I just want to be with my wife and enjoy it, I don’t feel like playing the “camera man”. However there is always that last minute call “we are counting on you for the pictures”.

EVER ENDING STORAGE NEED

Yes storage is getting cheaper by the day, however data storage needs are growing exponentially too. With my current camera a RAW file is about 22megs in size and a typical retouched psd image in the 400 megs. Knowing that I keep 2 copies of each picture in both RAW and PSD format that’s roughly 1GB for each picture I edit.

WOW GREAT PIC WHAT CAMERA DO YOU HAVE

Well that’s a classic but it never fails to irritate me. I do feel the lust to sometimes change my gear just because a newer one came out but I am fully aware that this won’t improve my photography I just do it because I feel like it and I can afford it.
Just recently my wife was looking at pictures I took of our children and she asked me “Is it the cam or the lens? These pictures look just great”, that made me smile and told her “why can it not be simply your husband ?”

What about you ? What do you hate about photography?

No related posts.

I want to introduce you to Feeling Negative blog, a blog by my buddy Brian Auer, author of the famous Epic Edits photography blog.

Feeling negative is home base for the new-age film photographer, they are there to help you explore this amazing medium. You will find interesting discussions on things like old cameras and lenses, various films (expired and current), DIY equipment, darkroom stuff, and (grudgingly) computer stuff relevant to film photographers. They give back to the film photography community by featuring photos, articles, and equipments.

The site is organized into five main sections:
Camera Bag, Darkroom, Digital Darkside, Community and Other Stuff. For the beginners, they are covering the basics of shooting, developing, printing, scanning, etc. For the ol’ timers, they are digging into alternative techniques, various pieces of equipment and film stocks, DIY stuff, and new ways of working with an old process.

This is definitely a very interesting blog that you don’t want to miss, Hope you will have as much fun as i did browsing through the different sections on FeelingNegative.com

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I thank you all for your thoughts and emails and I feel really bad about my silence and I will update what’s missing soon by the end of this week I promise.

In the mean time let’s fix March assignment to “RUSH” and I have one free pro smugmug account to giveaway so I think it will be for the best “RUSH” picture. You still have a little less than 2 weeks for that contest so hurry and don’t forget to tag your pictures with “adidap.com Mar 09 assignment” (with the quotes)

OK me back to work I have an Exchange server to save !! Thanks again for your attention it sure is good.

Related posts:

1. Download ADIDAP Calendar March 2011 now

This is not the right way to vote for the pics… here are some very poor composition also , people are just marketing their pics and force people to vote for their pic only… is that the way for a photography competition ?? I don’t think so … lol .. its just making fun of the real creativity… !!!

Although I find this comment harsh and untrue, it got me thinking that you deserve to know how pictures end up published here on adidap.com

Simply submit to the group

I am grateful for every picture that is submitted to our flickr group and each one has its own minute of fame. The Reader’s Photos displays, in real time, the 20 most recent pictures of the group.

If you want more and would like to be published in one of the weekly rounds keep reading.

Check your thumbnail
Where I live we do not have the luxury of high speed internet connection and bandwidth is somehow limited here so, the first impression I take from a picture is the default thumbnail displayed in the pool. If I find the thumbnail appealing I will open to see the big picture.

Post often
I was hesitating to write this but it is true. I have the human tendency to want to feature more the people that I am familiar with. This doesn’t mean that I will automatically feature in each round all the pictures of the people I know but, if you are a regular, chances are that I will get familiar with your style and get to like your pictures and you will get featured more often.

Go colorful or colorless

I like colorful pictures as well as black and white ones, washed colors with a vintage look works well for me too. You can’t really go wrong here anything might catch my eye.

Go minimal

I love minimalism that’s a fact! I can’t help noticing these images where less is in fact more.

Go weird or unusual

I find myself featuring more of these images that just pop-up to my eyes and don’t look like anything I’ve seen before.

Get Close

Another tips, I like really closeup portrait

Make me think or wonder

I simply can’t get enough of these pictures that make me think. I can just look at them for hours lost in thoughts .

