In the US, you are all just about ready to sit down and have a good meal with your family and friends. Here’s wishing you a very Happy Thanksgiving, from my family to yours.

What comes next is usually considered the biggest SALE day of the year, or Black Friday. I haven’t done that 2 am mall run in ages and have no desire to send you looking for stuff at such a witching hour either. Life isn’t a scavenger hunt. Instead of buying “stuff” that will collect dust in no time, how about giving your brain a boost and learning some new techniques or getting your photography fundamentals down?

Full disclosure: Rob & Lauren of Photography Concentrate are friends. I love their products, I have used them myself and have learned a tremendous amount from them. Yes, even professionals need to keep learning. All the time. So the links you will find here are all affiliate links.

If you are just beginning to use your digital camera, consider buying Extremely Essential Camera Skills. Regularly priced at $49.95, if you buy it before November 29 (midnight), you’ll save $19.98. I reviewed this gem of an ebook (comes with videos to explain a few necessary fundamental things about your camera) and everybody who has bought it through my affiliate link has thanked me later. With a whole lot of you buying cameras – be they point & shoot or DSLRs, you’ll want to get this truly foundational course to get you going.

Once you have your photography skills down pat, you’ll need help with editing them. The team at Photography Concentrate have a tutorial called Super Photo Editing Skills. It too is on sale. Instead of paying $79.95, you can buy it for $47.97, saving you $31.98. If you ever wanted to learn how to use Lightroom, this is a great video tutorial. What’s awesome is that you can pause it, rewind and watch it again and again until the concepts and the steps make sense to you.

When you are done editing your images, you have a couple of choices. You can save them on hard drives or you can share them with the world. Albums are always a good choice because they have staying power. Awesome Album Design Skills, is another tutorial that Rob and Lauren have produced for portrait and wedding photographers. They show us how they use InDesign to quickly and efficiently create custom albums for their clients. This too will be selling for $47.97 through the end of November 29th, so you’ll want to jump on this deal if you are ready to go pro. It’s regularly priced at $79.95.

In addition to the sale, Photography Concentrate has a new free eBook – The Camera Buying Guide (do they just think of everything?) and giving away a Fuji Instax camera (brings you back in time to your Polaroid days doesn’t it?).

Please remember that the sale starts NOW and ends on November 29th at midnight EST. If you do buy these products, please come back here and let me know what you thought about them. Your feedback is valued greatly.

Based in Los Angeles and Washington DC, Justine Ungaro has been photographing weddings and portraits in her own clean, classic style since 2003. This is her first guest blog post on Tiffinbox.

“The pictures are so small on the page and there is too much white space”.

Every time I receive one of these emails, I die a little bit inside. You know the ones I’m talking about because you all get them too. Usually from the mother of the bride or groom about her album design that you labored over for hours. Sometimes even from the bride or groom themselves. And as much as it just drives me crazy it’s really not their fault. As photographers we are highly visual people. We notice the tiniest nuances and subtleties of light. We stare at compositions and dissect how we coulda, shoulda done it better. We are very hard on ourselves.

But sometimes we need to remember that our clients (usually) are just not as visually sophisticated as we are. Sometimes we need to educate them, try to change their minds, show them that we know what is best for them. And sometimes it’s better to just give in. It is their album after all. But rarely do I give in without a little bit of a fight. I want my white space. But whether or not I win or lose any particular album battle is beside the point. It brings up a very good question. Why is negative space important?

Now although I do design albums, I don’t consider myself a designer. Still, despite being a non-designer I do try to incorporate what little I do know about good design into my albums…and that is balance, tension and flow. I want to lead my viewer across the page in a way that makes sense. I also want to make them work for it just a little bit and I want the pages to feel nice and balanced. Generally this is not accomplished by just cramming tons of images onto a page. Simple and clean is elegant, sophisticated and classic.

