Monday, January 28, 2008

Giveaway: Personalized Photo Collage

UPDATE: THIS GIVEAWAY IS NOW CLOSED. THANK YOU TO ALL WHO ENTERED! I'LL BE CONTACTING THE WINNER WITHIN THE NEXT DAY.





My wife is having fun with this giveaway, so I thought I would join in!

Anyone that knows me knows that I love taking pictures of our daughter and then manipulating them in Photoshop. Here are some examples of some of the work I have done:


























So I am giving one lucky winner (chosen randomly) a custom-made collage using up to five pictures of your choice. It could be pictures of you, your kids, your pets. Anything!

To enter, just leave me a comment telling me what pictures you would like to have made into a collage, along with some sort of contact information (email address or link to your blog).

This contest is open until Friday morning and a winner will be chosen after that. Good Luck!

And don't forget to come back and visit me. I regularly post tutorials on Photoshop and other topics related to photography.

Monday, January 21, 2008

Photo workflow

At some level I would like to think that it's not just me that have been facing the issues with maintaining publication of family photos to share with family and friends.

If you have been there you probably know the issue where you get several photos during a month and either have to do incremental uploads to some web publishing sites during the month or at the end of the month go through the process of selecting photos, scaling them for web publication and uploading.

I use Adobe lightroom for processing photos and managing my "library" of family photos. For that purpose it's great. Lots of visibility and easy to find your photos. However I was still facing the scaling, exporting (from lightroom), selection of files and then finally upload and sending out emails.

Recently I found a new extension for Lightroom. It's the Lightroom export sdk which basically is a software development kit for lightrooms export. It's ok if you don't do software development and wouldn't know where to start with it.

Included in the sdk which you can download from Adobe labs is a sample for ftp export and flickr export.

I experimented with the flickr export which included setting up a flickr account and kindly asking for permission to use their API. You can setup all the flickr stuff using flickr services in the explore menu (when using the flickr plugin it's sort of easy since you are helped through the process).

Now my process for uploading family photos is as easy as selecting the photos in lightroom and select export. Of course in the export dialog I have to select flickr as the destination but it is so much easier than it has ever been before :-)

Thursday, January 17, 2008

GF restaurant guide

Ok I will be the first to admit it. Going out to eat I am not good at making a decision for where to go.
Now throw into the mixture that it has to be a place that is gluten-free friendly... ggg not an easy one. However looking around I finally found a restaurant list for places that are gluten-free friendly if not gluten-free. In this day and age most places won't let you heat anything in their kitchen (not even the rest stops along pa turnpike) which makes things a little difficult sometimes.


Anyway here is a link to the list.
http://www.celiachandbook.com/restaurant-guide.html

Now I look forward to trying them out and see how it goes :-)