And that doesn’t mean you won’t get your picture featured unless you follow these “guidelines“, I see myself featuring a lot of landscape pictures for example.

Well that’s it! Rambling mode off.

To get featured in our yearly calendar that’s totally up to you guys, you are the one to vote remember !

Related posts:

1. ADIDAP taking again submissions for POTW

So here is my list trying to stay away from photography (as much as possible that is)

5 Things I Was Doing 10 Years Ago
1) Meeting my wife for the first time
2) Skipping classes at the uni
4) Starting my first “official” job (not as freelancer)
5) Having a lot of fun with my friends

5 Things On My To-Do List Today
1) Spending more time on my Bonsai hobby
2) Keep on swimming twice a week
3) Plan a family trip for next summer
4) Take my job to the next level
5) Insure my kids education

5 Snacks I Like
1) A nice Tiramisu cake
2) A big hot chocolate cup
3) A kinder Delice chocolate bar
4) Slat and vinegar chip bag
5) Why not add Häagen-Dazs ice cream

5 Things I Would Do If I Was A Millionaire
1) Travel a lot and visit all the places I dream of
2) Buy a full collection of MontBlanc pen (yea I’m a fan)
3) Open a fancy restaurant
4) Renovate my convertible VW
5) Finish furnishing our house

5 Places I Have Lived (For Various Lengths Of Time)
1) Ain Saade, Lebanon (Where I live now)
2) Nice, France
3) Egypt
4) that’s it really

5 Jobs I Have Had
1) Freelance programmer
2) ISP technical support
3) Systems Engineer in a bank
4) IT infrastructure consultant
5) Nothing here sorry

5 People I Tag
1) Mireille
2) Rami
3) Fady
4) Udi
5) Neils

No related posts.

May 22nd 2007, nearly one year ago, I took this picture and called it “Give peas a chance”.
Today Lebanon is experiencing a utter level of hate, a kind of war we all thought would never occur again !

Not only I hate politics but I don’t even understand it, so this is not a political post however what we’re living today is really off the hook ! Lebanese people are dying on hands of other Lebanese people and this is disgusting.

If you don’t like this post I’m sorry just skip it out, however this is not the picture of Lebanon I’d like to be transmitted on medias and this is definitely not the picture of Lebanon I’d like my children to know !

I have also added a “Give peace a chance” ribbon to my blog as you can see it in the corner and I will remove it once violence has stopped in the streets of Lebanon. If you are Lebanese and you’re fed-up of what is happening you can add the ribbon to your website/blog by just pasting the following line of code into your blog/website code.

Hoping I’ll never have to post something like that again

No related posts.

So I will share with you here MY experience with social websites, the ones I use, the one I love and the ones you could really help me make a change with!

Going personal

A few thing you might be interested to know about me. I, like most of other bloggers, am not a pro blogger nor a pro photographer. Photography is my passion and I decided to blog about it to fill a need when I cannot have my camera at hand.
I have a full time job as IT consultant so I blog at night when everyone else is sleeping.
Recently Adidap has grown beyond my dreams and I set to myself a few goals that only you can help me achieve.

• Have 1500 RSS subscribers by the end of April 2008: Currently 1000 subscribers
• Get into the top 100k sites on alexa by the end of 2008: Currently ranked at 136k
• Be part of the top 10k blogs on technorati by the end of 2008: Currently at 44k

Blogging for money?: Although I wouldn’t mind at all making a living out of ADIDAP and photography, this is not about to happen at all. Rather I use the income generated by adidap to sustain my photography hobby buy new material etc…

Metric sites and my take on them

There are quite a few metric sites that I use frequently to measure the success of adidap

Alexa is not a social website but more a metric one that rank websites based on their traffic. I have found alexa not to be very accurate and sites tends to get ranked better as they get older. Although I have had times when adidap’s traffic was considerably better than today, my alexa ranking is still going up. Although not accurate I use it and would like to see adidap in the top 100K site by the end of the year.

Care to help? To help me achieve this goal you could, not just visit adidap daily, but also download alexa toolbar. I have read, and noticed, that visits from people with alexa toolbar installed have better value to alexa ranking. This is probably because alexa can directly track the visits.

