I broke down and bought a Wacom Tablet. I can’t wait to start playing with it and see what I can do in Photoshop with it. Especially with my wallpapers. I can also use it in my photos to clean them up, if needed. I don’t usually do too much editing to my photos. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, though. I guess it’s really just a user preference.

I have a thing about posting pictures of people. Well, let’s go even further…I have a thing about taking photos of people. I see all these other photoblogs that have great photos of people and I think man, it would be great to take pictures like that. But I feel awkward taking photos of people. I guess I feel like they are going to be upset if they see the camera pointed their way. All you photographers out there…what’s your experience with photographing people. And I mean like in a public setting, not necessarily in portrait, but just candid shots when your out and about.

I’m pissed off right now. I so badly wanted to set up dual monitors at work, but I don’t have a video card that will work. My husband let me have his other card. But it won’t work with my computers. It just makes me so mad! I know I’ve been working without it for a long time, but it would have been so nice to have two running. Some days I have 6 or 7 applications running at the same time while I’m doing my programming that I get confused about where things are.

Sometimes, I think about going back to a desktop because I can do things like dual monitor and it would be great with Photoshop…I could move all those little windows out of the way and have my workspace clutter free. I could work with TopStyle and FTP Voyager and Photoshop and Firefox and be able to see more of what I’m doing. I’d have more disk space on the desktop and it would always be there ready for me to work, rather than having to open up my laptop and wait for it to come out of hibernation. (Yes, I’m impatient.) I’d also have the CD burner for backing up photos. I don’t have any burner on my laptop, which sort of sucks, cause I have to move everthing to the desktop before burning it. It’s a pain.

But then I think about the times like last night, that I didn’t feel like taking my laptop out and turning it on, so I just didn’t get on the computer. And the past few weeks where I’ve been stuck on the machine, but I was still able to sit next to my husband while he watched tv, instead of being stuck away in a room at the back of the house by myself. And I like being able to take my laptop to work with me and upload my photos while I do my real work. That’s when I love having a laptop.

Yet, I miss being able to sit at a desk to work on my site. I sit on the couch with a meal tray in front of me as a desk. (pretty pathetic, huh?) We don’t have a desk set up in case we want to sit at it with the laptop, aside from the desk that the desktop is currently on. And of course there isn’t any room for another computer on that desk, it’s so cluttered.

Oh why can’t I just get dual display at work?

I’ve been looking into new cameras this weekend and I found one I really like. It’s a reasonable price, but I think I will wait a few weeks and play with my husband’s camera first.

I currently have a Nikon Coolpix 775. It was fine when I got it, but I can’t do too much with it and I’d like to learn more about photography. My husband’s Coolpix 880 died a few months ago and he replaced it with a Coolpix 5400. It has some excellent features that I’ve been playing with. I’ve always loved taking macro shots and his camera does such a better job at it than mine. Macro focusing is so much better and his camera does black and white.

I know many people are against taking digital photos in black and white, because they can always convert later, but if they change their mind, they already have it in color. This arguement makes sense, but it’s nice to have that feature available. I took some fabulous macro shots with the 5400 in B/W this weekend.

The camera I’m looking at is the Canon Powershot A80. It has just enough to get me on my way to learning the ins and outs of digital photography, but I can still set it to auto and click away. I think it is the next step camera for me, but even though it’s a reasonable $269, I think I’m going to wait a little while and spend some time learning on my husband’s 5400.

I also picked up a digital photography book this weekend. It explains what all the settings mean (ISO, shutter speed, aperture, white balance, exposure, etc.) and what they do for your photo. This is my self-study. I’m reading the book in hopes of understanding what all the manual features mean and what they can do for me when it comes to taking better photos. Once I’ve read it and played with the hubby’s camera, I might be ready to upgrade my camera to something a little more advanced.

I’ve just spent some time re-organizing my digital photos on my computer. I’ve got them in dated folders and some have titles for specific events. Everything is great. I redid my catalog in Photoshop Album (PA) and I’ve set it to show me the pictures in folder view.

But for some reason, when I imported some of the photos, I realized that there were multiple copies of the file. PA made duplicates. I have no idea why, so I had to delete a bunch of duplicates. It also creates a duplicate if you edit a file, so that the original is not altered. That is fine, but when I imported them back, it imported the original and the duplicate. So I have to go back and remove the originals from the catalog.

Another thing I’m noticing is that I can’t rearrange them. I had to create a whole new catalog and reimport the files. It was easier than tryig to reconnect the links to the actual images. And I’d like to batch rename files also, but I can’t. I could open Photoshop CS and use the batch options in it to rename the files, but I should be able to do that from inside PA.

I just installed Paint Shop Album. I want to test it out and see how it compares to Photoshop. It has some features I think I’d like.

What do you all use to manage your photos? Just plain windows, or a specific program?