Photography is one of the most expensive hobbies in the world and it ain’t getting any cheaper. Once you have your camera, there’s an almost never-ending need to upgrade lenses, bags, tripods, filters – the list goes on. But luckily one area of photography doesn’t need to destroy your bank balance. Photography software can be mighty expensive, but did you know that there are excellent free alternatives to even the most costly of software? This list of free downloads is designed to introduce you to the fact that you do not have to spend a fortune on photography software.Gimp – This software is the mother of all free photography software. It does almost everything that Adobe Photoshop does and it is completely open source. There’s even a version that mimics the look of Photoshop so you can get used to it without having a steep learning curve if you have transferred across from PS. This one is a must have.Photo by Roarpett and Made on GIMP.Picassa – This is a great piece of free software from Google (who liked it so much, they purchased the company!). It is fantastic for organising, tagging, geo-tagging, adding notes and sharing your photos online. ...

When a new visitor or potential customer comes to your site for the first time, study after study shows that you only have a few moments to capture their imagination. That means your website needs to load fast and give them what they are looking for. While many photographers still persist with slow loading, heavy flash websites, there is a trend to faster loading sites that can be equally appealing. The biggest problem though, is that images, which are a photographer's stock and trade and a 'must have' for any photographer's site are also often quite large files and therefore slow loading, especially for web surfers on slower connections. That has been a problem until now.Smush.it is a great little web based utility that is of enormous benefit to photographers with a lot of large and heavy images on their website. It simply takes the photo and reproduces it with no loss of aesthetic, but at a smaller file size. As you can imaging, on an image heavy website, this can lead to significant savings in loading time (and means people will be more likely to stick around to see what you have to offer as a photographer). All you ...

Well, Light Stalking is powering along so we thought it was time to ask our readers what you want from the site!If you could help us out with letting us know what you want to see more of, we would be eternally grateful. So grateful in fact that we will do our best to provide it to you![SURVEYS 1]