After months of ewing and awing, I finally bought myself a Canon Digital Rebel XT camera. Now, about three months later, I’m actually beginning to learn how to use it.

As a newbie in photography, I’ve found it very difficult to get off of the “fully automatic” settings mindset and beginning expanding my creative photographic abilities with all of the features that the Digital SLR has to offer. For me, the Canon Digital Learning Center was exactly what I needed. It provides so much insite into how to properly expose your subject, when to choose a certain ISO setting and pretty much everything else a beginner needs to know. Better yet, they offer tutorials specifically for the Rebel XT.

This past week and a half has probably been the most exciting and emotional time of my life. I bought Kristin an engagement ring and managed a whole three days of nerves and butterflies before I had the opportunity to propose.

It was so exciting to hear her say yes, my head almost hit the roof. Since then, we’ve began making lists, booking a hall, and picking the date (July 29, 2006).

Please watch by as I’m going make regular postings throughout the planning of my wedding! Be sure to check out my Flickr account to see some photos of me and my “Fiancé”

Quite recently I was looking for a powerful Slide Show Application that I could use on various freelance websites. I came across Slide Show Pro, an API that is used within Flash to provide you with an easily customizable Flash widget that can be used on virtually any site.

After working with the Application for about a half hour, I had my first “basic” slideshow up and running. I spent the remainder of the night tinkering and customizing, trying to get all that I could out of this wonderful little tool. One of my favorite features is the scalability. You can scale is up or down to the extreme, and still have a working slideshow.

The funny thing is, as much as I loved using SSP, I found myself shying away from it, sticking with the php based slideshow that I’ve been using for the past year.

All in all, SSP is is great way to get your photos out there quickly, inexpensively, and it provides you with a ton of features. It’s just that it isn’t nearly as user friendly as the code based SL and you require Flash to be installed on your computer to use it. Also, if you don’t put the time and effort into customizing it, you’ll end up getting a cool feature that thousands of other people are using on their sites. After all is said and done, I would give SSP a 3 out of 5 stars.

Anybody who works with CSS realizes the importance of floats. Css Max Design did up a very useful float tutorial that displays everything from the basics to creating a three column liquid layout. There is still some presentational mark-up, but the tutorial is very useful.

I’ve been doing a lot of research in regards to the advantages of coding a website to conform to the W3C specification but have been engaging extra interest in accessibility. I find it very interesting that very few people actually take an interest in making their websites useable for the visually impaired. Most of my potential clients could care less, until I explain to them that coding for accessiblity actually helps the biggest blind user of all, Google. For more information on this topic, have a look at this article from alistapart.