Technorati is a mixture of a social network and a blog only ranking site. It allows you to add your favorite blogs and ranks them based on other blogs linking to yours and the number of fans. I started using this one rather recently and I discovered a few great blog with it.

Care to help? I have also listed in my goals to get adidap to the top 10K blogs by the end of 2008, to help me achieve this, if you are a technorati user, add this blog to your favorites

Feedburner is one of the greatest tools in any blogger arsenal since it helps keep track of the number of rss subscribers and it is definitely on the top of my goal list to reach 1500 subscribers by the end of April 2008.

Care to help? Simply add adidap to your favorite feed reader.

Social sites and my take on them

I wouldn’t imagine adidap without flickr. Flickr for me is a daily bread that I use to

1. Host most images I use in posts: Flickr offers unlimited storage and bandwidth so I use it to host various images/icons/logos that I use here.
2. My inspiration bits: Thanks to great flickrees photographers that make use of the cc license on their pictures, I am able to find photos to fit every post I write
3. Interact with you: Finally adidap flickr group allows me to see and share more of your wonderful pictures day after day

If there is ONE social network I would invite you to use it would be StumbleUpon! Adidap have been literally living feeding from StumbleUpon traffic so KUDOS to SU users and to everyone of you who take the time discover the articles you love. For the rest using StumbleUpon is really simple, you just download the tool bar and ThumbUp the pages you like so why not giving it a try on adidap home page right now ? No honestly SU is a great traffic source and every stumble counts so next time you read an article you love, here or elsewhere, be generous stumble it. Here is a link to my profile if you feel like adding me as a friend too!

PhotographerVoter is a digg like community specialized in photography links! Luckily the people are much nicer than at digg.com and I have noticed that PhotographyVoter is growing day after day and bringing in more traffic to for published links.

Networking

The project subject is Social Photography isn’t it? Well, for me, the most important part of socializing is not the social websites but it is rather to meet and make friends from readers and other photography bloggers !!! I could never stress on this enough. Taking the time to know each one of you better and sending some link love every Saturday has made me some great friends and this the most rewarding for me.

I hope this was not overkill !

No related posts.

So this post is going to include some stats and the best posts of the year, and hopefully next year I will have something to compare to !

Some number first

• Posts : 371 since August 2006
• Comments: 662 since August 2006 not counting the spams of course
• Unique visits: 339,091 in 2007
• Page views: 692,617 in 2007
• RSS subscribers: 600+
• Alexa rank: 187k
• Technorati: rank 59,623 authority 109

Best Posts

January

• How to pose your model: The 1-2-3 positions
• 28 Exercises to help you unleash your photography potential
• What flickr does to our pictures

February

• Photoshop Tutorial: A drop of color
• Fix Adobe Photoshop CS3 startup problem
• Striping out that JPG out of RAW

March

• Photoshop tutorial: Layer mask for beginners
• Photoshop Tutorial: From image to sketch in 4 easy steps

November

• Photographer’s Christmas Shopping list
• 300+ Free photoshop Christmas Brushes
• Better hand held shots at low shutter speeds
• Photoshop Calendar 2008 templates
• What is a crop body anyway?

December

• Model Release: When do you need it and where to get it
• Tips on Photographing Christmas ornaments
• Photoshop Tutorial: Turning day into night
• Photoshop case study: from picture to Christmas card
• DIY : Poor’s man ring flash
• Going with the grain: Guest post
• Minimalism: because complexity sucks !

As you have noticed there are 7 full months missing from that list ! I am very ashamed of this but I reached a point of de-motivation back then and this post will help me remember that this should never happen again .

Thanks

Of course I would like to take the time to thank

• YOU: There is no way adidap would exist if there was no one to read what I am writing ! It was YOU who pushed me out of my de-motivation phase when I realized that I’ve ignored adidap for 6 months+ and still I had people visiting it… So the first and topmost credit is for you ladies and gents thanks
• Family and friends: Well they are all I have right
• Brian: Well Brian’s name could fit in both readers and friends however I want to reserver a special thank for him ! I met Brian in early November when he wrote his list of 87 Great Photography Blogs and Feeds. I was quite annoyed I was not on that list and I got in touch with Brian. His motivation to me was such as ADIDAP jumped from 200 to 600+ rss subscribers in less than 2 months ! That’s 300% increase. IF you don’t know Brian make sure to read his Photography blog !

