Cheers for that Father, nice to know I do stuff people would have in their house. You never know, I might get people to part with their dosh for an original "Liam" someday..

Cheers

Liam

I like #2 a lot.. Like Prieni, I thought it was horizontal, like the seating for a roman autitorium. I like that when you start at the bottom, it's pillars, and your mind turns it over as you look further up the picture. Magic Eye stuff.. keeps you looking.

Hi all,

This just turned up in the post, printed at 18" x 12" (actual 18" x 9 1/4") and let's just say that I'm really rather chuffed with myself this morning.

Hopefully I'll be displaying a few prints at a local art fair next weekend. (They haven't rung me back yet). This will be one of them.

C&C welcome of course




*ist DL | 18-55 Mk1 @ 55mm | 1/350th @ f11 | ISO 200 | RAW | desaturated then tinted

PEN74X

That's the one to have..

Hi George,

Any Pentax lens, yes. Have to be careful with the odd 3rd party lenses though. I have a Soligor where the rear element is fine on a film body, but projects too far into the body on my DL. Also how many posts have we seen concerning the removal of ( I think) a certain Ricoh lens.

Not being picky, just adding a little detail for the OP.

Cheers

Liam

Hi Philip,

get yourself a card reader, and just use that to download your picturwes direct from the card.

Cheers

Liam

While you're deciding which app to get, try GIMP..

http://www.gimp.org/downloads/

Several here use it, and it's free, so if you decide at a later date to purchase one of the above, then it doesn't matter. What it does give you is a chance to see what a high end application can do. Once you know what you like, you can either stay with GIMP, or take that knowledge on into whichever one you eventually decide to purchase.

As Peter says, you don't modify the file itself, certainly not a PEF anyway (I assume that DNG is the same).. what you actually see on screen is a *.jpg produced to display the data in the RAW file.. I think there are actually three *.jpgs of large medium and small produced, but X-Factor's on so I haven't got a chance to get a link for you now..

The RAW file captures lots and lots of data about the scene you took the picture of, hence the large file size. This is why when you finally export the RAW to a *.jpg, it's still the same size (give or take) as if you'd shot in *.jpg originally. You just have a lot more parameters stored in the RAW file to change the final image, than if you just used a bare *.jpg in the first place.

(I stand to be correted of course)..

Cheers

Liam

You're welcome Prieni,

I'll build a complete demo site a little later.. dinner time now, and I'm starving.

Cheers

Liam

Let me be the first to welcome you Steve.. unless someone else gets in before me of course.

Yep.. car photos.. like them..

Cheers

Liam

Hi all,

I've been checking out a few features in Picasa 3 (beta), having never used it before, and for organising your photos it's pretty good. Some of the PP controls aren't too shabby either, certainly for all your general snaps, although for your serious work it's not going to give you anything like the control of say PS or GIMP of course.

The last few days I've been checking out the (limited) web gallery templates, and they're pretty basic. I have however found this site..

http://www.paulvanroekel.nl/picasa/

where Paul Van Roekel has built some very nice gallery building scripts. Sadly if you want to download them individually, you have to muck about extracting zip files.. Uhh.

He does have an autoinstaller script that will install all 19 templates into Picasa 2 for you. If however you don't have Picasa 2, and have gone straight in with 3, here's how to get the templates into 3.

Click the autoinstaller (third column, second paragraph), and let it run. Once finished, you will find it has created it's own folder in Program Files. Open up ../Program Files/Picasa2/web/templates and choose which template(s) you want to use.. I chose Lightbox-Picasa-Template. Right click, and select Copy. Now navigate to ../Program Files/Google/Picasa3/web/templates and right click in an open space, then select Paste. When you build a web page, that template will now appear in the options.

I won't go into how to build your web page here.. unless you ask, and of course I will.. but the end result (using the Lightbox template) is something like this.. (mouse over RHS for next piccy, LHS for previous)

http://www.liamsworld.org.uk/Assorted_Flowers/index.html

I've just scrolled through my piccys to find these with a connected theme.. you can tell from the naming that I'm no gardener though..

The entire uploaded file with main images, thumbnails and code is just over 800KB for an image size of of 1024px, so it won't kill bandwidth if you have set monthly limits with your host either.

You can also build the gallery in three different image sizes, so that you can give the viewer the choice of image size depending on their monitor size/resolution. This means that they can choose to view your whole set of galleries at the size of their choice, via a single click on the front page of your site. That just requires you to set up three folders, one for each size, and of course write a few lines of code. It means you won't frighten off potential viewers/customers because they have a 12" laptop, and can only see half your picture, or need a magnifying glass with their 23" monitor...

I'll be doing some tests on this later, so I'll post up a link for you to see how it works.

Hope that's been of some use to you..

Cheers

Liam