It won't be too long before we can take pictures like this around Alberta.

This one was taken at Lake Louise - Alberta - Canada a couple of winters ago

It's almost Friday!

A few more glasses today:

Sunday picture:

It's been a long week but Friday is finally here.

Here is today's post:

Mountains close to Moraine Lake - Alberta - Canada

Low calories picture today

This is another shot of Sydney - Australia.

Such a lovely place.

Opera House - Sydney - Australia

Probably the most beautiful modern city that I had the opportunity of visiting.

Totally worth the 20+ hours of travelling from where I live.

You may see sails on this picture but I see sharks. :-)

Hope to come for another visit any time soon.

This picture was taken close to Tulum-Mexico.

I guess I just answered the question that I asked when I placed my previous picture. Lets see if you can figure out the answer.

Can you figure out if this picture was taken during Sunset or Sunrise?

Let me know if you can.

This was taken in east coast of Mexico.

I keep mentioning to people that I live close to heaven.

Today's post is just to confirm that.

This is a place named Lake Louise and is located roughly 2 hours west of Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

This is how Lake Louise looks like during winter time:




And this is how Lake Louise looks like during summer time:



If these two pictures do not convince you to come for a visit, I don't know what will.

As I mentioned on my previous article, printing pictures is one of the most common and probably easiest ways of sharing pictures with friends and family.

There are literally hundreds of services out there that allow you to generate prints from negative, slides or digital images and all offer an huge variety of print sizes, paper type, etc.

I have tried several of these print services and now have a list of favorites that I am going to share with you:

Whenever I have a picture that I want to print for a presentation or to put behind glass I use the services of Technicare which is a shop dedicated to serve professional photographers in the west of Canada.

Technicare uses Kodak printers and a combination of Kodak Papers to deliver a very high quality product that I am sure will satisfy the most demanding photographers.

My favorite paper is the Kodak Endura Luster. You will not want to print in any other paper after giving this one a try.

Technicare will also provide you their printer's ICC profile which you can use in Adobe Photoshop to soft proof your pictures before sending them to print. Call Technicare and they will even guide you through the process of installing their order management java based software that really simplifies the process of sending pictures for printing at their labs. Even though the quality of their services is extremely high the price is very competitive and don't be surprised if you find out that the services that they provide are actually cheaper than less sophisticated competitors.

My second option in Canada is FuturePhoto which is the Photo Printing arm of FutureShop. FuturePhoto uses Kodak Royal Paper which is also pretty good and it is extremely simple to use their web site to upload the pictures that you wish to print. You can choose if you wish to pick up your prints at the closest FutureShop store or if you wish them to mail the prints to you for an extra fee. FuturePhoto does not offer a customized ICC profile for their printers but you will do just fine in 99% of the cases. I just got an email from FuturePhoto indicating that they are charging a mere C$ 0.19 for 4"x6" prints and that is probably one of the cheapest options in the west of Canada right now. If you find something cheaper than this and that delivers similar quality then please let me know. Click here to check FuturePhoto latest prices.

My third favorite printing service is Winkflash which is an american based company that provides really great prints on Fuji Crystal Archive Paper. Winkflash charges C$ 0.24 per 4"x6" print and will mail any quantity of pictures to Canada for a flat fee of C$ 2.65. I live in the west of Canada and it usually takes less than one week to receive my orders from them which I find pretty good for just
C$ 2.65. As FuturePhoto, they do not offer ICC profiles for their printers but you will do just fine in 99% of the cases. I won't probably be using Winkflash much more if FuturePhoto keeps offering competitive prices as they are right now.

I believe that if you are reading this article it is probably because you are interested in photography and chances are that you have been taking tons of pictures using either your film or digital camera and that you have been sharing the pictures you take with Friends and Family.

There are several great ways of sharing your pictures and the easiest solution is usually printing a few copies to give out. There is also the option of quickly emailing some pictures out but it may be wise to use some sort of software that allows you to better automate the process of sharing pictures when you need to handle a reasonably large collection of pictures.

