Point-and-shoot cameras: 5 useful tips
Sydney Opera House
For those that are unaware, I have an interest in photography and love to just take random shots when I see something that appears interesting. But unlike many avid photographers, I don't have a fancy digital SLR Camera, instead I have a normal point-and-shoot camera (Fuji Finepix J110w).
As with most point-and-shoot cameras you are quite limited to the number of settings you can play around with even if it is in manual mode. Unfortunately this means many "How to take an awesome photo" tutorials out there are quite useless since you can't follow their suggestions of increasing or decreasing the ISO, aperture, shutter speed, exposure etc.
However, all is not lost as you can definitely still take awesome photos with your humble camera. Here are five tips that I find work quite well for me, if you have your own technique/tips I would be very interested to hear them 
1. No Flash!
This might be a personal preference, but I find when you use flash when taking the photo in a dark/dim place, the light from the flash is usually too strong which makes the whole photo look artificial. The simplest solution is to try and brighten up the place - turn on a light, open the curtains etc. Lighting is quite important in taking a good photo, so the more flexible you can be with your lighting the better.
Another alternative is to cover your camera's flash with a piece of paper/tissue. This somewhat subdues the flash while still providing a source of light. I've only tried this a couple of times and overall it worked quite well. Of course, you can always take two photos, one with the flash and one without - that way you will have both alternatives and you can pick the best one.
Having said all that, there are always exceptions when using flash and as weird as it may sound, using flash outdoors (where it is nice and bright) can often give you better photos - it lights up your subject just enough to make them clear, but since the surrounding is bright as well the flash doesn't stand out like a sore thumb.
More Link Modifier…now in Danish!
It has been about two years ago when I decided to give php a go and write a WordPress plugin. This plugin was what I called "More Link Modifier" and it came about because I didn't like the behaviour of the default 'more' link, which basically was fixed text and jumped to the section where the more link was within that post (usually somewhere in the middle). It seems like many people also don't quite like the default more link since there has been over 1400 downloads as of today!
I must admit that after finishing the initial release of the plugin I never really got back to add more to it (though I do think it has enough 'features' as is, don't want feature creep!). In fact, I don't think I've touched it ever since submitting the first version (shame on me 
).
However, in the past few weeks I was contacted by Georg Adamsen who had very kindly translated the admin settings into Danish - thanks Georg So now armed with the files edited by Georg that enabled the Danish translation, I looked at code that I had written some two years ago (yay for comments) and reviewed the comments on More Link Modifier download page to see if any changes were needed. Surprisingly I didn't make any drastic changes, only a few small cosmetic changes. Having said all that, there are some possibilities of a few small additions to the plugin, in particular use of 'the_content_more_link' filter available from WordPress 2.8 that allows adding extra attributes to the more link.