What’s for 2008

I really hope ADIDAP will still grow in 2008 the one thing I can promise is that I will not ignore it or let it down as I did in 2007. I will keep on adding helpful stuff day after day and meet more photography passionate people like you and me !

Finally I wish you all the best for the coming year and to a year full of photography, beauty and joy !

No related posts.

We wish you all a warm and safe Christmas and may it be filled with joy and happiness !!

The Khater’s family

No related posts.

Yes it is 2009 I’m not mistaken !!!
The Idea
Here is what I am thinking of, I am posting every Sunday an Adidap Flickr Round so why not preparing an ADIDAP calendar for 2009 with the best pictures posted on Adidap Flickr Group ?

How it will happen

Starting from this month, December 2007 ” ((“yea I’m a bit late but we still have time”))” every week you will vote for the best picture of the week posted in Adidap Flickr Round and then at the end of each month we will have a special vote for the Best picture of the month which will be chosen to be the Picture of the month in 2009′s calendar.
December 2007 picture for example will be on December 2009 calendar, Jan 2007 best picture will be on Jan 2008 calendar etc…

In December 2008, I will prepare a calendar for 2009 with the 12 chosen pictures ” ((“With full credits to each photo owner”))” and make it available for download ” ((“The calendar will be free”))” so we can all enjoy it.

What do you think, ready for a full year of photography ?

Related posts:

1. Download ADIDAP Calendar April 2011 now
2. Download ADIDAP Calendar March 2011 now

I tried a lot of recovery softwares but none were able to do anything, I sent the card to a friend in France and he gave it to a specialized company for review. To make a long story short they contacted him saying that can give the recovery a try but, IF they succeed, it can cost me up to €400.

So what do you think ? Should I just take a deep breath and tell them “GO FOR IT” ? What would have you done ?

No related posts.

Two days ago I called for all ADIDAP readers to drop me a note and I got 11 replies from 11 of you from 11 different places in the world but I didn’t reply to a single one why ?

When I first wrote the post I freaked out I didn’t want to publish it, I was afraid of not having a single reply. And then when I saw some reaction I was like WOW this is the best post I’ve ever wrote (in my opinion of course) it was so good and so important to me that I didn’t want to touch it, I just want to keep it unspoiled so please don’t think I ignored replying.

Now the next question: how many replies I was expecting ?
Honestly I wasn’t expecting anything, but should I have had no replies at all I think I would have decided to close ADIDAP. But I was ready to go on for just one replying reader

So thank you

• Tammy Cravit
• Brian Auer: well for much more thank just replying to the post
• lepis from Finland: By the way keep your blog in Finnish diversity is good IMHO, get another one in English
• JLES from Spain: gracias amigo, muchas gracias
• JeffH
• Rami Fayoumi from Lebanon: when is our next outing ?
• Janek Gasiorowski from Polland
• Alex from Brazil
• Serge from Russia
• Arnaud de France: A propos pour moi la France c’est ma seconde patrie
• Di from Texas

for answering my call

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• I know that about 20% only of the hits ADIDAP gets are returning visitors
• I know that ADIDAP has nearly 300 rss subscribers (btw I really need to hit 300 before Christmas it is a personal challenge)
• I know that ADIDAP has 350+ newsletter subscribers

But I do not know you…

So come on be kind enough to drop me a comment here IF you consider yourself and ADIDAP reader. I would like to know more about you, your websites/blogs, what subjects you’d like me to cover etc…

I really hope someone will reply

No related posts.

No related posts.

So if you have a picture and you’d like to explain the technique involved behind it, join ADIDAP Flickr Group and submit your picture to it, don’t forget to add in the description “ADIDAP Readers section” and I will contact you.

Related posts:

1. ADIDAP taking again submissions for POTW