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Photography often plays a major role in web design. So It’s no surprise that many web designers have an interest in it. However, there are so many aspects to photography such as lighting, composition, and equipment features that can make it difficult to master. In this article I’ve rounded up 10 of the best blogs that consistently produce valuable tips and resources to help you with your photography.

Digital Photography School

Digital Photography School is a website with simple tips to help digital camera owners get the most out of their cameras. It is maintained by Darren Rowse who you probably know from ProBlogger.net.

The Photo Argus

The Photo Argus is a resource for photographers novice to advanced. It’s aim is to deliver useful information, inspiration, technique, photographer showcases and more.

Epic Edits

Epic Edits is a resource and community for photography enthusiasts of all experience levels. It’s focus is to explore many aspects of photography through discussion, example, and participation in group projects.

PetaPixel

PetaPixel was born in May of 2009, and is a blog about photography geared towards tech-savvy digital photographers. Our goal is inform, educate, and inspire in all things related to photography.

Strobist

Strobist is about one thing: learning how to use off-camera flash with your dSLR to take your photos to the next level.

Photojojo

The writers of Photojojo scour the internets, rip pages out of magazines, ransack our friends’ closets, and go through dumpsters to find the very best Photo tips, DIY projects, and Gear.

Joe McNally’s Blog

This is the blog of Joe McNally, a phototgrapher for National Geographic, Life, and Sports Illustrated. Joe’s blog is full of inspiration and tips that will help your photography.

Photocritic

The Photocritic is all about learning more about photography, from the incredibly insightful (rarely) to the dreadfully mundane (also, hopefully rarely) via just about everything in between.

DIY Photography

DIY Photography’s goal is to provide a place for photographers to share, and learn from each other, and to bring cheap studio equipment to those who can’t really buy all the expensive stuff out there.

Photodoto

Whether you shoot with an inexpensive digital compact or the latest digital SLR, Photodoto will help you get the most out of your digital camera.

In 2009 we’ve witnessed many talented and generous designers creating tons of amazing stuff and giving it away for us to use. We’ve already shown you all of the best free fonts from this past year. Now we’re going to show you the best free icon sets. There were plenty of free sets created this year, but these stand above the rest in terms of quality and usefulness.

Basic

Onebit Icon Set 2

Hand Pointer Icons

WP WooThemes Ultimate Icon Set

Led Icon Set

MinIcons

Grunge Peeling Stickers

Onebit

Web Injection

Watercolor Icon Pack

Finance

Flavour Extended

Social Media Icons

Must Have Icons

Social Icons Hand Drawn

Weby Icons

Quartz

If you’re the type of Web Designer that doesn’t like to get your hands dirty with XHTML and CSS, SiteGrinder 2 could become your best friend. It’s a plugin for Photoshop that can turn a design into a fully functional website. This means you will no longer need to outsource the programming of your designs.

Enabling Photoshop to Do More

Out of the box, Photoshop is a robust graphics package with a powerful set of tools that enable designers to work their magic and create visually stunning web designs. In a typical web site creation workflow, when the design process is finished, so is Photoshop’s role. However, if you’re using SiteGrinder 2, Photoshop becomes a fully functional web page building solution. It’s a plugin that makes the transition from design to code seamless.

SiteGrinder 2 also ensures that the integrity of the design is maintained. This is so important for designers. Often times in a typical web site creation process, important aspects of a design have to be omitted because they require complex coding. SiteGrinder 2 makes sure that your design will look just as good in the browser as it does in Photoshop.

The main aspect of SiteGrinder 2 that designers will love the most is the fact that no coding knowledge is required. All of the code is generated by the plugin and it happens behind the scenes. And if you are the programming type, SiteGrinder 2 is going to be a huge time saver. There’s no longer a need to switch to Dreamweaver or TextMate after your design is finished. SiteGrinder 2 does all of the coding for you, leaving you more time to tweak your design.

So How Does it Work?

This explanation of how SiteGrinder 2 works is going to be short, because it’s such a simple process. It’s all about how you name your layers in Photoshop. The plugin requires special “hints” that tell it what each layer should be. For example, if you have a button in your design, just add “-button” to the end of its layer name, or “-rollover” to define its rollover state. Of course, for some designers this will mean actually being organized with their layer naming and overall PSD structure, but this is something that web designers should get in the habit of doing anyway. Plus the time saved by using this plugin makes it a non-issue. These hints are also used to create more complex web site elements, such as drop down menus, forms, multi-media content and more.

Basic or Pro

SiteGrinder 2 comes in two flavors: Basic and Pro. The right version for you will really depend on the functionality requirements of your sites. The Basic version gives you all the standard features, but does limit you to using solid color backgrounds. Going Pro will give you more options for background images and the added ability to easily create photo galleries, include Flash media, and add forms to your pages.

When products come along that claim to make difficult and complex tasks “push button” easy, it’s natural to be skeptical. However after using SiteGrinder 2, I’m convinced that this is a powerful plugin that can make a web designer’s job much easier.

Visit the official SitGrinder 2 site to learn more about this product.

Adjusting and enhancing photos in Photoshop can involve a lot of trial and error, and be very time consuming. Thankfully their are actions to make our job easier. Here are 50 excellent Photoshop actions that can add professional looking enhancements to your photos with the click of a button. There are a few links below that contain more than one action.

Bright Eyes

Old Photo Action

Cool photo effect action

Soft Elegance

Pencil Draw Photoshop Action

InFection

Old style sepia effect

Photoshop Photography Action Set (8 actions)

Polaroid GENERATOR V1 (9 actions)

Vintage

Diabolic

Dim and Jade

Lith Print

Gradient action

Red action

Sharp action

Dream Blur

Oscar Pilch Photoshop Action

Wedding Enhancers (12 actions)

Black white sepia

Photo Coloring II

Stylish Sepia

Retro

Photo Coloring 11.2

Website footers have become more than just a place to put the copyright information and a few links. Now web designers are making full use of the footer as way to keep the visitor on the site longer. You will see from the examples below that this can be achieved by using clever placement of graphics and design elements along side links to additional content.

Story Pixel

The Photo Argus

RedVelvetart

Carsonified

Ecoki

Sprocket House

Media140 London

Edgepoint Church

Blog Amuki

Biola Undergrad

Brad Candullo

CSS Tricks

Branded07

Jason Santa Maria

Sam Rayner

Orman Clark

Revive Africa

Psdtuts

R.U.4 Children