I have been using FotoAlbum Pro for that purpose for a couple of years and I highly recommend using it in combination with FotoTime's web site.

FotoAlbum Pro allows you to create offline albums that can be synchronized with FotoTime's online albums for easy sharing with friends and family.

FotoAlbum takes care of resizing/compressing pictures before publishing them to your online Albums and offers great features such as archiving your pictures to CD/DVD and keeping only the thumbnails in your Hard Disk for future reference. Support is also very effective and pretty quick in answering any questions that you may have.

It will cost you US$ 23.95 to get a one year Fototime.com subscription and that includes 500 Megabytes of Disk Space to share your pictures and video and a free version of the Foto Album software.

You pay an extra US$ 19.95 to upgrade to Foto Album Pro.

I had the chance of visiting San Diego a few weeks ago and just loved it. Lots to do and to see.

You can easily spend several days visiting the Seaworld, the San Diego Zoo and its sister park The Wild Animal Park, the museums at Balboa Park, the Aircraft Carrier Museum Midway and, if that is not enough, you can head to La Jolla to visit the Birch Aquarium which is part of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UCSD.

La Jolla was certainly one of my favourite spots while in San Diego. It is Hard to find a spot to park close to the beach but you will not regret the effort.

I would suggest a walk by the beach around sunset time and if you are lucky you can get a shot like the one I captured (below).

My local photography club September's theme was water. That led me to explore a few possibilities that I will be sharing with you over the next few days. I am also experimenting with posting a link to a picture that is posted on Flickr. Let me know if you like this picture or if you have any suggestions.

The folks at Skype have been pretty busy developing new features for their software and I thought it would be worth mentioning that they just came up with a new cool feature that allows you to forward unanswered calls to either your landline or mobile phone.

You need to download and install Skype's beta version and once the software is installed choose: Tools / Options / Call Forwarding & Voice Mail and enter the phone # (i.e. +13433430192) where you wish to receive the unanswered calls forwarded by Skype.

How does it work?

You load your Skype Account with a few credits and those credits will be consumed whenever somebody uses your "call forwarding" option.

You don't need to have your skype software up and running in your computer. All it takes is for somebody to try to contact you using their skype software and not being able to (i.e. you're offline or you don't answer a call using your version of Skype).

Lets say that you live in Canada but your family lives in Argentina and that it costs them 0.50 cents a minute to contact you using a regular landline service.

Skype would allow you to pay 0.017 a minute to have the pleasure of hearing your relatives voices and there's absolutely no cost to whoever calls you.

I tested this new feature today with my sister, who leaves overseas, and with my friend Gean Oliveira who lives in Toronto and it worked nicely.

Tags: Technology

This is my first post using w.bloggar which is a great freeware Blog editor developed by Marcelo Cabral

w.bloggar allows you to edit your posts offline and interfaces with a number of Blog content management systems.

You can spell check your posts off-line, save them for future posting, preview, etc.

Also a great tool to use if you manage a number of different Blog.

You won't regret if you try it.

I am taking a risk but I decided to move the new layout to production.

It's still a work in progress and I still have some pages following the old layout but I will soon take care of changing them as well.

Let me know if you like and I am open to any suggestions.

I added a small links section to the right side of the main page but I will probably eliminate that, as the plan is to have the links on a separate page accessible via de main menu.

I also added links to the galleries from the pictures at the top of the page. That’s fully functional now even though I still have to change the style of each of the individual gallery pages to match what I am doing with the site’s main page.

I find it interesting that Internet Explorer recognizes the content of the ALT tag and uses it as a cuetip but the same feature does not work that way in Firefox. I will have to find a away of making that work in Firefox.

It appears that I finally understand how the Movable Type CSS works.

I added a menu today that looks pretty close to what I want it to look like and added another layer with a few pictures that will shortly link to the site galleries.

Next steps:
-Replace the “CoolPortfolio by Marcelo Pinheiro” with some sort of picture banner.
-Link the pictures to each specific gallery and add some cue tips.
-Add a links section

I am really having a hard time to get this thing customized.

