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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We’ll let CNET tell the story of this FREE tool from Roxio Labs:

Read the full review and download MediaTicker now!

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.

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 Creator, such as DVDs, photo calendars, slide shows and more. These make for great fundraising tools, as well.

The secret to compelling school videos and slide shows is simple: Don’t just take photos of your kids at the big events. Think documentary-style. Capture their friends, teachers, coaches, practices, rehearsals, surroundings and struggles along the way. The triumphs will be much more meaningful when placed in context.

Tip of the Month: Have a DV camcorder? Try VideoWave’s SmartScan feature, which scans your tape at high speed, then presents a list of scenes with thumbnails. Just select the ones you want to capture, and sit back! Saves tons of time and disk space.

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 Roxio’s Backup MyPC and BackOnTrack, in this month’s feature article on MyRoxio.com. The two programs work hand-in-hand to guard against most types of system problems and data loss.

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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 Natural Reader and simply copy and paste your text into the reading window (many other Windows text-to-speech programs are also available). Then press the "Text to MP3" button, and save your new audio file to disk. Finally, burn it onto audio CD with Creator for playback in your car or home stereo, or copy it to your iPod or other MP3 player to take on the road. 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 a 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 haven’t yet tried the MyDVD program in Creator 9, you’re missing out big time. MyDVD simplifies the process of turning your digital home video and photos into DVDs, Video CDs, and Super VCDs with professional-level transitions and animated menus. Thanks to direct camera input and a simple task-oriented interface, you can create "quick-and-dirty" DVDs with minimal fuss and maximum impact. At the same time, MyDVD provides for complete customization, so you can add your own buttons, transitions, overlays, text and other special effects if you want.

Learn how to use MyDVD in one of this month’s new articles on MyRoxio.com.

See screenshots and step-by-step directions

This list surely has a lot to do with the average age of MySpace users, but if you recognize yourself here, it’s time to change your digits. We are reminded of the joke:

Alex: My password is alphanumeric.
George: Well mine’s a mixture of numbers AND letters.

password1
abc123
myspace1
password
blink182
qwerty1
123abc
baseball1
football1
123456

Read more on Wired.com

Got an idea for Humor Corner? Send it to us at editor@roxio.com