My wife, a former journalist and wannabe travel writer, recently forwarded an interesting online newsletter called The Right Way to Travel. It’s from a company that trains people to be travel writers and photographers.

For all you Your Blog photographers, the e-letter and its free archives offer some great tips, including this from what I call the how-in-the-heck-did-they-know-that category:

Just about every camera (even point-and-shoot cameras) has a little hole on the bottom so you can screw the camera onto a tripod.

Did you know, though, that the screw coming out of the top of a tripod is the same size as the screw that comes out of the top of many living room lampshades?

That means, if you’re ever caught indoors without a tripod, you can just unscrew the top of a nearby lamp and screw your camera on instead.  Instant tripod.

For what it’s worth that’s something of which most photographers, if not 99.99% of the world’s population, have no clue. 

Now please excuse me while I gin up some “Have Laptop, Will Travel for Pay” business cards ….

There are a lot of little gems sprinkled in Vista.  If you’re on the fence about upgrading to Vista, here is another great program that comes free with it.  The Vista Photo Gallery program offers a lot of features with a great, easy-to-use interface.

Number 1 - It Already Works With Your Digital Camera

I’ve plugged several digital cameras into Vista, one of them a few years old.  Vista recognized them easily, with no extra software to install.  It is very convenient to actually connect the camera to any Vista PC, with ever having to install any extra software that might alter the configuration.

Number 2 - Organization

After Vista scans your camera’s memory card, it automatically organizes photos by the date they are taken.  This is just the first step in viewing the photos you want to view, in the way you want to view.

Number 3 - Tags

Don’t you wish you could see just your vacation photos?  Or maybe just the photos of your kids?   Perhaps, all the photos of your kids while on vacation?  As you peruse your fond photographic images, you can simply “tag” each photo with the label “kids” and/or “vacation.”  You can create as many tags as you want.  Then simply assign the tag or tags to the photos.  As you select the name of the tag from the master list, all of the corresponding photos are quickly displayed.

These tags are embedded within the photo, so if you e-mail them, others benefit from your work.  When they add the photo to their computer, Vista will use and organize the photo by the same tags.

I’ll tag these photos of my son in the garden with “Flowers” and “Jackson”

Number 4 - Fix Your Photos

The dreaded red eye in a photograph is best explained here.  To avoid dealing with this issue at the Target photo printing kiosk, simple fix it yourself.  Just select the photo and choose Fix > Fix Red Eye.   It’s fast and effective.  You can crop the image from the same area, which can really improve the aesthetics of the photograph.

Number 5 - You’ll Actually Be Able To Find Your Photos

As you review your favorite photos, you’ll probably want to record some fond memories of the event.   When you select one or more photos, you can also add a caption by clicking on Info > Caption.

Best of all, you can then search your entire photo library for that caption.  As you enter text in the search field, your entire library of photos is filtered based on the text you provide.   This is a great way to view the handful of images you really want, across a collection of thousands.  From there, you can always sub filter based on tags you have assigned.

Note my search for the word “pink”

There is a lot more as well. You can also assign a one- to five-star rating to your photos.  Your photos look great in Microsoft Media Center for running a slideshow on your TV.  The photo slideshows can run based on the tags you selected as well.  Finally, everything I’ve said about photos can also be done with video clips.  All this takes a little time and effort, but the payoff is great.

I just ran across a really cool and quirky Web site that anyone who can snap a digital photo will probably get a kick out of trying … Dumpr.

Simply upload a photo from your PC or Flickr account to Dumpr, choose a special effect like a museum display, Rubik’s cube, jigsaw puzzle or photo within a photo, and presto! You have an e-mailable (if that’s a word) image that’s sure to be a conversation starter or keepsake.

The site is free, but for a price you can access additional special effects that require more computing power. Check out one of my roadside shots on “display” at the Henry Ford Museum, and youngest grandson digitally enshrined on a Rubik’s cube.

How often have you returned from a vacation and wanted to show friends and family a photo slideshow?

Chances are, unless your photos are wildly funny or Ansel Adams-esq in quality, your audience probably wants to spend time with you enjoying a meal instead of reliving your vacation, one photo at a time, as a group.

The folks at Mashable found a new social photo sharing network called The Bragosphere. The Bragosphere functions as a digital scrapbook – but without the silly little stickers. It’s a great way to share photos with friends and family to view on their own and in a way that’s easy to digest – especially if you went a little shutter happy and have a lot of them.

It also offers tagging options for Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, Facebook, and elsewhere for easy distribution.

