Food
This is most certainly one of our passions in life. Akiko is an incredible cook and I am trying to keep up with her.
During our stay in Paris, we took a few cooking lessons and even attended a wine tasting course.
We never miss an occasion to try and enjoy a Grand Restaurant or other "Gastronomie" feast. France was great for this, but we can find such food artists everywhere.
I guess this is why we started to take more and more pictures of the items we find in our plates.
Family Photo Album
As mentioned on another page, I'm trying to put together in one way or another, all the pictures we took during the recent years.
There are a lot of them and this would take forever with just mere prints (everyone knows why so many pictures are sleeping in shoe boxes).
Hopefully, the power of digital world will help me take care of this quickly.
Recent collages
I've been playing with a new program called FotoFusion. I was so impressed by it and its potential that I registered it almost right away.
The collage on the right took me a few minutes to create. It's so simple and the quality is really quite good.
I'll be posting a few of the creations I come up with it.
Digital photography - the RAW format
It took me a while to understand what this RAW format was all about. I first heard about it at work, when we started to get complains that our flagship title, Paint Shop Pro, was not able to handle this format. Adobe Photoshop, our main competitor was again the only option in the marketplace.
At the time, I didn't understand, but now that I started to use this RAW format, I can see its advantages.
Many thanks here to my friend Michel for showing me the direction and helping me understand all this.
How to use Digital Photos
For my work as well for by personal interest, I am spending a lot of time to try to find the best way to use the various features that are made possible by the digital imaging world.
Instant online worldwide publication and presentation of one's work, easy to create collages, digital albums, online sharing and exchange of ideas and comments, galeries, etc. The possibilities are endless and I will try to show what I am coming up with.
I used quite a few cameras since I restarted to take pictures and adopted the Digital revolution. My latest camera is a Nikon D2X, and my favorite lenses are still the 105 mm Micro, the 18-35 mm zoom, the 24-120 mm VR zoom and when I have the courage, the 80-400 mm ED-VR zoom. I am still using my beloved and trusted Nikon D100, and I also use a Canon IXY Digital 700 (aka as the PowerShot SD550).
On the software side, I use a lot of different programs. I guess this comes from my work -- let's face it, I can't help it, I am a software junky. Our digital picture collection (now over 40,000 images) is organized using ACDSee. I've had my up and down with this program as I encountered numerous problems over the years such as the loss of my entire catalog due to bugs,
etc. The latest version is working (I do make regular back ups, just in case) and enables me to easily find just about any pictures very quickly.
I did try but gave up on Paint Shop Photo Album, and cannot get used to PhotoShop Elements which I find somewhat cumbersome albeit quite powerful for some tasks. I do not know why, but I feel I am still not ready for Photoshop..
For editing and fixing my photos, I cannot continue to use exclusively Paint Shop Pro. Unfortunately, this program fell behind technologically as it is not able to handle RAW format files -- it must therefore be complemented by something else and I am therefore using a recent title called RawShooter Premium from a company called Pixmantec.
