Digital Tips Today

If you aren’t familiar with Picasa you are in for a wonderful surprise. First of all it is FREE! And it works great for managing and doing simple edits for many, many photos. I have over 40,000 photos and it allows me to easily keep track and find the photos that I want to work on.

Most of us send and receive emails from groups of people. To preserve the privacy of the people in your group you should make use of the BCC or Blind Copy option. In the normal TO: line put your own email as the recipient. Then look for a button or line that is identified as BCC. Once you click on the button normally a new address field will open and you can put the email addresses or group here. When people receive this email they will ony see you on the address line and will not be able to see who else this email was sent to. This will preserve their privacy.

If you are over 30 you probably have a lot of non-digital photos. And for most people they are still in the envelopes and stuffed in a box or drawer where they are not only accumulating dust they are slowly fading away. Now that even most grandmothers have a digital camera and perhaps a digital photo frame it would be nice to have some of those old photos to look at and and preserve. And the only hope that your children and grandchildren will keep them may be to get them scanned to a digital format to share with them.
I know I was guilty of this problem. I had decades of photos of my children growing up and of my parents and other relatives who are no longer with us. I did not want to lose these images. While they are certainly not photographic art they are precious memories to me that I want to preserve.
So I was delighted to find a website, ScanMyPhotos that would scan 1,000 photos for only $49.95!  I know from personal experience it would take me many weeks of scanning photos to scan that many photos!  And it would never get done.  They have an even more affordable option where they send you a priority mail box to fill with as many photos as possible and they pay the postage.

I immediately set to work gathering up my old photos and putting them on some kind of order, elminating duplicated and disasters.  Even just this task took me the better part of a week to prepare about 2,000 photos for scanning.    I also ordered the photo index book which printed a thumbnail of every one of my photos.

I must say I was delighted with the results.  Browsing the book is like watching my children grow in fast forward.  I made copies of the disks with the photos to send to my sons and they browsed them all too.

I’ve been teaching some classes on digital photography recently. I have come across some great books and there is one that I would especially recommend for the amateur photographer who wants to make the most of their digital camera. Digital Photography, The Missing Manual by David Pogue is just what the doctor ordered. He writes for layman, he never uses technical jargon. He gives great, simple tips on photography and goes through all the necessary steps to load photos into your computer, how to organize them and how to print and share them using Picasa and iPhoto.
Note you can order this book at Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/David-Pogues-Digital-Photography-Missing/dp/0596154038/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1243098337&sr=8-1