If you haven’t been bitten by the Pinterest bug, you will now. It’s an addiction to rival the digiscrap addiction, trust me.

What is Pinterest and what does it have to do with Photography?

Pinterest is a neat little site where you can collect and organize things you find on the web. With a twist.

Ever save a layout or preview then come back to look at it weeks or months later and think, “what the heck did I like about THAT?”

Me too.

But Pinterest lets you save the image “pinned” to a digital bulletin board, AND it lets you write yourself a little note about it!

You set up Boards – name them whatever you want. (See mine here.)Then download the bookmarklet and put it in your bookmarks bar. When you’re out and about on the internet and come across something you love, click the bookmarklet, and add your notes, tell it what board to go to and ta-da, you’re pinned!

The BEST part is when you go back to look at them. Not only do you have your notes to yourself (“LOVE the color scheme on this!”), if you click on the picture it takes you to the original web page! No more wondering “WHERE did I find this?”

THEN, you share! You can follow people (follow me here) and when you start up Pinterest you’ll see a wall of images (Pins) that the people you are following have pinned. Think of it like your facebook news feed, but in images. But you aren’t limited to the people you are following! There’s a pull-down menu of topics at the top of the page so you can see pins done by people you’ve never met. If you like what they’re pinning, follow them!

What does this have to do with photography? Two things:

1. The visual format of Pinterest is a great way to collect photos and links to tutorials that inspire you. And nothing gets the creative juices going by looking at great images. In any art a great way to improve your skills is to attempt to recreate work by other artists. You learn a lot, and develop your own style in the process.
2. The social part of Pinterest will broaden your horizons. Find people who are pinning good stuff and follow them. They’ll take you to websites and tutorials that you’d never have found on your own!

   Try this: Search by topic by typing terms into the search box. Want to take better portraits? Type “portraits” into the search box. Want tutorials? Type Photoshop Tutorials in the box. When you get results at the top of the page you’ll be able to choose Pins, Boards, or People with your search terms in them. Don’t forget to check all three!

How do you get started?
You need an invitation. Leave a comment on this post and I will send you one, or if you don’t want to wait for me, go to Pinterest and request one. I got my invite within a day or so, yours may come even sooner!

Want to follow me on Pinterest?

If you follow me, I’ll follow you!

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Ok, so I’m probably the last person on earth to know this, but I thought I’d share.

My favorite way to get photos off my camera (that doesn’t require me to hunt down that pesky cable) is to post them to facebook from the phone then go download them from my facebook album to keep on my computer.

I use firefox, and when I download something it goes to my downloads folder, and a little window pops up to show me the progress of the download. What I’ve been doing is right-clicking and choosing “Open Containing Folder” then dragging from the downloads folder to wherever I want to keep it.

But today I had a *headsmack* moment!

You can drag the file directly from the little download notification window to wherever you want to keep it!

Just click… and drag.

DUH.

Did you know that? What else do you know that you’re not telling me?

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Sometimes you have a ton of photos you need to resize. Maybe you want to put them on Facebook or Flickr but don’t want your high-resolution photos going out there. Maybe you captured them at very high resolution but are making a collage and don’t want them that big. Either way, Photoshop and Elements gives you a quick way to do that, without even opening up the files!

I made you a little video using PSE10 – the Photoshop instructions are at the end, too.

What do you think, do you ever have a reason to resize a whole folder of photos?

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Oh now I’ve done it. I’ve hit rock bottom. Sunk to the depths. Crossed the line.

I went on vacation armed with only my cellphone camera. [GASP!]

Yes, I admit it. After years and years of lugging around DSLRs, hanging point and shoot cameras from my wrist, even buying disposables in a pinch – I decided to leave the camera behind for a little weekend jaunt to Vegas with my husband.

No, this wasn’t a case of CRAP I FORGOT THE STUPID CAMERA AGAIN!

