Who better than famed paparazzo Ron Galella to provide advice on shooting great candid photos? Here are some of his top tips for Wired:

• Don’t pose subjects -- get them while they are relaxed and engaged in an activity.

• Shoot first -- don’t worry about framing the perfect shot, just keep moving and click fast and often.

• Compose later -- refine your raw material later using photo-editing software.

• Use Burst mode -- if you shoot 6 pics, at least one will likely come out good.

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With the recent announcement that some key companies will bring their big PC games to the Mac (think Tiger Woods, John Madden and Harry Potter...), you don’t have to feel like a second-class citizen any more. And with virtualization technology on Intel Macs, you can even run Windows versions easily in the meantime.

For the latest scoop on Mac gaming, including the best controllers and add-ons, game reviews and announcements, our favorite site is Inside Mac Games. Don’t miss the sneak previews!

A: Glad you asked! Disc images are basically full copies of a disc or drive packed into one file. They are usually used for storing or transporting CDs or DVDs before burning, but they can also be used for floppies or hard disk volumes. You’ll often find software downloads packaged as disk image files. Since disc images contain all the data and volume attributes of the original, you can "mount" them on your desktop, and they will look and act just like a physical volume.

The ability to mount and play disc images makes them useful for much more than downloading or storing. For example, you could create a disc image of a new CD or DVD to test it out before burning. This is especially useful for movie discs, where you might want to check menus and navigation. With 50GB Blu-ray discs costing $30-$40 apiece, disc images can avoid a lot of grief! Disc images are also a good way to keep a library of CDs or DVDs on your hard disk, and conserve battery life on notebooks.

Making a disc image file of a CD or DVD with Toast is a snap. Just create a project in the Toast window as you normally would, then choose Save as Disc Image File from the File menu. You can then mount them when needed by choosing Mount Disc Image under the Toast Utilities menu.

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From the Editor
It’s back-to-school time...which means it’s also time for football, soccer, marching band, cheerleading, school plays, science fairs and other activities scholarly, sporting and artistic. This year, make a resolution to capture the action in photos and video, so you can put it all together at the end of year and create keepsakes for family and friends with Toast, such as DVDs, cross-platform photo discs, slide shows and more. These make for great fundraising tools, as well.

Tip of the Month: Want to extract audio from your video files? Toast does it easily. Just add your video file to an Audio CD project, highlight it, and click the Export button. Choose the format you’d like to convert to and save. To add the new audio file automatically to iTunes for easy syncing with your iPhone or iPod, choose "for iTunes (audio only)."

With tornados hitting Brooklyn and devastating hurricanes, floods, fires and earthquakes seeming to occur with alarming regularity, not to mention bridge collapses and steam pipe explosions, it’s clear that no part of the country is exempt from possible disaster. Most of us perform some type of hard disk backup, but are you prepared if your entire home office should be destroyed in a fire? If your backup discs go up along with your computer, they aren’t of much use. Imagine the total catastrophe of losing not only your precious family photo albums, but all your digital versions as well.

And even if you have an offsite backup, do you have easy access to it? Would you be able to get your business or Web server back up and running on short order?

Learn the basics of creating a disaster recovery plan, as well as protecting your system with Toast and Deja Vu, in this month’s feature article on MyRoxio.com. The two programs work hand-in-hand to guard against most types of data loss.

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Don’t have time to read all the books you want? Or simply have lots of articles you’d like to get through during your commute? Try making your own audiobooks and podcasts, using any digital text. Why pay for books on tape when you can make your own for free?

To get started, find some text you’d like to convert to audio. Project Gutenberg, an online library of great (and not so great) literary works that are no longer copyrighted, is a good place to start, as is any online newspaper or magazine (for personal use only).

Next, download the free TextEdit to MP3 AppleScript and simply copy and paste your text into TextEdit. Then run the script and save your new audio file to disk. Finally, burn it onto audio CD with Toast for playback in your car or home stereo, or copy it to iTunes for your iPod or other MP3 player. That’s all there is to it! Now you have no excuse for not having read War and Peace.

More free books:

 Online Books Page

 The Internet Archive

If your digicam is more than a couple years old, it’s time to see what you’re missing. The latest cameras have come so far in quality and features that even consumer models now come close to rivaling film, and a raft of top-notch digital SLRs has already prompted more than one venerable camera maker to stop selling film cameras altogether.

Perhaps the only catch is the staggering variety of options from which to choose. So we’ve put together guide to help you understand all those tech specs, and decide which are important for you. For example, you’ll learn just how many megapixels you really need for enlargements, what to look for in a zoom lens, and why the most important number for any digital camera is usually buried in the fine print.

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If you need to share your data CDs and DVDs with Windows users, Toast makes things simple with its Mac & PC disc type. In fact, you never know when you might need to pop a disc into a Windows machine, so we recommend making Mac & PC discs as a default. All you need to do is choose "Mac & PC" from the left of the Toast window when you create a Data project, and Toast will take care of the rest.

But there’s more if you want to get a little fancy. For example, you could include certain files or applications that you only want to be viewed on one platform or the other. You don’t want Mac users to accidentally click on PC .EXE files, since they can’t run PC applications, and vice versa. Toast lets you decide which files will be visible on each platform, simply by clicking checkboxes in the project window.