My first thought was "Hey, I can already create simple collages in Picasa, and complex ones in FotoFusion, so why would I use this?". After taking it for a spin though, I see that they have a bunch of cool templates, so this is something a little different. With output resolutions being limited to 1.9 megapixels (1600 x 1200) you're not going to be making collages appropriate for printing, but for sharing on Facebook and Twitter? Pretty much perfect. It's free, so check it out!

"Digital photography has made it much easier to capture special moments in our lives. Folks who carry camera phones can always be ready to point and shoot everything from an impromptu family football game to a carefully staged portrait of folks in matching sweaters. There is no longer the need to worry about having only two shots left on a roll of film during the school play or coming back from the drive-through Fotomat or drugstore with fuzzy prints."

This article gives you the basics of what it takes to safely store and maintain your photo collection. Most of the tips are simple, and I doubt anyone reading this site would learn much from the article - but it might be exactly the sort of thing you should pass on to relatives and friends who are less tech-savvy. I'll take issue with one thing in this article: backing up to CDs or DVDs. Many of my home-burned CDs and DVDs are un-readable now; I only recommend backing up to other hard drives, or to the cloud. Optical media is too prone to decay and data loss - just don't do it. And given the prices of hard drives, there's really no smart reason to use optical discs.

"ProShow Producer has never been this powerful or easy to use. Explore over 190 new transition effects like Page Curl, Curved Path and Camera Flash. Enjoy effortless, automated show creation with the new, built-in wizard and show themes. Plus, add a fresh, exciting look to your shows using any of the 170 new built-in slide styles. Download a free trial today."

I'm a big fan of ProShow Gold and ProShow Producer, but have always struggled with some of the more advanced parts of the program - it's a really powerful product, but certain aspects of the user interface are mystifying and I've never put in the grunt work to figure it all out. Well, with version 4.5, part of that problem is solved. They've added a new wizard for project creation that I can only describe as phenomenal: I was amazed at the result that came from an automated process. I tweaked a few things after the fact, but it was so much easier to tweak than to do it all from scratch. The purists out there might consider this cheating, but I say that the end result is what matters most. Check out two sample videos after the break that I've created that illustrate this. Read more...

"San Diego, CA - August 25, 2010 - Nik Software (www.niksoftware.com) today announced HDR Efex Pro, a completely new HDR imaging toolkit designed to help photographers quickly and easily achieve the full spectrum of HDR enhancements from the realistic to artistic. High dynamic range photography is a process in which multiple exposures are captured, aligned and merged to generate a single image that enables a much wider range of colors, highlights, and shadows. HDR techniques are typically used to enhance landscape, architectural, nighttime, and artistic photography. New HDR Efex Pro overcomes limitations in other software tools with a revolutionary all-in-one approach that enables both realistic and artistic effects to be applied within a single tool."

I really like HDR images - so long as they're not overdone - but I have yet to purchase a tool to create them with. Lightroom 3.0 still has no HDR functionality (one of my complaints with it as I work on my review), and my image processing is also done in Photoshop Elements 8, which similarly lacks HDR tools. I've tried several tools, and they've mostly fallen flat when it comes to ease of use - I don't feel like I have hours to spend learning a new tool, so it needs to be reasonably intuitive. HDR Efex Pro isn't cheap at $160 USD, but if it does the job, it might be worth the asking price.

What's your preferred HDR tool?

"Wildlife photographer Greg du Toit was so determined to capture the perfect image of wild lions drinking he sat submerged in their watering hole for three months. The defiant photographer had endured a year of failed attempts at getting the right picture after building hides and digging trenches near the animals' drinking spot. In a final desperate effort, the 32-year-old decided to take the plunge and climb into the murky pool with his camera and ended up contracting several tropical diseases."

Now that's what I call dedication - and a healthy dose of crazy. Read the article and check out the diseases this guy caught - but wow, what images!

"A recent e-mail from Eastman Kodak Co. didn't lead to a Kodak moment for Vanessa Daniele. It got her angry. On May 16, the company's Kodak Gallery online photo service will delete her picture albums unless she spends at least $4.99 by then and every year thereafter on prints and other products. That's the new rule for people whose photos take up less than 2 gigabytes of space on Kodak's servers - enough for around 2,000 1-megabyte photos. People over that limit must spend at least $19.99 a year. And customers who signed up under the old rules won't be given a pass."

