Well, Deke is safely ensconsed in a broadband-challenged area of "off-the-hand" Michigan, so I can write whatever I like today without him editorally looking over my shoulder. (I think he enjoys turning the tables on me.) So I thought about running my seasonably inappropriate and infamous "How to Draw a Snowflake using InDesign" tutorial, but, instead, I'll celebrate my personal independence the way all red, white, and blue-blooded American's do this time of year here in the states, by rounding up the best advice on how to photograph fireworks.

• Over at the The Digital Story, Derrick's got a great set of basic advice for shooting your pyrotechnic celebrations. His first item? Turn off the flash: "Yes, you're going to be shooting in a dark environment, and if your camera is set to auto flash, it's going to fire. This is the last thing you want, so turn it off." This presumes you know how to turn off the flash. In fact, that's probably an even better tip: know how to control the flash on your camera before you're in the dark trying to figure it out on-the-fly. (For more sage advice on shooting in special circumstances, from airplanes to underwater to infrared, check out Derrick's book, The Digital Photography Companion.)

• Lifehacker has a terrifically illustrated list of things to remember about shooting fireworks. Here's a favorite:

Have a small light handy for checking and altering settings on the camera and tripod without having to fumble in the dark. A small red LED key chain flashlight is perfect for this task. Red light is less disruptive to your night vision than white light.  

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Hey gang, I'm about to hop on a plane (a few planes, actually) bound for the middle of nowhere. I'll be without cell or Internet access until Monday, hanging out with my family in Michigan's tranquil, kooky UP. Enjoy the site in my absence. I believe Colleen has a post planned for Thursday. Keep the comments coming (good or bad). And thanks for everyone's kind support. (!)

Welcome to dekeQuiz #1, your chance to win a couple of $50 books (2 x $50 = $100 in retail book money!) based on your decoding skills. About a minute into his latest video -- right before launching into a ninja-like (© Adobe's John Nack) transmission of 101 Photoshop Tips in Five Minutes -- Deke pauses to gather his thoughts and recite a secret mantra. A frame from this mystical moment appears below.

Our question to you is: What is Deke saying in his meditative state? If you think you know, email us the answer at quiz@deke.com. (Please don't comment or you'll spoil it; this is a top-secret ballot!) For more info, including a helpful hint . . . Read more » 

It's entirely possible that a few of you have had your fill of the "101 Photoshop Tips in 5 Minutes" piece and the navel-gazing that accompanies it at this site. (If it’s any consolation, Colleen and I are actually trying to balance things with a steady stream of content.) But if my manic performance somehow leaves you wanting more, you can listen to Chuck Joiner's audio interview with me at MacVoices.com. It’s largely my personal behind-the-scenes story of the making of the video, which as you’ll learn, wreaked havoc on my thighs. (Colleen’s article documents the day and a half of live-action shooting, but quite a bit happened before that.)

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When you're working in various Creative Suite applications, you can change the color of the background in a document to suit your mood, reduce distractions from your work environment, or test to see how your project is going to look in the environment where it will eventually live.

In Photoshop, it's relatively simple. You have two options:

1) The first is to right-click. (Do I still need to say Control-click on the Mac? Is anyone out there foolish enough to not have a two-button mouse? Seriously, I need to know because Deke and I are bound to butt editorial opinions on this!) On the background, and choose from one of three options: Gray, Black, or Custom. The other item in the context menu, Select Custom Color, brings up the somewhat annoying but familiar Color Picker that lets you change that Custom color item to anything you want, including any number of choices from the Color Libraries.

2) The second way is to Shift-click with the Paint Bucket tool (which lives in the same slot as the Gradient tool), to fill your background with whatever you have your foreground color set to.

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No, that's not an eerie full moon rising, it's an even eerier not quite setting sun. The skies all over in Northern California are filled with smoke due to hundreds of burning wildfires. I thought it was pretty freaky I could shoot at the sun and not completely blow out highlights—or my retina. (Despite the smoke, looking through the viewfinder directly at the sun probably wasn't the most intelligent thing to do). Usually summers here in the Sacramento Valley have several days of unhealthy air, due to auto exhaust and high temperatures, but this feels worse, and downright odd.

One of the fires further north is threatening the home of one of our beloved Planet Deke colleagues. Team Deke is sending out our strongest heat-shield, fire-retardant, force-field energy to Toby and others whose homes (and persons) are threatened by the fires. The particular fire threatening Toby's homestead is one of those going entirely unmanaged. Read more » 

In less than 40 hours from launch, dekePod hit #9 on the technology podcast list, making it (for slightly more than 24 hours) the top-ranking Photoshop podcast on iTunes.

Mind you, it didn't stay there. In fact, my guess is that the strong initial showing was due at least in part to the backlog of folks who began subscribing to dekePod back in 2006.

I guess the challenge now is to stay regular and see how it fares.

Note: this entry has been edited -- cuz I can!

Okay, my little team (Paul Legomski on the Web site, Colleen Wheeler on articles, Laura Painter uploading the various formats of dekePod) and I were up till all hours getting the pieces put together for today's launch. I got 3, maybe 4 hours of sleep last night. Paul and Laura are East Coast, so I don't know if they slept at all. The last email I got from Paul ("I’m about to start the migration. Please try and hurry up whatever youre doing within 5 minutes while i put on another pot of coffee. Eeeek im nervous") was after 5:30am his time!

Anyway, the point is, I wake up this morning, stumble into the office, and waiting for me is an email from Russell Preston Brown, Senior Creative Director at Adobe, the man largely responsible for bringing Photoshop to Adobe. He wrote to tell me of my "101 Photoshop Tips in 5 Minutes" video: Read more » 

Today, I announce the birth of digital twins. The first is the very site you see before you now. Gone is the cartoon Deke against the green background with the interchangeable socks. (Though I have to say, those were some great socks. Kudos + my unending gratitude to my brother, Daniel, for creating that site, dekemc.com, and keeping up with it for more than a decade.) In its place is the more streamlined and expansive deke.com, which offers access to short-topic bursts (dekeBlog), long-topic articles (dekeStuff), irreverent videos (dekePod), and much more.

Which brings me to my second cause for celebration: In mid-2006, I published a podcast (dubbed dekePod, after the name I had inscribed on the back of my personal iPod, below) devoted to the topic of scanning, opening, and printing money. The movie was shockingly popular. Problem was, dekePod cost a lot to produce and I had no realistic means to replicate it.

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