lesa's blog

My good friend Scott Kelby has churned out yet another book, and personally, it's fast become one of my favorites. It's called The Digital Photography Book and if you've ever dreamt of taking better photos, or if you're a seasoned pro wanting to improve your game, or if you own a digital camera of ANY KIND you have to get this book. It's packed full of fantastic tips, like:

Ever tried to resize or crop an image that's larger than your document size? Certainly not an impossible task, but finding the missing handles can be an exercise in frustration.

The fix, my friends, is screamingly easy: Just press Command + 0 (PC: Ctrl + 0) for Fit on Screen and poof! The document resizes to a point where you can see the previously missing handles.

My name is Lesa King and I'm a point-and-shoot addict. While I'm writing this, it's been 42 minutes since my last shot (a beautifully plated Salmon omelet during Sunday brunch). I admit it, a cute little Canon PowerShot SD30 (5.1 megapixel) goes with me everywhere nestled snugly inside my purse, enabling me to capture culinary delights heretofore never before seen.

I’m taking this weather home with me on Friday, that’s all there is to it. Every day this week I’ve enjoyed blue skies, 95 degrees temperatures with zero humidity. If you live in the South, you’re green with envy, I know you are.

My flights were uneventful, save for sprinting from one terminal to another (B to E) in Salt Lake City. I even snapped this beautiful shot of a sky full of white puffy clouds during one leg. More importantly, I didn’t get accosted by immigration this trip. Yay!

It is a rare day when a truly inventive input device hits the creative pro market. Mice and trackballs come and go like a parade, but not since the graphics tablet have we seen anything really unique. That is, not until Logitech released the NuLooq Professional Series: a hardware-software design controller combo that’s so different it... more

“FRACKING BREATHE!” I screamed to myself inside the helmet as I plunged deep into turn 1: a downhill 90-degree left hander with 25 testosterone-laden guys on crotchrockets of 650cc + hot on my Suzi’s 500cc tail.

This past Saturday was the scariest day of my life--my very first track day. How fast did I go? I couldn’t tell you. Not once could I spare the attention required to actually look at the speedometer.

For the last month, I've had the pleasure of toting around an Olympus Evolt-330: the world's first digital SLR with a live LCD preview screen. This means that instead of using the optical view finder, you can compose your shots directly from the screen.

The downside of this is that you lose a bit of image stability (that of pressing the camera body against your face), but the upside is that you can get shots you'd never be able to get otherwise (think over-the-head or below-the-knee).

I just can’t get enough of the Deal’s Gap area and the great Smoky Mountains. Shawn and I had a great time (be sure to check out the photo gallery called Deal’s Gap in the links above) and I did *not* want to come back home! There’s no better feeling than that of having the bikes packed and being on a trip.

It seems like everybody’s a designer these days, and why not? With today’s incredible technology, why wouldn’t you choose to play artist...

For more, pick up the latest issue of Layers Magazine at your local bookstore or newsstand.

With Adobe Photoshop’s proven ability to perform feats of color magic, you might think a color-correction plug-in would be overkill. Not so. Even for color experts, the process of correcting color can be time-consuming and frustrating because of the many problems and methods of correction, and because fixing one detail can throw off another... more