multifarious mushrooms

A good photo is not about the equipment you have. There are many great shots taken on a Box Brownie. It is about composition, aesthetics, perception and the use of light.

There is now a fantastic site which talks about the basics of photography. It is called Photo Tips

Kodak has composed the tutorials. There are rules to photography from taking shots of babies to what you are going to sell on ebay to something you might one day publish. All the basics of good composition and lighting are on this site.

Having a good photo editor is also probably necessary these days. Now, Photoshop and Paint shop pro are the best, but they cost. I have a list of free graphic editors on oz web hub. But here are a couple of new ones, also free.

PhotoPad is one of them. It has an attractive interface and does what most people want when it comes to photo editing. It crops, straightens and corrects colour and removes red-eye.

Photoscape is another. It’s not as good looking as Photo Pad but it functions just like it. It does a few extra things too. There’s a back lighting effect and a ‘bloom’ feature making for glam portraits.

There is another application which does only one thing. ShiftN straightens converging verticals. There’s no preview in this app but if all you want to do is correct that photo you have of the Empire State building, then it’s for you.

Happy learning!

I was reading bleedingedge again and they have corroborated my feeling that as everything else is getting smaller, technologically speaking, the PC would also.

I saw the queues in Australia for people wanting the buy the new iphone which combines a mobile with almost everything to do with a computer on line. The 3G mobile has existed for a while but what is added to this gizmo is that it combines an mp3 player as well as TV. However, here is a review of the new Apple Iphone

Still not the answer yet.

The laptop was another way of drawing people away from the desktop computer, most of which were made by Apple. It sounds nice, but I never bought one. I don’t need to have one as I’m not that mobile these days. Also, it seemed to fail in one most important way. How to break your back while you are using it.

Nevertheless, its sales did overtake those of the desktop computer.

Last December the ASUS Eee PC 701 was launched. It has a 7 inch screen and cut down keyboard. It only cost $500 too. It operates on the Linux platform and uses a lot of the open source programs which are free and which do everything that Microsoft can do. It only had 4 GB of memory however, but much less memory is required to boot it up. It has 3 USB ports to which you can add flash drives or another HD drive.

Obviously most web sites didn’t fit on the screen so one has to scroll left and right and the keyboard might require a kid’s fingers.

It has a web camera and Skype built in. A very cheap and portable computer.

Now ASUS is about to launch another one called Eee PC 901. So what has changed? The screen is bigger, the web cam is now 1.3 megapixels, battery life is about 4 hours and it comes with bluetooth and Pre-N wireless. You can now choose between XP and Linux. Each costs $649 but the Linux version has more memory.

Most people will probably go for the XP version. If you have a spare XP program you should be able to install it yourself. You can also use nlite from nlieos.com. That allows you to strip out Outlet Express and IE.

You can download the drivers from tinyurl.com/56okdk too.

I think I’ll keep my desktop for a while until it dies, but this cheap computer does sound very appealing.

Look, I don’t know whether I’d join this new one. It is called weblin. Avatars talking to avatars? How virtual do you want to go?
Here is what weblin offers:

Meet your friends and new people on every website!
Weblin makes you and others on the Web visible as small avatars. There are others on the same page you are on right now. Weblin opens a new and exciting world on every web site.
Get to know people with the same interests.
Do you want to enter this world? Get your personal weblin now!

Perhaps those millions on Second Life would like this sort of thing. For me it is a bit of a concern. People can disguise themselves very well with an avatar. Who would we be talking to. We just wouldn’t know.

This is freeware.
Have you ever erased a photo from your digital camera by mistake? Well you can retrieve it with PC Inspector Smart recovery. You can do that via your camera being hooked up with the card in it or with the card inserted into the computer. You cannot retrieve images which have been overwritten.
PC Inspector will not recover deleted video files though.
PC Inspecor has other utilies on its site in order to recover other files too.

Photoshop Express is currently in beta form and is free. I hope it stays free because it looks excellent. I can’t access it at the moment because it is only for USA residents, but here is what it says it offers:

You can use tools to crop, straighten, fix white balance and exposure, highlight, alter shadow levels, red-eye removal and sharpening. Why would one need Photoshop or Photoshop Elements?

The retouch tool is a bit like the healing brush tool in Photoshop. You can even turn a photo into a sketch.

After editing, you can store your photos on Adobe’s servers. You get 2GB of space. You get a URL like this: http://……………………. .photoshop.com