Crop Corner

Altered scrapbooking projects are all the rage.

Here are some project ideas from ScrapJazz that I liked:

• Altered Desk Calendar
• Altered Wall Plaque
• A to Z Altered Recipe Box
• Altered Jars

About.com scrapbooking has a large collection of layout galleries that include page ideas as well as free scrapbooking patterns. For example, here is a gallery of free paisley patterns and scrapbook page layout sketches. They’re not really my style, but are a good example of the type of resources available to us scrappers.

If only I had time to try them all out!

As an amateur photographer, I think it’s interesting to read about how professionals setup for their photo shoots.

Here’s a good article from ePhotoZine about how a professional setup for a calendar photo shoot.

Things I learned:

• even professionals sometimes have unwilling subjects and need to have quick action
• a simple process to use to create black and white images
• a skylight can be used to light photos from the top

This technique is particularly useful and makes removing skies, even where their are fine details encroaching into the sky, easy. It allows you to protect the areas you do not wish to erase, eliminating fiddly painting work. The first task is to create a history point this will allow you to paint back the original image in any areas that may be accidentally erased. Double click the photo layer (background) to turn it in to an editable layer. In the History Palette, click the box next to Make Layer, to set the history point.

Fall is upon us and that can only mean one thing: It's back to school time! Remember how exciting it was to go back to school every year? Shopping for school supplies and new clothes, meeting your new teacher and seeing which friends would be in your classes-all in anticipation of that exciting first day! Or do you remember not wanting to leave home, being afraid that you won't find your classes or that you won't have anyone to sit with at lunch? Back to school brings up so many different memories for each individual, so now is the perfect time to scrap your old memories or your child's new memories with great school-themed pages!

You're attending a photography workshop when you look around. You have the impression that everybody else has a bigger, better camera than yours--longer lens, newer, more expensive, more features. You feel inadequate. Tail between your legs, you slink back home to engage in your other hobby--cooking. You prepare a great meal and serve it to your friends. They love the food, and one of them says, "Gee, that was delicious! How did you do that? You must have a great oven."

In November of 2001, I did a review on the Adobe GoLive 5 web design program, using my own web site as an example of how well it worked. I've been using Adobe web design programs ever since the introduction of PageMill, their first one, and I've been impressed with each new version. GoLive CS is, by far, the best upgrade yet and the easiest to use to create web pages. If you've used Adobe's web design programs before, you already know that once you have the basics down, creating a simple web page (a page with photo images, information text such as titles and descriptions, and page links) is easy. From there on, GoLive CS just gets better and better, offering all kinds of fancy features you can add on as you go.

Photographer who didn't know what to do with all his photographs... Photo albums are still a good way to show photos to one person at a time. Oops, wrong space story. Ours is a story about the space photographers need in order to store the photographs they've taken. All photographers eventually run into this dilemma, so you might want to begin thinking about a solution now. Back when photography was in its infancy, photo negatives were often in glass plates. Storage was a real hassle in those days. Contamination and breakage always posed threats to the images. Later, negative films were invented, and photographers had to worry about fading, fungus, fingerprints, and scratches. Finally, someone devised a paper negative sleeve that helped greatly. You can mark on these sleeves and then file them in some sort of order. There are boxes you can use to store both black-and-white and color negatives of all sizes.

There is never a shortage of Photoshop books to learn from, but a few are a lot more worth spending your money on than others. The Photoshop CS book for Digital Photographers, by Scott Kelby is for sure one of those. If you are going to buy any new Photoshop book, make it this one, and you don't have to be a digital photographer either. This book covers everything you will need to make yourself a top Photoshop Guru, and you will be turning out images to match any digital pro. As with all of Mr. Kelby's books, this one also shows you not only what tools to use for each effect, but it includes all of the settings for those tools. It couldn't be any easier to learn from unless the book somehow actually "did the work" for you. This 375 page soft cover book is for intermediate to advanced users and retails for US$39.99 and is published by New Riders.

Lasers and the sun are the two brightest lights that your eyes will probably ever have to confront. Therefore, it would make sense that anything that makes them even more intense would be dangerous--right? And using equipment--such as a telephoto lens--that increases their size makes them more intense. You wouldn't think of placing a magnifying glass between your eyes and a very bright light before looking into it, would you? Likewise, if you look directly at the sun through a telephoto lens on your camera, you're essentially magnifying the effect of the light. However, you don't have to use a telephoto lens to capture a dramatic sunrise or sunset shot. In fact, you don't even have to include the sun in the photo itself. I've used wide-angle lenses to good effect in landscape sunrises and sunset shots. If you have good cloud formations, sunsets are more spectacular when the sun is already below the horizon.