Another week passed, and here is a next dose of some interesting links:

- Nature photography from Ethan Meleg - enjoy his portfolio here and blog over here.

- A very useful and promising initiative to describe best photo spots - Open Source Photography Guides. It is broken by country and then by region and published in the blog style. Main international site.  NSW, Australia portion. It is quite new, so do not expect to see a lot.

- Nick Veasey, X-RAY Photograper. It is not something very new, I knew about this excellent porfolio for a while now, but though that it would be good thing to mention.

- Deep Sky Astrophotography for Beginners. If you don’t have those expensive telescopes and tracking devices, you can try using image stacking techique to get some good results.

- For long trips, I usually do some homework and prepare a spreadsheet with sunrise/sunset times for each location for each day. It is good to be prepared, but I was always hoping to have a more dynamic way of determining sunset and sunrise times. UTMDATA for S60 Symbian-based mobile phones - this small freeware application runs on the mobile phone, can read current GPS position from the built-in or external receiver and calculate current sunrise and sunset times.

- I have also spent some time this week, exploring different ways to fit graduated filters on super wide-angle lenses like Canon 14mm F2.8 II. Here are some useful forum topics and guides:

- Using a Cokin X-Pro filter on the Sigma 12-24 lens
- DPReview forum: 14-24 with graduated ND filters
- DPReview forum: Help! Polarizing Filter On The 14mm II Lens
- FredMiranda forum: Nikon 14-24 on 1Ds3 + filters question
- FredMiranda forum: dusk ambience

I think I’ll try to make my own holder for Cokin X-Pro filters that would work on 14mm. I’ll post my results.

In this weekly links post:

- Keith Luitit PhotoBlog. It is in the MUST SEE category. It looks like he is the first who has combined tilt-shifting and time-lapse photography together, producing some great videos of Sydney. Currently he has 4 videos availble in his blog.

- We have some disturbing developmens around the Internet Filter here in Australia. Currently, government plans to make such filter mandatory for all users without opt-out option. Please visit http://nocleanfeed.com/ to see what you can do to stop it.

- In the Canon 5DMarkII category we have a couple of RAW images posted on akihabaranews.com, taken by pre-production Canon 5D Mark II.

As I mentioned in my last weekly links, I was planning to get one of these R-Straps. I received one today and, so far, I think that it is the most convenient camera strap I have ever tried or seen. And it is not expensive as well.

I’ve got RS-1 version – nice and simple, I don’t really need all those pockets for flash cards and mobile phones.

Have a look at this nice youtube video (not mine):

Official webpage: http://www.blackrapid.com/
http://www.camerasdirect.com.au is their Australian dealer.

- Tech Tips by Chuck Westfall, Canon USA’s main media spokesman
- Photomicrography,  everything about “the taking of photographs through a microscope”
- Rapid R-Strap Review, seems to be very convenient, I will be getting one of these very soon. Official website and australian distributor
- How to hold a camera, by Joe McNally