Merry Christmas!I plan for this to be a somewhat long journal entry compared to the normal ones that I have had as of late. In this you can expect to find:
1. Picasa Review
2. Upcoming plans
3. Features
Shall we get started?
Picasa ReviewI have to give google credit where credit is deserved. I have read reviews all over the place for the organizational capabilities of Adobe Photoshop Elements 8.0. Honestly, I love Adobe products, and use many of them, however, Elements is below par in my opinion, especially considering it is organizational-based featuring facial recognition and has minor Photoshop editing capabilities. And for $80 you can own this software which has long loading times, below-par facial recognition, and unintuitive organizational capabilities.
Why do I preface Picasa with Elements? Well, I have never seen them compared, and haven't read any reviews on Picasa, though it is a free software that is excellent at what it does. I compared both softwares with the same base of photographs from the past two years, which is approximately 4000 pictures, and imported them into both pieces of software. Picasa was able to start recognizing people after just one or two 'tags' of that person in the photo's....Elements still can't pick people out of a crowd, and each picture has to have the people individually named as it's facial recognition algorithm can't find them. If you ask me, that is rather sad. From there, Picasa picked out the main 13 or so people that reoccur often within my pictures (family and close friends make up those 13 people). I 'tagged' about 3 pictures for each person, and then from there, confirmed all the suggestions that were made by the software, none of them were ever wrong, and confirmation gave more suggestions for other photo's. After the import of the photo's it took about 20 minutes to confirm all the photo's with those 13 people in them, and there are over 100 each.
Also, it has geotagging capabilities, though, I haven't experimented with that as of yet as I am waiting for my camera gps to get in, but from what I have seen of the software, it does what it advertises incredibly well.
Upcoming in my lifeStarting January 2, 2010, my brother Ben, my sister Abi, and I will be heading on a road trip which will consume the entire month of January. Our travels will take us from LA County, our current location, north to Seattle, WA. From there we will travel east to Maine, stopping by the landmarks that we pass including the Great Lakes and major cities. From Maine we go south to the Florida Keys. As we head West back to California we will venture up into the Mid-West hitting Missouri, Oklahoma, New Orleans, Texas, Arkansas, etc. In this road trip we will be sleeping out of the car and visiting people we know along the way. Anyone want a visitor for a day?
As we travel I will be geotagging all of my pictures for when we get back, and if anyone is up for it, we can stop by and you can get a free photoshoot if you catch us! (Leave a comment or send a note if you are interested in the free photoshoot as we travel through, I'll give you a number so we can talk about it ^^)
Speaking of geotagging, which I have mentioned a few times here so far, I got myself some Christmas Presents, A shinny new Nikon D300s, Nikon 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR-II Lens, a Nikon GP-1 GPS Unit, and a portable hard drive to download pictures to while on the trip. It will be fun times. Though, speaking of the new camera, anyone interested in buying a Nikon D5000 Camera Body? I don't have the software for it, but the software was useless to begin with, use Adobe Lightroom 2.4.
Either that or I can send what comes with the 300s with it
But the new camera makes me happy for the road trip, and hopefully my career as a professional photographer that follows when I get back home.
FeaturesI haven't done any features in a long time since I stopped browsing dA regularly when i lost hope with a lot of 'artists' who don't want to learn their craft, and any constructive criticism isn't taken because the 'artist' "Knows better than anyone else", which, being that I break a lot of rules of photography in general, I can somewhat understand. But I am not insulted when someone criticizes my work, rather, I take it in, acknowledge why, and even take it into consideration. Anyhow, that is off-top for this section, my hope was renewed earlier today, so I went looking for pieces to feature. ^^ So, with the theme of holiday's as tomorrow is Christmas day, I present my features to you.
This photo got me right away. This is what the holidays are about, and I believe this picture captures it perfectly. As the title says, "Two kids and an auto timer", that is what it is. Two lovers kissing each other with a beautiful fall background, and capturing what they share to show the world. It's beautiful, it shows the love of the holidays.
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As you can see, I wasn't able to find many. Please, link me some beautiful pictures by artists. Show me the holiday spirit that can be found on dA!
After all that, I wish you all a very Merry Christmas, I hope that you get to spend the time with your family, as there are many that are unable to at this time of year. Cherish the time. It's about family, friends, love, and hope; not about the gifts that you want and other materialistic things.
Best regards,
Jon Lawrence
Sentimental 
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Italians are CONTAGIOUS!!
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