My Photo !

Several years ago I spent a nice summer in Europe, visiting great countries like Spain, France and Netherlands. I brought a huge collection of digital photos from this trip and wanted to share them with my friends and relatives. I started to look for the software that can generate photo albums to upload them to my homepage and was quite dissapointed with the quality of the thumbnails pages - even though the pages themselves looked fine - the small pictures were just resized originals, rectangles, the one-pixel frame around them was the best that I could found those times. What I wanted is something like bevel effect or frame effect around the thumbnail and a shadow to make it look more 3D, alive and fancy.

Then I thought that it could be easily done just saving a script in Paint Shop Pro with bevel, frame and shadow effects, and then running batch on all my gallery photos. But I figured out that I can’t create HTML pages along with my generated thumbnails.

So I decided that we might develop that kind of software ourselves. At that times we were a team of software developers that were working on projects for the offshore business. I talked to guys and after some planning we started on this project.

Picture Frame: The main goal was to create nice looking, stylish thumbnails, so we started with a picture frame. The frame looks like a conventional picture frame, so you can specify frame thickness, give it round edges, specify the frame height, light direction, overlay any texture - for example any wood or marble and give it 3D shape. But if you want - you can create all sorts of fancy frames with acid textures and irregular borders - it depends on what style do you want!

Bevel: Another effect I always wanted was Bevel - it is an effect that makes your picture look three dimentional, thus more effective and striking. Also - rounded edges together with bevel give us nice and extreemly good-looking thumbnails. Almost what I wanted…

Mask: But what about other shapes? Rounded rectangle was not enough for me, so here is where the masks come out! I was really amazed, I remember, how effective the masked thumbnail looks together with beveled edges, just pick a mask and bevel does the rest. Or create a frame and apply a mask to make irregular shape for the frame.

Also we created many other features like HTML gallery templates, e-mail sending, batch processing and others, here I just wanted to point out why we started this project - we wanted our galleries to look unique, stylish and fancy, and we think we did it! You can try it yourself - the program is called Photo Shaman.

Mark Loumbert - Communication Director and CEO, Brave Orange. http://www.photoshaman.com

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It wasn’t as if the whole family had to pay for it. No one had offered to, although they would take part of the credit when the 25th anniversary gift was opened and exclaimed over and hung lovingly over the fireplace for all to see. It wasn’t as if the wedding portrait, an original oil painting from an old photo, was anyone else’s idea, but someone would probably say it had been.

It was an idea I had been forming in the back of my mind since last year when my grandparents had celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary, which fell on Christmas day. Twenty five years of marriage does not seem like a lot for grandparents, especially for those who have grandchildren in their forties, like me, but theirs was an amazing love story. Both had been married to other people following the Holocaust and had subsequently lost their spouses tragically - his from cancer, hers in a car accident - and then, love again. Getting married later in life, with families already well-established and fully-grown hadn’t been the easiest transition. Different walks of life, beliefs and ways to properly cook a Thanksgiving turkey had been only a few of the many issues that had arisen between the newly blended family members, but now it was time to come together.

Originally it had been a family portrait idea - to have a painting made from a photo taken of the entire family - siblings and step siblings, children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews, but the idea had grown bigger than I could manage, so I had decided to simplify with a wedding portrait of my grandmother and their grandfather together on their wedding day, shrunken and wrinkled, old even then, 25 years ago, but happy, deliriously happy.

Since their anniversary fell on Christmas day, I thought the original oil painting would be a unique Christmas gift idea as well as a memorable 25th wedding anniversary gift. They deserved something special to commemorate how far they had come. They knew about all the struggles, even though we, the blended family, always tried to keep the unpleasantness from them. Maybe it was too late to try and teach an old family new tricks, but they didn’t think so. Every child and grandchild, niece and nephew was loved by my grandmother and their grandfather as though they were flesh and blood.

They deserved something special. The thought kept circling around in my head. A wedding portrait would not be enough. I would have to revive the family portrait idea. They deserved something special like the whole family - the two they had tried so hard to make into one - coming together on one page, or at least one on piece of canvas, frozen happily in a timeless collection. A sitting would never work, but a painting from a photo would. It wasn’t going to be easy, but then again, love, of any kind, never is. After all they had given it was worth the sighs and groans, the unwanted opinions and ideas, the late arrivals to the photography studio and the enormous cost to give my grandmother and their grandfather - my grandparents - the one thing they love the most in the world, their whole family.

Allan holder is the founder and owner of
My Picture Painter Oil Paintings:
which is a site dedicated to the revival of the lost art of portrait painting. In today’s fast paced world, sitting for a portrait painting is simply not practical.
We allows the user to submit a photo to our network of talented artists who will paint a personal oil painting from your photo.

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Recently an ex-CIA man comes forward into the political spotlight and National Media to claim that the Bush Administration “Cherry Picked” intelligence information leading up to the Iraq war with regards to WMD Weapons of Mass Destruction.

How can you blame the Bush Administration for carefully scrutinizing all the data and cherry picking the potential important information from 95% of the intelligence gathered which was BS? That is how intelligence works; you look at all the data and you know 95% is baloney and you follow up on the leads, which are promising.

Besides this CIA guy who said this has a political axe to grind. I bet you can find someone else in the agency who would say the exact opposite without a promise photo-op and darn book deal from far left liberal contacts in the media. It is amazing that a virtual nobody from an agency which is suppose to keep its mouth shut has someone running around spouting out such debris.

Additionally I ask hasn’t he dishonored his former agency in doing so and broken the code he swore by. Indeed how can you trust the information coming from someone who has betrayed his own honor? The media is witch hunting again and using any quote the can find for a headline whether it is the ice cream man in West Memphis wearing a turbine or an Eskimo who still lives in an igloo near the North Pole. The media needs a reality check and the CIA needs to shut up and do their job and more careful who they hire. Consider this in 2006.

Lance Winslow

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