Many digital cameras come with free software for organizing and editing your photographs. That software is fine for casual users, but if you are a photo hobbyist advanced enough to, say, read a photo blog, then it’s best to invest in Adobe Photoshop Elements™. Elements was upgraded from version 6.0 to 7.0 last year, so you know it is a mature product. It comprises an organizer for filing and retrieving images and a photo editor for improving them. The basics are well-covered at this point, but I have some suggestions for improvements. These range from searching caption text to improved methods of resizing images, tagging, and making panoramas.

It was early spring in Hakone Gardens in Saratoga, California. Saratoga is near San Jose, and the Japanese-style gardens cover 18 acres of foothills. I used a pocket camera to take this image (actually a two-image vertical panorama spliced in Photoshop™) of the Pond and Hill Garden. The original image had dark shadows and other technical problems that were adjusted to product this result:

I like photos in which there is a lot going on. It gives the eye something to munch on, so to speak. Shinjuku Station, in Tokyo, is the world’s busiest train station. So there is definite potential for shots in which there is a lot going on. The original of this shot of the Vegeteria (or, according to the sign, VegeteriA) had problems. It needed to be cropped, and there were three separate problems with the lighting.

For any group in motion, the trick is to catch an instant when something is happening. I took a couple of photos of a woman with a dog walking toward the bluff top. I photograph with a wide angle lens, leaving the niceties of composition to a later time, after there were images in the camera. To complete the composition a distracting auto hood had to be removed.