(Both images above are of Queensberry‘s newest album offering, the Musee)

Why else is negative space important to us? If you look around at advertisements for various products, you can tell immediately which ones are cheap, mainstream or just unabashedly pedestrian. They are the ads that are full of stuff: pictures, clunky logos, too many fonts & colors; they look messy. If you look at advertisements for luxury products or services, they are almost always clean and simple and full of what? That’s right, negative space.

So I know that we’re all in different positions in our various markets. Not everyone serves a high-end market. But if you do or if you’re a social climber, consider the types of visual stimulus that appeals to your ideal clients. Speak to them non-verbablly through your branding and through your albums. If you want to reach a wealthier clientele, consider whether or not you’re using the power of negative space to your advantage.

As a documentary wedding photographer, I custom-design albums for each of my clients. That’s right. Every single album design is unique. No two clients will ever receive the same album design layout. Why? Simple. Each client is unique.

But this post is about a terrific set of Photoshop actions that photographer Andrew Funderburg has created called – Fundy’s Solution On Steroids.

Andrew and I struck up a conversation and he has generously agreed to provide Tiffinbox readers a whopping 25% discount for the next two weeks when you use the following discount code: September08.

Check out the video tutorials that will help you set up the program. Dig deeper and you will find that Andrew also offers an Album Proofing program that will allow your clients to check out your awesome and, yes, unique album designs on their monitor and allow them to comment on the images and layout, giving you a faster turnaround on the album making process and more cash in your pocket.

For me, using Fundy’s actions is a no-brainer. Click the banner below or the links above to buy Fundy’s Solution on Steroids. Remember, you are getting an awesome set of actions at 25% till the end of September.

Aaron Johnson is the brains behind “What the Duck,” the funniest comic strip I have come across in a very long time. It’s photo-centric, which makes it all the more funny for me [because I do like to laugh at myself sometimes].

Using a duck as his protagonist, Johnson goes about illustrating some very poignant moments that photographers experience, especially with their clients. Some photogs may not find it humorous as the punch lines can be acerbic like this one:

The RSS feed is here. The comic strip’s archive is here. Listen to Aaron Johnson on October 21 at Photo Talk Radio.

[via Rob Galbraith]

I am huge fan of the Canadian blog Drawn dedicated to illustration, art, cartooning and drawing. Here is a link to the contributors to that group blog. Please bookmark the site and visit often!

Via Manish Vij

“I have done my best to honor Hindu mythology with both a sense of charm and originality. My aim was to simplifiy Hindu imagery to make it more accessible for young children and their parents.”

With a kid on the way, my wife and I are going to definitely order Sanjay Patel‘s book – Little India. Sanjay works at Pixar [me turning green right about now] as an animator and a storyboard artist. Order your copy of Little India or 11×17 prints by clicking here.

I met Sonia, an artist, at a Srishti sponsored workshop called Sunoh. She is now marrying Sunoj. I love the invitation card for its simplicity and humor. I am quite sure Sonia and Sunoj had hand in designing this card. I blurred out the location so ya’ll don’t gate crash. To the couple – congratulations!

This is quite a feat folks. Rajan Sedalia, the illustrator behind the comic strip, “A Cookie Jar,” is having his work now distributed through uComics.com.

There is one in the series that has a group of sperm going down the wrong path while a disgruntled ovary looks on. The tag line is delivered by the sperm who collectively say “Has anyone asked for directions?” Just brilliant.

Via Reza A. Marvashti

Society for News Design (SND) has announced the world’s best designed newspapers for 2005.

I just signed on to become a member of the VisualEditors.com online forum. It’s an oasis of information. If you are involved in anything visual for a news publication, here is where you can iron out your thoughts, vent or otherwise discuss among peers, role models and mentors the ideas behind presenting your work or the work of others in the most elegant and useful manner.

“VizEds publishes industry news, coordinates education, reporting and training resources and enables interaction with journalists from around the world.”

This is the brainchild of Robert Motgomery, the news design editor at the Chicago Sun-Times and adjunct professor at the Medill Graduate School of Journalism at Northwestern University.