I am not a photo purist. I am all for adding a personal touch to your pictures, giving them a unique look and some snap using post processing. In fact, that's half the fun of digital photography. But there is such a thing as taking it too far, and one of the most common "effects" I see, and one which I hate almost beyond description, is fake water ripples.

This post is entirely inspired by spring weather, and all those inspired by it. I won't lie to you. I am really not a big fan of flower photography. In fact, it ranks as some of the least interesting on my personal list. However, many others feel differently, and among those are thousands of microstock photographers. I know, because I see several flower shots come through the queue at iStockphoto, whenever I inspect images there.

I've talked about giving myself little challenges and pushing myself, and now the time has come to stop talking and start doing. It's about time, I take on something bigger than your average photostroll. Therefore, I have decided to start planning a photobook.

Everything photography came to a standstill for me a few days ago. Okay, I still carried my point and shoot around with me, taking snapshots, but leaving them on the memory card. I also talked to a few models about setting up shoots, making sure to plan them far enough into the future, that I could recover from the problem, that has been keeping me from uploading anything new to either Flickr or iStockphoto. The problem?

I thought, I would share three of the most inspiring photobooks from my own bookshelf. These are not photography how-to books, but tomes of pictures I can look at again and again, and every time, I find new inspiration.

As an inspector, people ask me how to get more images accepted at iStockphoto. One of the most common reasons why I (and my fellow image inspectors) might reject a photo is due to noise issues. In this case noise refers to compression artifacts, blotchiness and banding. Here are 5 quick tips to help you avoid this problem and get more photos safely through to your portfolio.

A good and easy way to get inspiration, is to go for a walk and take pictures. I did that today, and because I like to make things difficult for myself, I added an extra rule: Go for the Little Things.

If you are an exclusive contributor to iStockphoto (or another agency with an exclusivity program), this might be relevant to you. Earlier this month I mentioned the photo book competition hosted by print-on-demand service Blurb. I love the idea of this and would very much like to take part, even if I would give myself little to no chance of actually winning.

Lee Torrens from Microstock Diaries recently took on a challenge and even more recently, wrote an interesting post about the results of said challenge.

Now that I've been using Lightroom (LR) for a while, I am glad that's what I ended up with. Aperture 2 was nice and a huge improvement over what I was using before, but if Aperture blew me away, Lightroom has dropped a nuke on my old workflow. In a good way, that is.

For a while now, I have been following a number of people on Flickr, who all take part in a project: Every day for a full year, they post a new and different self-portrait. They then add those pictures to a dedicated Flickr group (there are several to pick from), to share with likeminded people.

Most photographers, myself included, have at least one idea for a coffetable style photo book, they would like to make. I have several, but like others, I keep pushing it off to satisfy more immediate needs, such as paying next month's rent. Now, however, is the time to get the ball rolling. Blurb, the print on demand service, is hosting a competition called Photography Book Now, with a grand prize of $25,000.

Everyone's favorite photo-sharing website, Flickr, just launched a new service: Video. In other words, they are fighting back against YouTube and hoping to corner their part of that market. And it makes sense too, for those of us who are already active on Flickr, and might be inclined to upload video from time to time.

As previously mentioned, I do a lot of Time For Print (TFP) work with new models. Very often, I only really process and upload the photos, I am going to give my model and then I move on. If I don't have too many new shoots set up or I am feeling extra inspired, I might process more, but even then, I leave a large number of photos untouched. A lot of those are garbage, obviously, but not all of them.

To be honest, I've always thought of Leicas as being kind of silly cameras. Especially the digital ones. Sure, they're pretty good, but the price-tag didn't jive with me at all. However, as regular readers will know, I have been struggling with finding a good point and shoot, and when a friend handed me his Leica D-Lux 3 and said to give it a go, I really wasn't expecting to be impressed.