Photo Month: Week Four

So this is it - the last week of the challenge.  Never fear, there will be another one of these soon.

Don't forget you can leave comments on anyones photos.  It is always encouraging to see what other people think of ones photos, so say something!

The last theme of our photo month will be

Balance

...because it's still September.  I know I implied the themes would all be Sept related, but some just haven't been practical.

What does balance mean to you?  Standing on one foot?  A scale?  Hmmm - this is going to be a challenge!  Thinking caps on!

Remember to tag your entries with dbpm_balance in Flickr.  It will help us find themes in the group.

Photo Month: Week Three

It seems this last week has been a very slow week for creativity and shutter clicks.  Please do get your entries in so we can see them, even if it takes all weekend!  To help you along, think about engines, instruments, electronics, nature, toys, or even the biggest noisemakers on the planet: people.

So that brings up to the next theme:

Body Part

That should be easy.  Just try keep this a family show please!

You can go macro, or you can go arty.  Will it be your own?  Or your partners?  Or your pets?  Up to you.  Ruffled hair, dirty fingernails, toned muscles, secret tattoo, naughty smile...

You've got until next weekend - 20th. 

Photo Month: Week Two

Well done to those that have submitted their "Seven" photos already.  The rest of you better get your entries in on the weekend! *

It's not as easy as I thought it would be to choose themes.  I've been deliberating over a shortlist for a few days now.  So the  theme for this week is ...  

Sound

That gives us lots of options.  The jackhammer outside your bedroom window.  Your musical instrument.  A screaming baby.  Windchimes.  The night sky.  Or whatever else "sound" means to you.

Get thinking.  Get creative.  Get snapping.  And get your pictures uploaded for the 13th Sept.

Please remember this isn't a competition.  This is a challenge - for you to try different things with your camera.

* if you're still struggling to think of something "seven", what about a Boeing, a Lotus, a BMW, a door or postbox, a row of trees, the strange kid in your son's class with too many toes, the guy next door with 3 fingers missing, a number plate, a parking bay, or a racehorse.     

New software from Google: Picasa and Chrome

Google released some new software yesterday evening.

The most significant is Chrome, their browser to challenge IE and FireFox.  The other is an updated version of Picasa, the photo management program.

You can get Chrome and find out more about it here:  http://tools.google.com/chrome/?hl=en-GB

I used it for a few hours last night, and it seems pretty smooth.  It imported all my settings from IE, and just works.  The neat things I noticed are:

• you search from the URL line, so you don’t need two separate boxes.  Chrome handles this simply and transparently.  If what you’re typing looks like a URL it will call up the webpage, otherwise it will search.
  
• when you open a new tab it displays thumbnails of your commonly used webpages.
  

There are probably plenty other cool things, but it’s a browser and as such it should be unobtrusive and just work in the most intuitive way – more so than any other software.

The only problem I encountered with Chrome was that it didn’t seem to want to download Picasa.  It showed that it was trying to, but the download never seemed to progress.

So I used IE to get the latest version of Picasa – now version 3.  It, like most other Google software is classified as Beta.  The download file is a fair size larger than that of v2.7, which implies some good new stuff.

To see what that new stuff is, check here:
http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=93773

Probably the most notable is the ability to retouch photos.  I only played with Picasa v3.0 for a few minutes, and I didn’t figure out how to use the Retouch tool.  Sounds promising though.  I assume it works like the Clone tool in Photoshop.

Picasa also now has an external viewer for your photos – something like the one that comes with Windows – Image Viewer – but millions of times better looking, and maybe operating.  Best of all it copes well with camera RAW files.

Overall, the general look of Picasa v3.0 is slicker, and there are a few more buttons on the screen to do stuff.

You should get Picasa v3 here:
http://dl.google.com/picasa/picasa3-setup.exe