Rediscovering Photography

After reading a number of highly rated reviews about Windows Live Writer, I decided to give it a try. 

Writing a blog is a lot of fun, but it is also a fairly time consuming activity. Combine that with an obsessive photo hobby and the free time disappears rapidly. So anything that can make the blogging part easier just leaves that much more time behind the camera.

Windows Live Writer (or WLW for short) looks like a very interesting program. And I really like being able to keep a local copy of my posts prior to uploading them to the blog. We’ll see how this works and I’ll report any bad (or exceptionally good) experiences.

The primary reason I am trying this is from the information I saw in a couple of posts by Ed Bott from ZDNet, ‘My 10 favorite Windows programs of all time‘ and ‘Your turn: Readers choose their 10 favorite Windows programs‘. There is some good information here, especially if you have time to read the comments. Check it out.

So I am writing this post with Windows Live Writer. It seems to be working famously. And as long as I am doing a post about testing new software, I thought I would throw in this HDR photo of the Jeep. It is first of all a test to see if WLW will handle the photo display markup I used in my previous posts. And if you click on the Jeep photo to see it full size you will notice the Photomatix watermarks on the picture. I have been testing the trial copy of Photomatix, and while it is interesting it is not interesting enough for me.

In my opinion, and painting with a very broad brush here, there are two kinds of ‘new’ digital photographers. Those that go out and take photos, and those that are caught up in all the tech things that can be done on the computer with digital photos. There are countless very good sites on the Web where you can learn about Photoshop, debate RAW vs. JPG, consider the differences in printing your shots yourself or using various photo printing services, and examine the intricacies of the histogram you see on your camera. But it is sure a lot more pleasing and interesting reading and learning about these things after you have a good library of photos of your own to work with.

We will be talking about High Dynamic Range (HDR) photos in the future (here is an example photo and a site with loads of HDR information. But for now our primary directive is to maximize our time when we are out taking photos and finding additional interesting things (er, I mean ’subjects’) to photograph. There are zillions of sites to tell you what to do with your photos after you have them, but very few that can help you determine the best and most effective way of being in the right place at the right time to take those photos in the first place. And that’s what we will be trying to do here.