The only speed bump to using The Bragosphere is a required Microsoft Silverlight plug-in. Consider it just another download necessary for modern computing.

If you have a few issues early on, go easy on The Bragosphere – they’re still in beta testing. However, this is a good service with a lot of potential.

It’s all over the interwebs already, but in case you haven’t heard, Dell made a pretty big –and colorful – splash today with the launch of Studio—a sleek, colorful and nicely loaded new product line designed to unleash the blogger/poet/novelist/artist/scrapbooker/YouTuber/Annie Leibovitz in all of us.

The first tranche of systems in the new line is two laptops – Studio 15 (15.4”) and Studio 17 (17”). John Biggs at the New York Times notes, “It’s summer, so why shouldn’t one’s laptop match one’s hot-pink bikini?… Optional Blu-ray or DVD recording drives ensure you can watch a movie under your beach umbrella, while built-in Wi-Fi, cellular broadband and Bluetooth keep things connected.”

For a quick overview of these systems take a look at this video with John New from Dell’s notebook team:

Of all the color options (seven different solid lids, plus four graphite with color insets), pink seems to be the most popular callout. The fashionable gearheads at GQ made note of the pink option, but were also impressed with Dell Dock, a simple, customizable task bar that replaces multiple icons on the desktop and sorts applications by category, that’s premiering with Studio. Wilson Rothman’s overview and very nice slide show on Gizmodo even hit the front page of Techmeme. To answer your question, Wilson, you can move the dock around.

For more on the Dell Dock, take a look at this vlog:

After backing in to a compliment about Studio’s “mouth watering colors” and “a few tasty extras, Charlie Sorrel at Wired also gives Dell Dock props and suggests that “The Studio is looking like a nice alternative to the MacBook.” Note to Charlie: Not exactly the way we’d put it, but thanks!

If you think beyond the box when buying a computer – read: if you accessorize whenever you can – don’t miss the color-matched Designed for Dell line of bags, mice/mouses, portable hard drives and other personalization options.

Lots of interesting ground to cover, so look for more on Studio, Dell Dock and Designed for Dell over the next few days.

This week, Dell launched three new Photo Inkjet All-in-One printers, the V105, V305, and the V305w. The V105 is a low-cost, ultra-simplified full color scanner, copier, and printer. The V305 offers a more flexible all-in-one printing solution and the V305w includes the option to connect the printer to your home office network wirelessly.

  V105 

V305

But one of the most exciting new features on these printers, from my perspective, is a powerful new piece of software that comes with them. It is called the Dell Imaging Toolbox and it not only offers basic print handling and maintenance features, it opens up a world of powerful tools to use with your digital photos.

The Dell Imaging Toolbox gives you extensive tools for editing the size, brightness, contrast, color balance, saturation and a host of other variables in your digital photos.  Easy-to-use scaling tools provide a simple way to make your pictures look exactly the way you want them to look.

There are also some fun photo sharing tools built right into the software. For example you can create multi-page posters at the click of a button or two and turn your favorite shot into a wall-sized display.

There are also 89 different templates for the creation of customized greeting cards. The card templates match virtually any occasion and allow you to attach your own message in whatever color, font, and type size you prefer. It even has an e-mailing tool to let you send the cards in a variety of file sizes to all the important people in your life.

The V105 and both versions of the V305 are capable of supporting 6-color photo printing with the installation of the optional Dell Photo Ink Cartridge and the use of Dell Premium Photo paper.

I have more than a decade of experience with digital photography and I’ve used the top of the line in photo editing software, Adobe® Photoshop®, since 1996. Obviously, there are tons of things in Photoshop that you will never find in the Dell Imaging Toolbox. But if you want to quickly re-size, crop, and retouch your photos and either print them or distribute them to friends and family, I think you will be impressed with the easy-to-use software that comes with the latest Dell Photo Inkjet printers.

For more detailed information on the Dell Imaging Toolbox, you can find my how-to article in the Dell Solutions Network.

I was recently reading Thomas Hawke’s blog called “The Digital Connection.”  If you are interested in photography and all things related to digital photo and the Web, Hawkes’s blog is a must read.  He also writes about the digital home and I find every aspect of his blog insightful and helpful for the fun things in life (ok and some of the work things, like Friend Feed, too)

Thomas recently noted he had been playing with PicLens.  He said “if you haven’t installed PicLens yet for browsing photos on the Web you are missing one of the most beautiful ways to view photography on the Internet yet” linking to this Firefox add-on.  It even supports YouTube, which I have not yet tried.  Check it out.