I have a pretty simple rule when it comes to my photos, music, videos, documents, etc: redundancy and backups rule the day. And while putting things up in the cloud (online) is just great, it's simply foolish for that to be the only place they exist. I feel for anyone that gets trapped by service changes, but if you value your photos, placing your trust in an online service to protect and keep your images isn't smart.

"2008 has been an eventful year to say the least - it is difficult to sum up the thousands of stories in just a handful of photographs. That said, I will try to do what I've done with other photo narratives here, and tell a story of 2008 in photographs. It's not the story of 2008, it's certainly not all stories, but as a collection it does show a good portion of what life has been like over the past 12 months. This is a multi-entry story, 120 photographs over three days."

Those are just two photo I selected from amonst the 120 amazing photographs that were selected to encompass some of what happened in 2008 around the world. Sadly, many of the photos encompass some of the violence that we see around the world - let's hope 2009 is a year where more peace, and less violence, will be the norm. Enjoy the photos! Be sure to check out part two and part three after looking at part one.

Answer me this my fellow digital photographers: when you come back from shooting a bunch of photos with your camera, do you keep them all? Or do you delete some of them? I'm not talking about the blurry ones, or the ones that are too dark to be rescued. I'm asking if you delete photos that turned out well. Does the thought of that scare you? Do you believe that the real benefit of digital photography is the ability to shoot as many pictures as you want of the same thing, and keep them all? Then this article is for you.

I love digital photography. Prior to going digital, I wasn't very interested in photography. I was enchanted by the idea of photography; capturing memories and images, but I was less enthused about the costs, and the limitations of never knowing if that shot you took actually turned out until after you developed it. I became more interested in photography in college, after having purchased a 35mm Canon Rebel for a photography class, and enjoying the feel of a camera really meant for taking pictures. As I moved to digital after getting a Kodak DC265 in 1999, I realized that the rules had definitely changed. It's taken me a few years to develop a system of working with digital images that works for me, and I hope to share part of that system with you today.

The Importance of Culling

I think you should get in the habit of deleting "good" photos, and here's why: I believe that deleting/culling photos is an important part of learning how to be a better photographer. The word culling has its genesis in ranching, but the idea is a good one: separating the weak from the strong, for the purpose of making the remainder even stronger. It has powerful implications for digital photography.

If you snap five pictures of a scene, odds are that only one of those images captures the moment better than all the others. Often it's hard to make the judgement if they're really close - I often have to do A/B comparisons of photos several times before I pick the one that has the most impact. Looking at your images and comparing them helps you learn what makes a photo great. Sometimes it's the small details of a photo that make it better, while other times one photo is just technically better than another one - better exposure, a better angle, or better composition. There are exceptions to this rule of course - often times, especially with photos of human/animal subjects shot in rapid succession, you can capture spontaneous moments and the entire series of photos tells the story.

It's my belief that keeping five nearly identical photos foster a pack-rat mentality that holds a photographer back from improving. If you keep all your images, you never have to think about why one is better than the other. That means you never have to look critically at your own photography and learn what types of photos you should be striving for when you bring that camera up to your eye and press the shutter release.

Back in my analog days of photography, I went on a vacation to Arizona. Never having been there, I was enchanted by the vivid colours - the red rocks, the yellow desert, the vivid sunsets. During the week I was there, I shot around 12 rolls of 36 exposure film. Returning home, I got it all developed, and requested doubles for good measure. It was a hefty developing bill! When I started looking through my images, I was stunned to realize that I had taken so many images of the same thing. After ten photos of cacti and twenty photos of red rocks, they all start to look the same. I was disappointed in myself for not only trying for more variety in my photography, but more so for not realizing what a waste of money and film it was to take so many pictures of the same thing. Now that we're in the digital world the waste isn't in money and film, it's in hard drive space, and collections of memories that are bloated by too many photos. Having a collection of 20,000 digital photos isn't a good thing if 15,000 of them are near-duplicates of the other 5,000.

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