The article describes most of the ways of creating an SVG icon for any beginner. The author has clearly mentioned the pitfalls and issues faced during the process. The related links are very useful as most of the developers face the problems mentioned in the related links. Personally, I would suggest to have the SVG icon created from scratch using any vector editing tool, instead of converting it.
I also like this article. And also have to agree on the comment above - vector icon converted from photo might be much bigger than that created from scratch. One thing to add is you could also use CorelDraw and XaraXtreme for authoring SVG icons. --Warjan 21:49, 3 September 2009 (UTC)