Dropbox

If you keep seeing me mention Dropbox and are wondering just what it is then now's your chance to find out. Dropbox is quite simply one of the most useful bits of free software that the club uses. It makes the job of collecting pictures & files from all of you really easy. Here's a step by step guide on how to get it set up.

• use this link to visit the Dropbox website, download their software and register on the website. If it's been a while since you installed their software then go and download & install it again, they've released a few new versions lately that fix a few bugs.
• Install their software. Go on it doesn't hurt. Once installed you should see a Dropbox folder on your desktop
• Email me to let me know you've installed it. Please make sure you let me know the email address you used to sign up to their website.
• You'll get an email asking you to join a "Shared Folder". The folder will be called something like "Reflex Entries Your Name". Please accept the invite.
• Once you've accepted the invite you should see the shared folder INSIDE of your Dropbox folder (the Dropbox folder is on your desktop if you didn't change it's location when you installed the software)
• That's the hard part done. See I told you it was pretty painless!
• From now on whenever you want to send pictures or files into the club all you need to do is put them inside the SHARED FOLDER.
• When you want to send in pictures just put them inside the shared folder. You can also create more folders inside the shared folder if you need to.
• If your sending in pictures just leave your PC switched on for a few minutes so that it has a chance to upload the files. (If the pictures are sized for our competitions then it will only take a few seconds for them to upload. Larger files will, obviously, take longer to upload)
• That's it. You don't have to worry about Dropbox anymore it should all run smoothly and without you needing to do anything else.
• Another useful thing is that by having Dropbox installed if the club needs to send you a picture or file it will also work that way as well.

Deliberately mess it up.

If you came along to last nights meeting you would of been sat there bored, listening to me tell you how to edit your photographs, but wait a minute. I didn’t tell you how to do it. I showed you how I would edit three of my pictures and hopefully started you thinking what you could do to your own work to make it stand out a little.  I didn’t want any of you going away from last nights meeting thinking you had to do exactly what I said. I desperately wanted you NOT to do that and I really hope I succeeded.

I honestly think that everyone should take the pictures they want and edit them (or not) however they want to. They are after all your pictures. But I also think that if you do want to process your pictures you should try and make them the best they could be. If no one else likes what you’ve done to a picture, who cares! As long as your happy with it that’s what counts. But you have to admit it’s nice when someone tells you they like what you’ve created.

You may take something, look at it on the back of the camera and think “well that’s crap”, but I hope that the last two weeks have shown you that no matter how bad it looks on the camera screen it can be turned into a good picture with just a little bit of work. Now that’s not to say that you shouldn’t try and take the best photograph possible and get as much as possible right in camera, but if something goes wrong or you forget to change a setting because your in a hurry then its not the end of the world.

If I can create the picture on the right from the total mess on the left there’s no reason you can’t either! I guess what I’m trying to get you to understand is don’t be afraid to try doing something different when your editing your pictures. See what you can get out of the ones you think are beyond hope. You never know what you’ll get.

Something new.

 

The more eagle eyed amongst you may have noticed a very slight change in the way the Blog looks. But for those of you that haven’t, look over on the left. Yep that’s it. Above the Facebook box there now resides a list of the pages that are available to you on the blog. Pages? They aren’t anything special but they allow us to put information or articles on them that will just sit there permanently for you to look at whenever you want to. And as today’s Easter I thought I would give you all a nice present and unveil a new page just for you.

It’s the third one down.

Yep that’s the one it’s called “Photography on the Web”. Simple title for what is a page of links to various photography resources on the web. I hope you all find it useful and if you think of anymore that you would like to see added to the list then just let me know.