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Tripods can be a photographers best friend when it comes to Landscape, Portrait, low light photography, or just when you need a third hand. However they can be a bit cumbersome to carry around. Mini tripods are ok as long as you can find somewhere quite flat and level to put them on, I also find them a bit restrictive to use.

Last year I was bought a Gorillapod as a gift, and as soon as I took it out of the packaging knew that it was going to come in handy.
The Gorillapod worked (and still does) so well it went everywhere with me and I just about stopped using my full size tripod.

How does the Gorillapod work?
Unlike a mini tripod it doesn’t need a level or elevated surface. Each Gorillapod is made up of 30 or more flexible ball joints that have about 45 degree of adjustment and can rotate 360 degrees. Each ball joint also has a rubber ring grip as do the feet for extra gripping power. This means it can go anywhere and literally wrap its arms (or its legs) around just about anything, for example, branches, tables, rocks, banisters, railings, in fact nearly any object in sight, well almost.
I found the Gorillapod to be tough, very flexible and it easily fitted in my coat pocket and my camera bag.
The tripod head, has a “slim-line attachment” which slides out to allow easy attachment to your camera. Once the attachment is tightened into the tripod mount on you camera, you just slide it into the head until it clicks. A push-button release holds the attachment into place. For extra security a rotating ring lock prevents the push button from being depressed and releasing the slim-line attachment.
It comes in three sizes, and the one I received was the SLR-Zoom.

The smallest and lightest is the Gorillapod original which is ideal for any compact digital camera, this tripod only weighs 1.6oz and stands 5.9 inches (15cm) high.

The next biggest is the Gorillapod SLR, which is designed for lightweight SLR and Video cameras up to 800g (1.75 lbs) in weight, this tripod is 9.8 inches high (25cm), weighs 5.8oz, as it is bigger than the Compact version it can adapt itself to more things.

Then there is the daddy, and that is the Gorillapod SLR-Zoom which is designed for heavier SLRs and can hold up to 6.5 pounds in weight, more than enough for a camera with a large zoom lens attached. Although it is the same size as the SLR version, the legs are chunkier and it weighs 8.5oz.

Overall I really like my Gorillapod, its strong, flexible and comes in very handy, the downside is that I seem to be in the photos more.

I highly recommend the Gorillapod, click on the link for more information and to buy, or you buy them from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Most digital photographers would love to own Adobe Photoshop as it is simply the best photo editor on the market. However for most day to day basic image editing it is an overkill, because it has far more features than you would ever use, and at around $600 in the US and £500 in the UK is a bit on the expensive side.
So what are the alternatives?
I have searched the internet to save you time, and found the top 3 free photo editors based on my and other users reviews, below are the results.
Do you use another free photo editor and consider it better than the choices below?
Let me know in the comments at the bottom of this article.

Gimp 2.4
This application has many features of Adobe Photoshop but not quite as polished, however as it is completely free this is a great piece of software. It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.
When you first install and use Gimp you might find the interface a little bit confusing, however there is some very good documentation that is both in-depth and easy to digest, which you can either download or read directly from the website.
The latest version of Gimp is 2.4, and this application just gets better and better.
If you just want to use Gimp as a basic photo editor then it is a great tool for the job, it can get rid of red eye, colour correct photos, and if your image is a bit blurry or soft, there is a sharpening tool.

Gimp has many features and is designed to be made better with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything, which can be downloaded and installed at a later date
This application has many features

• Full suite of painting tools
• Sub-pixel sampling for all paint tools for high quality anti-aliasing
• Extremely powerful gradient editor and blend tool
• Supports custom brushes and patterns
• Full alpha channel support
• Layers and channels
• Multiple Undo/Redo(limited only by diskspace)
• Editable text layers
• Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear and flip
• Selection tools including rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy and intelligent
• Advanced path tooldoing bezier and polygonal selections.
• Transformable paths, transformable selections.
• Quickmask to paint a selection.

Overall this software program inherits most of the tools that Photoshop has, but the interface can seem a little cluttered and messy, until you get used to it, saying that it is free and excellent nevertheless. Some newbies might be put off by its sheer number of features. As I wrote earlier it has very good documentation that will take you through all of its features.
To download the software which is 14.4MB in size click on this link.