Here is a snipping tool pic of some of my photos in the tool…but trust me this doesn’t do PicLens justice.  Read Thomas and visit the PicLens site.

Ever since I started to teach myself photography just a bit more than 10 years ago, I loved the high contrast and surreal dreamy feeling of black and white infrared photographs.  In fact, most of work has been usually done as black and white infrared.  The first time I developed one in the darkroom, I was blown away and fell in love forever.

Without getting into all the details, infrared film captures a part of the light spectrum (wavelengths) that are not visible to the human eye.  This is not about seeing in the dark with military-issue infrared goggles or some such thing.  I suspect somehow they are related but I am no scientist to understand. For information check out the Infrared FAQ.

As you might guess, if our eyes cannot see infrared light, the camera cannot meter it.  But film can capture it.  With some work and a lot of bracketing you get photos like the one on the left below (sort of a bad scan of a print, but you get the drift).  The picture beside it is a normal black and white film print scan of the same location/same day.

I became familiar with the film, how it worked, and with a camera loaded in complete darkness, and a red filter I was off to shoot like a mad man, many a time…and able to catch a good shot almost every time, with bracketing.

Then along came digital photography!  The camera manufacturers put an infra filter in the digital sensors to remove infrared light rays because it causes noise for digital photos.  This was looking complicated and you can read more about digital infrared here or follow items in this Google search.

There were software conversion programs, often called “Faux Infrared” because they could not exactly duplicate what the eye cannot see anyway;  I tried special infrared filters and recalibrating white balances, but this extended exposure times, meaning I had to use a tripod….I shoot photos more freely than a tripod.  Previous to this latest edition of Photoshop, I played with various formulas in channels and everything else…but I was not getting where I wanted.  By the way, the current version of Photoshop (CS3) has the expanded black and white conversion tool that does include a set of conversions for infrared…they are not bad.

I really didn’t want to give up the black and white infrared and as such remained a film buff as the digital revolution proceeded. 

Then I found Lifepixel.com and they have been my savior!  I took an old digital SLR, sent it off to them and for a couple hundred dollars, I am back to shooting what I consider to be real and challenging black and white infrared images.  For the adventuresome, Lifepixel also offers a do-it-yourself instruction page. 

If you want to see some of this work, drop by and say hi on Flickr.

School is out and summer is almost here! From vacation plans to relaxing at home, almost every chic geek looks forward to the fun and long days that summer brings. It’s a time to kick up our heels and enjoy the weather, water and family.

One of the things we love to hate about the summer is the heat. Of Zen and Computing put together a great list of tips for Keeping Your Electronics Cool for the Summer. There are some good reminders in this list, regardless of the time of year, including keeping your vents clear and not stacking multiple electronics on top of each other.  Last but not least is my favorite: In Case of Emergency, Shut Down. Well that sounds appealing! Let’s shut down, disconnect and hit the beach!

There are many ways to go chic geek sur la plage this year. Here are seven recommendations for getting there:

(1) Hermés Printed Beach Towel (2) Hermés matching Beach bag (3) Cole Haan AIR BRIA STITCH THONG (4) Amazon Kindle (5) Burt’s Bee’s Wax Super Shiny Lip Gloss (6) Fendi Squared Frame B. Mix Sunglasses (7) Panasonic Lumix DMC-LZ10K Black 10.1 MP 5X Zoom Digital Camera

A balanced mix of style and technology will be key to complement the beach experience. Hermés towel with matching beach bag, Cole Haan Thong Sandals and Fendi Sunglasses will keep the chicest of chic’s style in check. Burt’s bee’s Wax Super Shiny Lip Gloss is a must to keep those lips moist and color applied. The Panasonic Lumix camera is a great addition to any vacation day, taking shots of your summer memories.

Most importantly, summer isn’t summer without a great novel. The Amazon Kindle promises to take summer reading to a whole new level. Whether you’re on the beach, a plane or relaxing at home, you can download your choice of more than 125,000 books in less than a minute! And no more huge newspaper to unfold and fold and unfold and fold, while you are eating your bagels and coffee on the beach as you await the heat of the day. This 10.3-ounce technology gem downloads national and international newspapers from around the world, right at your fingertips!

This is definitely my hot pick and must have for the summer. Looking forward to hearing what your favorite beach accessories are for the summer chic geek!

One of the great banes of blogging is the toil it takes to come up with just the right image, and not to sweat the legal issues. Well, help is here in the form of Compfight, a Web app that lets anyone who can type a keyword quickly and easily search a wealth of Flickr images.

Check out Corvida’s informative review over at ReadWriteWeb.  Anyone else have a pic tip to share?