An old trick is to view your subject through a dark green filter- that gives you an idea of how the subject will look in black and white. Another way is to look in a brown filter, it gove similar effect but better suitable for street photography.
If you like to shoot black and white, try to use a green filter on the camera when working out of doors. It gives a healthy flesh tome and lightens dark green foliage so that dark suits and hair does not merge with the background. A light yellow filter when used in a (flash) portrait set up, produces pearly skin tones in portraits of the bride- combine that with a bit of soft focus and you have a wonderful effect.

I had the idea for several month, but there was some resistance to put much effort into it and the thought that actually doing photography as a business will kill the pleasure I have from doing it. So the my way to the business was slow, but yesterday I decided to get a tighter grip on the idea and start doing something in this direction.
My first step was to plan the whole thing, which lead me to creating a business plan. I searched the internet and found several resources to learn about the beast:

• Small Business Administration
• Small Business and Self-Employed One-Stop Resource (IRS) - added
• Business in DC (Washington DC government website) - added
• Dan Heller's Business Articles
• "Focus on Profit" Book and PhotoByte Software
• The Business of Photography - list of interesting books
• Business Articles on NYIP
• The Photographer's Guide to Marketing and Self-Promotion
• Sales and Marketing Articles
• Starting a Home Based Business - articles
• Sample Business Plan for Photography related business

Well, I am just on the second page of my business plan. I will post more of the ideas and thoughts on the topic. I better get back to writing the business plan ;)

Red, blue, yellow etc. are not just colors. These are emotions, feelings, memories, reflections, associations. They play a very important role of sings or symbols. Seeing a color or thinking about color produces a certain reactions in our mind....
Those are the first words that I read in the ColorAssociations.pdf. The document describes a study on associations that are perceived from colors written (in English) by Olga Dmitrieva. The study unfortunatelly covers only associations for red color. But any way this information could be useful when a photographer wants to convey a certain message in a photograph and uses red color for it.

More studies on colors you can find here.

Even before I got my 1D Mark II, I spent some tim browsing the internet and looking for related information. It was good decision, because I found one important aspect of the battery that I didn't know before. As every car has it break-in period, it seems NiMH batteries have similar period or rather specific techniques how to get the most of the battery pack. There is an article and forum thread that describe this aspect and steps that you have to do when get a new NiMH battery:

• D1X Tip: breaking in the EN-4 battery
• 1D Mark II - Initial battery conditioning?

Using those tips my 1D Mark II can get over 1200 shots from a single charge of the battery. Isn't it great? :)

There are several great posts on Rob Galbrath forum that explain the meaning of Custom Functions and what combination of settings best suitable for various modes of operation for Canon EOS 1 cameras (including 1D Mark II). Here are the few but most interesting threads:

• MarkII Custom Function Settings
• CFn. 4-1 and CFn. 18-2
• Focus tracking using Cfn4-1 and 18-2

One more link to related article: Instantly Switching Autofocus Modes