A knol written by a well-known What Digital Camera Magazine of UK offers ideas on how to save money and make your own camera accessories.

The tips – that are claimed to get you photography tips for less than $10 – are as follow:

1. Make your own soft-focus filter: Make your own by smearing a small amount of Vaseline onto an old skylight filter. Use a tiny blob to begin with and increase the amount to increase the softness.
2. Use free software: Try Adobe Photoshop Album SE 3.2, Corel MediaOne, Google Picasa, Kodak EasyShare, MAGIX Photo Manager 2007, Gimp, IrfanView, or Picturenaut 2.12.
3. Make your own reflector: Tape some foil to a piece of card, and your home studio has an instant reflector.
4. Make your own flash diffuser: Make your own flash diffuser with nothing more than a light tissue over the flash head.
5. Buy second-hand: You can save a packet by buying your next piece of kit second-hand. Whether on eBay, your local free ads paper or your local photo retailer, savings can be substantial.
6. Make your own beanbag: Stitch two small bits of cloth together and fill it with dried beans, lentils, polystyrene balls, marbles, pea shingle or whatever you can find. Seal it up (if you’re really good with a needle and thread, you can even put in a zip!) to produce your very own pocket beanbag.
7. Economic printing: If buying inkjet paper, try to make the most of it by printing only what you need and fitting what you can onto one sheet. Or, try print online.
8. Make your own string tripod: Simply cut a 2m length of string, tie one end to a tripod quick-release plate (and screw this into your tripod bush). Stand on the other end to make the string taut.
9. Buy discontinued stock: There’s nothing wrong with these older models. Sometimes the models that replace them have only minor enhancements, and if you’re prepared to forsake those you can make big savings.
10. Enter photo competitions: Enter your work into one of the plethora of online, or magazine, competitions (including What Digital Camera competitions, or if you’re feeling adventurous the Amateur Photographer of the Year competition ).
11. Rechargeable batteries: Why do some people still buy disposable AA batteries when rechargeables work out so much cheaper and are so much better for the environment?

To learn more on the valuable money saving tips, make sure you visit the knol, including the images to better explain the how-to.

Vesna explained that normally you can choose between the uncompressed (RAW, DNG, TIFF) and compressed file formats (JPEG).

She recommends the use of DNG whenever possible, or RAW if DNG is not available. This is due to the ability of the file formats to retain more information in a smaller file size.

JPEG is a good format for web publishing or for viewing only, due to it’s small file size. However, if you are planning to edit your digital images, TIFF is the better option.

In digital images editing, especially with Adobe Photoshop, the common file formats created are PSD, PSB (for large images, only available for Adobe Photoshop CS or later) and DNG. If the file formats mentioned is not available, you can use TIFF for all-purpose editing.

Vesna further explained that in printing images, PDF is the recommended format due to its support of many file types and small sizes. To view images only or send through email, JPEG, GIF and PDF are recommended.

She end the knol with file formats that should not be used in digital photography – GIF (limited colours – 256 max), JPEG2000 (usually used for previewing images), PICT (considered obsolete, replaced by PDF), BMP and PNG (positioned to replace GIF).

To have better explanations on each file formats, I encourage you to visit Vesna’s excellent knol.

Images by mandj98.