I don't give up very easily.

Just put the default index.html and stylsheet.css files back and lets try it again.

I have to study this CSS stuff a little better to clearly understand why the page does not behave like I wish it to behave.

I just noticed that Movable type has released version 3.2.

Time for an upgrade?

May be during the weekend.

Let me know if you have upgraded and if you think it brought any new fantastic features to your blog.

My key issue right now is to find time to explore all the features and to learn how to customize the stylesheets.

As I start to work on the MT powered page to turn this into my future main CoolPortfolio page I am debating what are the modifications that I want to put in place. I am playing with the menu positioning a little bit as I would like to see it at the top of the page instead at the bottom of the page as my current main page.

As this page evolves over the next few days expect the menu to change format and colors.

I am playing with MT default CSS templates to find something that I really like.

I have the overall idea in mind but it's going to require a little testing and adjusting.

I have been using Flickr for a little while now and i have to confess that I love it. Great user interface, great services, great discussions, great tools.

This is a test to see if I can show some of my flickr pictures on this blog:

www.flickr.com

Tags: Flickr, Photography, Photo

I downloaded and tried Google Talk yesterday.

The software is fast, pretty light and the interface is pretty simple.

It integrates well with Google's Gmail service and the sound quality is outstanding but it lacks features such as file transfer and webcam sharing that are offered by other instant messaging softwares such as MSN, Yahoo Messenger and ICQ

Certainly worth the download if all you're looking for is a simple interface to allow you to exchange a few lines and voice with your friends.

Tags: Google, Technology, Software, Google Talk

Google just released a new Instant Messenger software today.

The software is named Google Talk and you can downlod it here.

The software integrates well with Google's email and seach engine services and allows you to quickly import you "goögle mail" contacts.

I haven't had a chance to test the sound quality yet but I am sure that we will soon find out if it works nicely or not.

Tags: Google, Technology, Software, Google Talk

Canon has officially announced the 5D Camera which will sell for aproximately US$ 3.5K and that will offer a full frame sensor and 12.8 megapixel as its main features.

Sample pictures and Specifications are available at Canon's Japanese Web site.

There's also some information at Canon's North American Site.

Tags: Photography, Photo, Camera, Canon, 5D

I took this picture during a recent visit to San Diego.

Lovely coast.

I used a 4x Cokin neutral density grad filter to allow me to produce this filter. Got lucky that the little boat decided to cross the ocean during sunset.

Tags: Travel, California, San Diego, Sunset, Photography, Photo

If you are into digital photography like I am and if you have been taking pictures of everything that surrounds you then you have probably been burning a lot of backup CDs/DVDs to store all those pictures somewhere safe and you are probably consuming more and more of your internal/external hard disk space.

Well, it may sound like science fiction but it appears that the age of Holographic Data Storage is just around the corner and Inphase Technologies even has a video of a prototype holographic data storage unit. The company reports that it's product will store 300 gigabytes of data in a single disc the size of a regular CD.

I can't hardly wait to see this product in the market and can only imagine what new applications it will support.

Tags: Technology

The Saga continues and I guess the next step is to find a template that I really like. Like I said, lots to do still.

This is my first post using movable type.

It was relatively easy to put it to work following the instructions for installating MT at Windows based servers.

The first challenge that I found was when I ran the mtcheck application and it indicated that it could not recognize mySQL but the hosting company support was quick in resolving the issue (driver not loaded I guess).

The second challenge was when I tried to run the MT config builder app and it indicated that it could not find the mySQL user that I had speficied on the config files. I checked everything that I had access to and all looked fine.

I then tried to split the configuration line (different than what it's written on the official documentation) to have the database name and user name in different lines and the issue disappeared.

It probably took me a little over a couple of hours of work in total to follow the instructions and to get MT working to a point that I could start using the application.

The next job was to understand what needed to be done to create/configure COOLOG and to get this first post done.

Now I have to figure out everything that I can do using it. Looks interesting but it looks like I have lots to read until I can use this software to its full potential.