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Another set of inspirational photos from great photographers.

This week, all from Flickr. So, if you’re a Flickr member, go there and leave your comments.

Five Stars of the Week

The layout of a blog is perceived as the personal brand not only of the blog but of the blogger.

In the beginning…

In the beginning, and my very first attempt at serious blogging, this blog was dedicated to more “personal discharges” than photography, although already inserted on my photography-related site (see the TLD for what I’m talking about) - and thus the name.

With time I saw myself writing more and more about photography than anything else and I decided to dedicate it exclusively to photography, with a focus on digital photography, and although the name might not make much sense, it stuck, and I think if for nothing else, it distinguishes it from the crowd.

On the visual side, the template this blog is using still came from those very early days, almost since I made it live (there was another but for a very shot period of time). It took me ages to adapt the original theme and customize it to what I needed.

The hunt restarts…

With growth, I’m starting to have the feeling that the current theme, although I still like it, is not enough to support the blog anymore. I need something that interacts more with the readers while, at the same time, un-clutters it and makes it more reader-friendly.

So, the hunt begins again…

I’m looking for a new theme. This time though, supported by a much more extensive knowledge of CSS and how a Content Management System like Wordpress works, I hope to find one and customize it in a way that stays for a longer period of time.

So, this is where I need your help.

How would you like this site to look like? What are the main things that you think a blog dedicated to photography should have? A one sidebar layout or two? Bigger header? Bigger footer?

Tell me what you think. Help me in this process so that you can also enjoy it more. Or, is it good the way it is?

Share your thoughts on the comments bellow. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

For my feed readers, you probably need to pop around the site to take a look at how it is right now.

Thanks again for any help you may provide.

It’s been so long since I distributed some link love, and more importantly directed my readers to some great articles around the photography blogs world, that this edition will go a little back than a week.

Nonetheless, these are all great reads and teach something of value.

So, here we go:

• Thomas Hawk, the author of that fantastic video I shared sometime back, published a couple of posts with his views on copyright law and fair use. Although I completely agree with the first one, in reducing the time frame in which a work is copyrighted, the second one is a little more controversial and I’d have to think about it more deeply and in view of my own situation. But go there and read what Thomas has to say.

• David at the Digital Pro Talk shares 12 ways to really improve your photography in 2008. Great tips to really rediscover yourself and your photography.

• After that mild confusion that spread at the first sound of new laws coming that would affect photographers while traveling, Ben from the Complete Digital Photography wrote some more about it with a clarification. It seems that there are no reasons to panic after all.

• And it seems that the subject of Creative Commons will never be dead. This time it was Dan Heller’s Photography Business Blog’s turn to share his view on the subject. And it goes more deeply than it seems at first sight. Later on, Dan published a Proposal for the Creative Commons that would serve photography better.

• And if you are a photographer you know what a portfolio is. But do you know the best way to create yours? Brian, again with the high quality posts he has us used to, shares some tips on the Art of Making a Portfolio. It is a subject that I’ll probably return sometime in the future as I think there is some more to be said about it.

• On a more technical side, bokeh has been and continues to be a way to increase the beauty of a photo and direct attention to your subject. To create bokeh there is the lens way and the photoshop way, and Jeff at Beyond Megapixels teaches both. If you want more on how to use shallow Depth of Field to create bokeh and make those photos “shine”, Lau at PhotoAxe has a nice tutorial.

• Now, on to portrait photography. Besides the 31 Tips Brian “concluded” from his December challenge (nice ones by the way), there was one other, this time at the digital Photography School, that caught my eye: Catchlights (no pun intended). Those little things that add great value to portraits or, according to some professionals, ruin them.

And with a list this big, besides all the other posts from blogs you might be subscribed to, you have more than enough to keep you busy.