Winter session registration for the Torrance Adult Adult School begins December 7th for Mail-In Only, and walk-in registration begins December 16th.

I am beginning to develop the Pages that I will use to distribute handouts for the classes I will be teaching at the Torrance Griffith Adult Center and the South Bay Adult School. The pages themselves will be password protected. You may notice names and the formats changes on this main blog page as I add and modify the structure of the handouts pages.

Hi Everyone,

For those of you who are former or potential students in my digital photography classes, I have a couple of updates.

Apparently, the South Bay Adult School will open their web site for online registration on approximately August 7th. Also, their walk-in registration begins  approximately August 14th. I do not have any new information as to when registration opens for the Torrance Griffith Adult Center, but I suspect it will be approximately the same time.

The first week of classes for both schools will be September 14th. If you lost my email and/or have not been to the web site recently, below are the descriptions/schedules for the classes I will teaching at both schools this fall.

South Bay Adult School

Torrance Griffith Adult Center

The summer has really been flying by, and I am now in the midst of planning the courses and upgrading the exercises. If you have not taken a class in the last year or so, you will find that I now provide my handouts on a password protected web page in PDF format. You will be given the password for your class on the first day. Doing it this way not only allows you to print a superior quality copy to the xerox copies normally provided, but the Comments section on the handouts page makes a great way for us to interact between sessions.

 I have not posted as many articles on my blog as I initially planned this summer, but I hope to do a couple more before school starts. I hope you are taking advantage of the RSS feed, so you get a notice whenever I add a new post etc.

One of the reasons I have not been posting as much as I thought I would is  like the past couple of years I have been beta testing the next versions of Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements. Yes, there will be a Version 8 at some point. I have been doing this for the past several months. I am testing both programs on two different computers. It has taken up a lot of my time, but has also been quite rewarding and fun, as well as frustraing at times. It normally does not involve this, but this morning I was on a three way connection for two hours with a couple of programmers in India. They were sharing my computer screen while I was demonstrating a problem to them.

Well, that’s my update. I will probably send out one last reminder for the fall term via email late next week. In the meantime, I will be spending some time in the Sierras camping. Hopefully, I’ll come back with some good pictures and maybe some bad ones we can work on in class.

Enjoy te rest of the summer.

Surfing the net today, I rediscovered a site I believe I’ve been to before. Its address is www.customguide.com/quick_references.htm. What you have here is a pretty large list of quick reference guides for many popular programs. They are in PDF format. When printed they look similar to those plastic laminated guides you can buy in a book store. Here is the link to the one they have for Photoshop Elements 6. Even if you are using PSE 7, you should still find this guide quite useful. They also have one for PSE 5.

Check out the guides they have for other programs. I downloaded and printed the one they have for Microsoft’s One Note, a program I use extensively. This site is probably not the only site providing free quick reference guides and it may not be the best. If you know of similar sites providing concise reference guides for PSE or other programs, let us know about them in the Comments section of this post.

Until next time,

Don

Students, as you can see I have removed the password protected pages containing the class handouts for the classes I taught this spring. I will most likely add one or two public pages during the summer. Stay tuned.

Some of you reading this may not be that familiar with reading blogs, or at least the way mine is laid out. So I thought it might be a good idea to orient you a bit. To begin with, blogs show the latest post on the top and older posts in reverse order as you scroll down the page. This is similar to how forums on the internet are organized.

At the bottom of each post or article there is link you can click on to leave a comment or a question. I encourage you to do exactly that if you have a question or a comment. I get an email message any time someone adds a comment.

Blogs can be laid out in any number of ways. In my blog, you will see Page tabs at the top. Pages can be used for a variety of things. I tend to use Pages for those articles and information that I do not want to scroll off the screen in time. For the past several months, I have devoted most of the pages to providing student handouts for the classes I’m currently teaching. These are password protected and will be locked or removed shortly now that school is over for me until the fall.

The Blogroll in the right hand pane is simply a list of some interesting web sites. I will probably be adding to my Blogroll soon. Since a blog is just a long list of articles, you need a quick way to get to previous articles of interest. One way to do this is the Calendar in the right pane. For a given month, those dates that are blue are dates when a post was added. Clicking on a blue date takes you directly to the article.

At the top of the left pane are links to the Pages. It is important to look here for a complete list of Pages, because only so many page tabs can fit across the top.  Below that are the Categories and Sub-Categories which I have assigned to each post or article. It’s a good way to quickly get to a post on a particular subject. Below the Categories are the Archives showing links to previous months.

Blogs are intended to be updated frequently. Due to my teaching schedule, mine does not get updated nearly as much as it should. However, now that it is summer, I should be able to update it much more often. I encourage you to check back periodically. For my students, this will be one of the first places you will see what my teaching schedule will be for the fall at both the Torrance Griffith Adult Center and the South Bay Adult School.

The Entries RSS  and Comments RSS links near the top left of the page, can be used to set up an email reminder/link back to the blog whenever a post has been updated or a new one added. The RSS Comments link will send an email whenever a comment has been added to a post. To set up an RSS feed is different in each browser and/or email program. The figure at this link, http://tinyurl.com/RSS-Feed-IE shows what you should see if you click on the Entries RSS button from the Internet Explorer browser. I use Outlook as my email program. When I subscribe to a given web site using the RSS feature, I get notices sent to an RSS folder, not my Inbox whenever that site/blog is updated.  Each browser and email program may require different steps to set up an RSS feed for a given web site or blog.

