Working with photos
Posted by Mariel Amez on February 6, 2010
I’ve been silent for a while because I was away on holiday. I travelled to Colombia: Cartagena de Indias and the island of San Andres.
I have owned a digital camera for about a year, and never really sat down to work out what to do with the photos. As part of EVO 2010 I decided to learn a little while reminiscing about the wonderful days spent in these dreamlike locations.
First of all, with Windows Live Photo Gallery (which I discovered was installed on my netbook) I set out to enhance the pictures: I removed shadows, added sharpness, cropped some “unwanted participants” out of the photos. I used Corel Photo-Paint (also lying dormant on my hard disk) to blur the faces of every person appearing in crowd scenes. Then I tagged, named and rated the hundred photos I had taken, and found out that WLPG would directly export pictures to my Flickr account, where I created two albums, one for each location, with a selection of the higher rated photos.
I had used Flickr before, but resented the impossibility to embed in WordPress blogs (only linking is allowed). Looking at Michael‘s “Journey of Light” blog, I had the idea of inserting a thumbnail together with the link, which would improve the effect.
See Cartagena slideshow.
See San Andres slideshow.
After that, I turned to Slide to go on experimenting. It turns out it’s much easier to “borrow” pictures from Flickr than to upload them again, which is possible as long as they have been marked as “Public”. I created a Funpix (click to see it), using as many tools as possible (Glitter Text, Effects, Skins, Themes).
Slide seems quite similar to Picnik - Flickr‘s default individual photo editor. The main difference seems to be that, unlike Slide, Picnik does not require an account and allows you to download your creation. I had tried other editors for DMPT, as I recorded here.
Finally, I created this “fun” slideshow complete with music and all (skins, themes, effects) on Slide, which does provide a WordPress code – provided you are working in English, but not if your language is Spanish.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
I really need to start catching up with the sessions, but I feel I have learnt quite a lot through these picture selections.
