Lifecast: Life lived, life captured, life shared.

Do you have an experience to share or a story to tell?  Are you tired of the limits the photo sharing sites place on your creativity? Then we invite you to give Lifecast a try. Lifecast takes your photos further. Not only offering easy photo uploads, but introducing the limitless ability of story-telling by combining photos and text via a drag-and-drop editor and templates.   Lifecast also introduces social circles that will let you selectively share your stories with friends and family.  Lifecast is where your stories are told.

Lifecast is a place where you can share your thoughts, memories, impressions, important events and crazy experiences with friends and loved ones in a way that is much more meaningful than simply flipping through or e-mailing sets of photos. Lifecast allows you to easily and quickly upload pictures and then combine them with text in a way that makes your stories come to life.

We first introduced Lifecast to you in November’s newsletter. Since then, the beta version of Lifecast has gone live, and many ACDSee customers have been trying it out. We’ve been receiving excellent feedback so far, and are striving to provide improvements and new features every month, including design enhancements, storage upgrades, and high quality photo books. We’re also looking for creative people like you to share your photos, experiences, and thoughts in helping us to create the best possible online environment for visual storytelling and creativity.

Joining is free. Your account includes generous and secure photo storage, tools to share and tools to tell your stories, big or small, private or public.

Share your story. Share your life.

As an ACDSee customer, we are inviting you to be among the first to join us at lifecast.com and take your photos further.

Coming SOON: Windows Vista updates for your ACDSee products!

Don’t miss out on Vista supported software certified updates for our complete ACDSee product line, including ACDSee Pro, ACDSee 9 Photo Manager, and ACDSee Photo Editor. The combination of ACDSee’s digital imaging products and Windows Vista is an ideal way for professional photographers, enthusiasts, and memory keepers to manage their growing photo collections.

The updates will be made available via the ACDSee Support Center in Spring 2007 at http://www.acdsee.com/support .

By working closely with Microsoft, we’re able to provide features and functions at the highest level of compatibility with Windows Vista enabling our customers to get the best user experience when managing their digital images.

5 Simple tips to make your winter photography more enjoyable.

Don’t let winter’s harsh conditions discourage you from taking your camera and shooting outdoors. If you love your digital photography, even snowstorms and snow squalls can’t keep you from snapping some high-quality shots.

Take pictures of winter’s rugged expanses, snow covered fields and hills, dramatic open horizons, and smoking chimneys. Your family photo collection will be all the richer for it. And remember: You don’t have to be Annie Leibovitz to take an awesome picture!

Here are 5 simple tips to make your winter photography more enjoyable:

1. Knowing what the weather has in store will save you a whole lot of headache. During the winter months the weather can change dramatically in a matter of hours, so plan your shoot location the night before to get the most out of your trip.
2. Wear form-fitting gloves that keep your hands heated and nimble while you operate your camera in the shivery temperatures.
3. Take only what you need. Don’t load your camera bag with every piece of equipment you own. If you’re going to be out taking pictures all day, you’re much better off going as light as possible. This will help preserve your energy and keep you from overheating.
4. Look for details in the landscape. Snow, ice, and frost give texture to your pictures and help create atmosphere in most subjects. Morning frost is also good for close-up photography. At dawn there are also a lot of interesting light patterns in the landscape. Play with your camera’s depth-of-field and see how much of the breadth of the landscape you can capture with dramatic effect, or try focusing in on particulars of the scene like ice-sheathed bulrushes and craggy roadside fences.

In the early morning hours, try placing your camera at oblique angles to the sun - this will give your images strong shadows. It will also add mood to your shots. Once you’ve found the perfect spot pay extra attention to any foreground interest that will add depth to your image.


5. Don’t be discouraged if your shots are coming out too dark or too bright. Snow and ice are extremely difficult to expose properly, since they tend to confuse your camera’s metering system. Play with your camera’s exposure settings and keep shooting until you get the image you want. It’s also helpful to start *bracketing your shots to get the possible exposure. When you bracket your shots, add 1 – 2 f stops of light to compensate for your light meter reading.

*For more information on bracketing shots:

http://www.photoxels.com/tutorial_exposureBracketing.html

This month’s software tip will help you make your great winter landscape shots look even better.

The Levels feature in ACDSee 9 is a perfect tool for improving shots that have lighting problems. At first glance this feature might appear a bit technical but don’t be deceived, it’s actually very easy-to-use and will make a difference in how your pictures turn out.

You can find the Levels feature within the Exposure menu in ACDSee’s Edit Mode. Use your Levels feature to adjust the contrast and light levels in your photos. 

The Levels tool shows a histogram with 3 sliders for adjusting shadows, midtones, and highlights. Begin by selecting the channel you want to adjust – luminance (brightness) or a particular color (red, green or blue).  The most common selection is luminance.

By moving the slider bars you can adjust the shadows, midtones and highlights in your photo. It’s also recommended that you shift the shadows slider to the right to a point until the graph starts rising, and the highlight slider to the left to a point until the graph starts rising.

This will provide the best contrast without loosing any color in your photo. Take note of the clipped percentage as you adjust the sliders to ensure you’re not losing, or “clipping” data.  Then, as a final step, you can adjust the midtones slider up or down until the image looks exactly the way you want it to.

Tip:  Click on the exposure warning icon to get visual indicators to make sure you aren’t “clipping” too much data.

Photography Events

JOIN US AT THE WPPI TRADE SHOW!

March 24th – 29th, 2007

With over 250 Trade Show Exhibitors, 55 platform speakers, 33 MasterClasses and range of other exciting digital photography events, WPPI is one of the biggest and best photography convention and trade shows around – and we hope to see you there this year.

Come visit us at WPPI in Las Vegas, Nevada at booth #253, between Monday, March 26th and Wednesday, March 28th. We’ll be giving demos of our ACDSee products and answering any questions you might have. The show promises to be a great success, jam-packed with resources and fun for digital photographers.

See you at the show!