In a day or so, I will add my first post for the summer, a very quick yet effective wa to make a photo collage.  Stay tuned.

Don

Yesterday I went to upload some recent pictures from my Canon XTi’s memory card into the Photoshop Elements 7’s Organizer. This is very routine for me having done it hundreds of times.  This time things did not go as expected.

To begin with, I had become lazy and had not emptied my card for some time, although I had previously uploaded all but the most recent batch of photos. In fact, my card had almost 600 images with about 2.5 Gb of its 4 Gb capacity was filed.

As I proceeded to upload the images using File > Get Photos and Videos > From Camera or Card Reader, things went smoothly at first. The memory card was quickly previewed but then I noticed that the actual preview thumbnails were not being generated at some point.  I had seen PSE slow down generating thumbnails in the past, especially if I had a lot of RAW files, but never this bad.

But, I proceeded to the next step, and clicked on the Get Photos button. Nothing happened. PSE 7 had stpped wotking. I had to exit PSE via the Task Manager. I tried multiple times using different card readers with the same results. I began to worry, and was thankful that I had previuosly uploaded the vast majority of the images. But I did not want to lose my recent batch.

At first I thought maybe I was trying to upload too many from the card. Since I had uploaded most of them already, I decided to erase a bunch of them manually from within my camera. I quickly abandoned that approach. I can only do one at a time, or erase them all  and it was going to take a lot of concentration and time to delete them without inadvertently clicking on the Erase All button in my camera.

I then used Windows Explorer to copy the pictures to a folder. I was able to do this. As I was randomly opening the images with Windows Explorer, I clicked on the last picture I had taken, and it had an error that prevented it from being opened. I also noticed, its file size was somewhat smaller.

I put the card back into my camera and deleted that image, the last one I had taken. I put the card back in the reader and proceeded to upload the images using the Get command of PSE 7’s Organizer without any problems. 

I then wondered why that last image was bad. It obviously brought PSE 7 to its knees. Then I remembered. I was shooting RAW,  and my camera takes a few seconds to transfer the RAW image to my memory card. I do not have a high speed memory card. I remember that after shooting the last image, I immediately turned my camera off. I suspect it was in the middle of closing the file and for whatever reason it did not properly complete that operation before shutting down.  

Just to be on the safe side, I reformatted my memory card in my camera rather than just erasing the images. Many people recommend doing this all of the time anyway,  rather than just erasing the images from the card.

So, don’t be in such a hurry to shut your camera off after taking that last shot. That may not have caused the problem, I am not going to take any chances in the future.

Many digital cameras can take movies also. They often save the video in a .mov file format, which is the Apple Quicktime format. Although Photoshop Elements can accept these files into the Organize and generally play them back through the Quicktime viewer, they can not be included in a slide show. Video files for slide shows must be either .wmv or .avi files. Also, Microsoft’s Movie Maker 2 can not accept .mov files either.

A workaround for the above situation is to convert the .mov files to a format that Elements and Movie Maker can accept. Being able to convert one video file format to another is a common need. Many file converters exist and some are free. The following free file converter is one such program that is pretty easy to use, at least for converting files. There may be some loss of quality, but it does get the job done.

The program is called RAD Video Tools. It can be downloaded from the following web site.

www.radgametools.com

The name of the file is RadTools.exe. To download the file, click on the appropriate link. Your browser will ask whether you want to Run or Save it. Choose Save and proceed to download it to your computer. Run the install program from your computer.

The program is pretty easy to use, especially if you just simply want to convert a file. Here is a short video tutorial on how to do it.

Click on the following link to see the video.   http://www.donstouder.com/Photos-Videos/RAD%20Tools%20Take%202.wmv

 Until next time,

Don

This post is probably more for my benefit than for anyone who might read it. Up until now, my posts have been made using WordPress’ editor. Although it is reasonably friendly, it appears to do certain tasks and formatting you need to know HTML – I don’t. In reviewing some of my recent RSS feeds from Microsoft, I came across one talking about Live Writer. Live Writer is a free tool for writing blogs. It can be used with several of the popular blog hosting sites, of which WordPress is one.

I decided I would download it and see how it works for generating this post. What I discovered when downloading the program was that I already had it on my computer, along with some other components of Microsoft’s Live Windows suite. And I also discovered that I had already linked it to my Don’s Digital Photo Corner blog. I have a habit of downloading programs etc and then forgetting about them before I can find if they are useful or not. I have a backlog of these in my Downloads folder on my desktop. So little time, so many programs.

Using Vista’s Snipping Tool, I captured the right panel on Live Writer’s screen that shows tasks that I can do.

As long as I’m at it, I might as well show you what the Live Writer’s Menu bar looks like.

I am going to pause here and publish the post, or at least try to. OK. I’m back. I added the Category and Tag from the WordPress editor online. Now I am back to Live Writer working locally on my PC.

I am going to end this post now with the following thought you may want to consider. If you are currently posting pictures on the Internet, on a photo sharing site, you may want to consider a blog. For example, you could post your very best pictures on your blog which would give you a better forum to describe them and get comments back from your friends who view them. By the way, with most blog hosting sites, you can make it so your blog is visible only to those guests you invite.

See, I did finally get around to a digital photography in this post.

Don