Back after a long hiatus–new software and an Eye-Fi card

It’s been three years since I stopped blogging here except for on post in November 2011.  I’ve got the urge to get back to do this – maybe not frequently but we’ll see how it goes. I’m still using most of the tools I’ve written about but I’ve dabbled in HDR a bit with PhotoMatrix Pro.  I’m running Photoshop Elements 11 and I’ve added the Perfect Suite which I use a little bit.  I also have Three Topaz filters, Clarity, Simplify and Detail.  I really haven’t found a use for Detail but Simplify is a great tool for creating painting like images and Clarity can add some punch to a lot of different kinds of photographs. 

I’ll write some articles and put up some example of each of these.  I’ve also changed my mind a bit about cell phone cameras since I got a Galaxy SIII two years ago.  There are plenty of situations where a cell phone camera will get the job done.  Still, you can’t beat a serious camera like the Canon T4i that I’m shooting with. Have you found yourself in situations where you want to get high quality pictures but you’d also like to post to Facebook or just send a photo to family and friends? Or, you’ve just taken a wonderful photo with your DSLR and now you wish you could send it out.  Sometimes you can try the same shot with your cell phone camera but it’s tough to replicate your success with people pictures.  You also probably don’t have the zoom range, etc.  I recently acquired an Eye-Fi card for my DSLR.  This looks and works pretty much like a regular SD storage card but it has wi-fi capability built-in.  It’s pretty amazing.  When I take a great picture that I want to post or send out right away I just let the camera transmit the picture to my cell phone and I send it from there.  The full size pictures from my camera are too big to send quickly and certainly bigger than I would ever need for messaging or social media posting.  Fortunately my camera has built-in resize function so I shrink the photo before transmitting it to my cell phone. I bought the Eye-Fi Pro-X2 because I thought it would be nice to be able to transfer pictures wirelessly to my computer as well as my phone.  It turns out that you would never use that feature – it’s too slow.  So I could have gotten the Eye-Fi Mobi card which would probably have been easier to set up and use.