You make life worth living, originally uploaded by calligraphycarol.

This is my son and the girl he’s courting.
I used some free presets for Lightroom, and a free texture (image 1273) for the background, and one of my own wordarts. Here are the links to these products:
www.presetsheaven.com/2008/11/19/5-new-free-presets-creat…
www.bittbox.com/category/freebies/page/5/
www.1hourscrap.com/catalog/index.php?main_page=product_in…

I started drooling when I saw the Hallmark Institute of Photography’s 40-week long Photography School. I read about it on a blog that turned out to be their Mamiya Award of Excellence winner for 2008, Paul Nordmann. Check out the student galleries..they are so impressive!

I was discussing photography with a friend who said she wanted to learn how to use her camera, and I pointed her to Digital-Photography-School website as a great place to start. I love the bite-sized topics he has on his blog giving tips and “how-tos” for all kinds of different effects, as well as basic photography.

Scott Kelby, the founder of NAPP and Photoshop User magazine, and author of LOTS of photography books, has been hinting at a special event coming up on August 23rd, and he released information about it today! He is sponsoring a Worldwide Photowalk, an event where local photographers of all different skill levels get together and walk around shooting pictures for two hours, and then go and oogle over them at a restaurant nearby. I knew Bill would LOVE doing that (except for the heat), so I signed us up. It sounds like a lot of fun, and there are some really exciting prizes for the grand prize winner. More drooling.!

One more link I found recently has been sucking me in more often than I like to admit – the Wordle.net site. It is an AMAZING website where you can demonstrate the old saying, “A picture is worth 1000 words” literally! It takes any text you write (even from a website or blog) and makes a word cloud out of them, enlarging the words you repeat to emphasize them. Try it out for yourself!