Paint.net
This application started out as a better replacement for Microsoft Paint, but has developed into a sophisticated package.
Paint.NET has many of the powerful features that expensive commercial applications have, including the ability to use layers, remove red eye (which has been improved on the latest version), and everything from blurring, sharpening, distortion, noise, and embossing are all in here. Also included is 3D Rotate/Zoom effect that makes it very easy to add perspective and tilting.
It has a simple, clear interface, if you’re new to photo editing will find it easy to use.

More features:

• Simple tools for drawing shapes, including an easy-to-use curve tool for drawing splines or Bezier curves
• Adjustment of an image’s brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, curves, and levels.
• Convert an image to black and white, or sepia-toned.
• Magic Wand tool for selecting regions of similar color
• Clone Stamp tool for copying or erasing portions of an image.
• Unlimited History

And much more.

Overall Paint.net does not have as many features as Gimp, but for most users, this application has just about every tool you would ever need for basic image manipulation.
The latest Version is 3.1 and only 1.5MB in size, you can download it from here.

Serif Photo Plus 6.0
PhotoPlus 6.0 has all the basic tools you need and a few more up its sleeve.
This version is mainly aimed at newbies but will suffice the more experienced user. Like the other Free versions you can remove red eye, correct colour casts, and sharpen blurred images.
I get the feeling that all these free image editors are trying to make their software resemble the Photoshop interface, which is not a bad thing, if you ever do upgrade to Photoshop you will at least be familiar with the main window.

Key features

• Creative Tools Enhance your images with easy-to-use creative tools, such as paintbrush, airbrush, clone, smudge and erase - adjustable brush settings include size, shape, softness and fade for complete control.
• Digital Darkroom Adjust brightness, contrast, colour hue, saturation, enhance, repair and tweak your photos for great results every time.
• Deform Tool, lets you rotate, resize, skew and reshape images.
  Overall this application is excellent but if you need more advanced functions for example background eraser, 3D effects, etc then you need to upgrade to version 8 at a small cost. You can download the application from this link. The files size is 19.4MB.

I know what you are going to ask next, which one is the best?

If you are after a more complex application with lots and lots of added extras, then Gimp is your answer.

If you are after something more basic to remove red eye, and maybe sharpen and crop your images, then either Paint.net or Photoplus6 would be ideal. The choice is yours, good luck.

Popularity: 41% [?]

How would like to have all the photos from your camera wirelessly and invisibly uploaded to your computer automatically?
No buttons, no antennas, and no wires.
Well now you can, with the Eye-Fi Wireless SD memory card, which looks like a normal 2GB memory card and works with nearly any camera that takes SD memory. If your camera uses a compact flash card don’t worry as you can purchase your Eye-fi with it bundled in, (which costs extra).
Here’s how it works:
All you need to do is set up the card once, with the included USB card reader (tell it which wireless network it should use, and type in the password if you have one), choose the photo sharing service of your choice (you have plenty of options), then slip the card in your camera.
Not only can you upload your images to your computer, but you can also upload them to Flickr, Facebook, Picasa (or 14 others) wirelessly, and automatically!
When the card is set up, and whenever your camera is near the wireless network you selected, Eye-fi will upload all your photos (JPEGs only) to your online photo sharing service. Next time your computer’s online, they’ll download there, too!

 

Unfortunately the Eye-Fi is not yet certified for use outside the United States. However it will be available in the UK and other parts of the world soon.

The downside to this Wireless card is that you cannot upload Raw pictures, and I think it is a little bit expensive. However as this card becomes more popular and more are produced, I would expect the cost to come down. After all, you will always pay more for the latest technology.

The card costs $99 (£50) and can be purchased from Amazon.com.
Here is the link to the Eye-fi website.

Popularity: 13% [?]

I really like the Cool Hunter website there are some excellent photos on the site and if you are in need of some inspiration go visit.
I came across these photos shown below and really liked them, but whats more amazing is that there is a cafe in this rusty looking container, if you walked past it you would never know, although the sign might give it away.

Popularity: 5% [?]