I decided that this quick, romantic weekend with the hubby (he’s stuck there for two weeks for trade shows, so I flew out for the weekend between) wasn’t about sightseeing (though we did that) or about documenting everything we did. It was about spending time with my sweetheart without kids, schedules or anything! So I left the cameras at home.

Fortunately, our cell phones take higher resolution photos than our first digital camera ever did. So I’ll still get to scrap the weekend!
He took more photos than I did, so you’ll have to wait until he gets home to see all the fun stuff, but I wanted to share with you what I learned about relying on my cellphone camera:

• It’s sure easy. Loved having it in my hand or pocket and easily accessible. Would the point and shoot be as portable? Yes, but bulkier and I’d still have had to carry my phone. There would have been those, “I thought YOU had the camera?” moments. Nice that we each had our own camera, no extra gadget to worry about losing!
• It did just about everything I wanted it to. Didn’t miss the zoom surprisingly. Handled low light pretty well, if I held it steady. Got great landscape shots, good macro stuff, all without having to think about settings or lenses.
• I got crisper photos than I thought I would, the lens quality wasn’t bad! I did almost no editing on these (not that they couldn’t use a little) and they’re just fine.
• They were so easy to share! I could post from the phone to facebook and my phone auto-uploads to Google+, so keeping the kids up on what we were doing was easy-peasy!

Bottom line: would I do it again? Not for our daughter’s high school graduation, or even for a birthday party. But for a field trip? Maybe. For everyday stuff? Probably. Especially for situations like this where I’ll be out and about and want to travel light.

Do you ever use a cellphone camera? Have you tried addons like these lenses or these filters? Am I crazy for thinking this isn’t such a bad thing after all?

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Happy New Year, everyone!

Here at the White house, I’ve been bitten by the organizing bug. It doesn’t happen often, and usually passes if I just spend some time on Pinterest, but it’s almost always triggered by the appearance in the stores of shiny new storage containers.

I’ve even been organizing my digi-stuff! A new 1.5 Terabyte external hard drive somehow got delivered along with all the Christmas presents from Amazon, so I’m putting it to good use and taking the opportunity to clear out files as I transfer them. (More about that in another post, coming soon!)

As part of my mission to clear out clutter, I’m using a few new tools – the digital equivalent of shiny new containers – that I wanted to share with you!

Evernote - this Evernote is worth getting if only for the clipping feature. Install the Firefox add-on and you get a little elephant head icon in your browser bar. When you get to a webpage that you want to keep, click on the icon. (If you only want to keep a portion of the page, highlight that portion first!) It will create a new note with the content from that page, and you can tell it which of your notebooks you want to put it in, add your own notes to it, and save it. Best part is it also captures the link to where you got that information, so no more saving a tutorial then forgetting where you got it from! But you can use Evernote for so much more. Sir Scrapalot has written before about using it to keep things straight, and I can see how it would be useful for CT work.
Oh, and did I mention that you can get an app for your phone and tablet and sync across all platforms? So handy when I’m at the grocery story and can’t remember what else was in the goulash recipe… just pull it up in Evernote on my phone!

IFTTT – If This Then That -

If This Then That is a great new service that lets you set up little scripts to link up your social media accounts. Want all your flickr photos to be tweeted on your Twitter account? You can set that up! Want only your blog posts with the word “tutorial” in them to appear on your facebook page? You can do that! I’ve only just begun to look at the ways to use this service, but they’ve covered about everything on earth. You can trigger an action with a phone call, an email, or an action on one of the zillion services they have set up. You can also look at other people’s scripts (or recipes as they call them) and if it works for you, use it yourself! I’m thinking this will make it much less time consuming to post across platforms, and to remind myself of stuff!

OhLife – daily journaling service -

OhLife is too much fun! Sign up and every day in the evening you’ll get an email asking you to write a little about your day. Just hit reply and write away. It’ll save your entry, and when you go to the site you can export your postings and download them whenever you want. If you want to be better about journaling your everyday life, this is a great way to do it!

What are you doing to get your digital life in order? Are there cool new tools you are using? Share with us in the comments!

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