Windows Live Writer is Awesome!

Proof is in my posts.  I also uncovered that I can indeed access several of my other blogs from WLW.  Way cool!

Looking forward to writing my future posts.  Stay tuned!

A Test Post Using Windows Live Writer

Testing-1-2-3.  This is a test post.  I’m trying out Windows Live Writer to see if this really works.  WLW is suppose to allow me to write my posts offline (complete with pictures, videos, hyperlinks, etc), save it local to my hard drive, and then publish my post when I have Internet access.  How cool is that? 

Okay, so this has nothing to do with photography.  It does have something to do with having a cool tool that allows me to write my photography posts, collect my thoughts, pictures, etc whenever I want and then post when I’m ready. 

After spending 10 minutes with this program and writing this post, I have uncovered a cool feature, I can set the date of when this post will appear.  To document today’s date for this post, it’s Friday, October 29th.  I’ve set the post date to be yesterday’s date, Thursday.  We’ll see if this function really works. 

I can add bullet points like why I think WLW is a handy tool:

• intuitive to use
• picking a date for the post
• inserting hyperlink, pictures, or videos
• spell checker

Now I need to figure out if I can use WLW for updating my other blogs.  Will post back the results. 

Storage-How about a portable and functional netbook?

I've been looking for a device to store my pictures when traveling. For many years, I've used a PSD (portable storage device)...an Epson P-2000 Multimedia Photo Viewer (40GB). It's a perfect gadget to pack in a camera bag and use as a secondary storage device. For a small gadget, it's actually quite heavy. After a day of shooting pictures, I would take my SD or CF card and pop it into the Epson device and watch the photos get copied. I could review the pictures one by one or run the slide show feature. One could use this device to watch movies, but we're talking about looking at a 3.8" screen. Which is quite small. This device has a 40GB hard drive which I've come close to filling several times. Over the years, I've kept up with the download notices and upgraded the firmware. Currently, my Epson can only read up to a 2GB SD card. Kind of crippling in today's technology including the size of the hard drive and how heavy the device is. Now, I've been looking for a replacement.

I thought about getting a replacement for my P-2000. I've been extremely happy with this product and its reliability. The price for its replacement, the P-3000 is quite high and still only comes with 40GB of storage.

I've done a lot of research and finally came up with another portable device that is also very functional. A netbook.

This netbook idea brought me to another research path that was just mind boggling. There are a lot of netbook manufacturers out there as well as a lot of different models to choose from. I immediately searched for the "top 10 netbooks" and looked at the list from 2009 and from 2010 from various resources. I wanted to see which manufacturer consistently placed in both lists. I came up with four manufacturers that peaked my interest: Asus, Acer, HP, and Toshiba. (I'm familiar with the Asus brand as I used to build computers (many, many years ago) and had a lot of experience using their Asus motherboards). I made a list of the top important features I wanted in a netbook: hard drive size, battery life, and keyboard. Price was also a deciding factor.

I started reading the users' reviews. There were a lot of them. Some good, some bad. After a few hours of reading, I uncovered a few Mac users out on the Internet who bought a netbook. They were buying Toshibas. As a Mac convert, I knew I should take a bit more interest in their reviews which was mainly about the keyboard. I was able to narrow down the Toshiba model rather quickly and I came up with the NB305-N440BL.

Here's my new toy! This model comes in three colors and as you can see I selected the blue. The cover is nice and textured. There is little chance of this slipping out of my hands or getting fingerprints. Many of the other manufacturers are using slick and shiny covers.




The keyboard is nice and being a touch typist, it just feels good to type on. It feels like a full size keyboard.




There's a lot of status lights available to figure out what's going on with netbook.




Here's the left side of the netbook. There's an SVGA port, network port, USB port, and of course an SDHC card slot.




The right side contains a cable lock port, power, two additional USB ports, a Mic in, and Headphone port. I have my power cable plugged in. Also, I have a USB thumbdrive that's acting as my "ready boost"...giving me additional memory that the OS uses.





The newer netbooks come with Windows Starter 7. It's a limited OS. So far, it's working beautifully for me. I have upgraded the memory from 1GB to 2GB. Most netbooks only come with 1GB and one memory slot. So, if you're interested in 2GB, you have to buy a 2GB memory module and replace the one that came with the netbook. Yes, I had to do some additional research for the memory as this system was quite new and there were problems with older/existing memory modules.

This netbook comes with 250GB hard drive. More than enough to store pictures. I won't have to worry about running out of space. It also has wifi capability as well as an internal NIC if you want to be wired into a network. The battery life is awesome. I'm averaging about 7 hours and that depends on how I setup my screen brightness during the day and evening.

Installation and setup was easy. After getting to the Windows desktop, I was on a network within ten minutes and printing within 5 minutes.

Instead of narrowing my use with a PSD, I now have the capability to store more pictures, access the Internet, type up posts for my blogs, etc. This list could go on and on.

If anyone has this particular netbook and is interested in the memory module that will work with this system...leave me a comment.

I will be back to post the software applications that I'm using with the netbook. I've done some research in finding small footprint apps for manipulating photos, etc.

Taking Wedding Pictures

I had a wonderful opportunity to take some wedding pictures for a friend of mine from church. There was no pressure, as I was a backup photog. I'm actually my church's unofficial photographer and I'm always in learning mode. I keep that mentality, learning mode, so I can be as creative as I want to be.

The church's sanctuary has no natural lighting. It has a very high ceiling where bouncing a flash does nothing. I had rely on the equipment I had: my D5000 and SB-600 flash with diffuser and rely on my own techniques that I've learned while photographing inside this church over the last few years.






















Sometimes you just need to keep an eye on the bride, because you never know what she might do next...
















Overall, this was a fantastic wedding experience for me. I took over 250 pictures of pre-wedding, wedding, and post-wedding. Unfortunately, there are no reception pictures. My darling hubby wasn't feeling too well and we ended up leaving before the reception.

I set my camera to take both RAW and JPEG (fine) images. I didn't have any problems with camera lag time. My D5000 did a phenomenal job of keeping up with me. So did my flash. I used less than two SDHC cards (4GB each).

I'll be back to post more pics.


Camera: Nikon D5000
Lens: 18mm-200mm
Flash: Nikon SB-600 with Sto-Fen diffuser
Settings: Program, Single-point focus, Center Weighted
Post Production (PP) settings: Auto color and copyright information