For better or for worse, travel has been part of my life for many years. My best guess is that I’ve spent two months out of each of the last 30 years away from home. To help ease the pain and drudgery of travel, I’m always prepared to record my travels with a camera.

About 25% of my travel involves photo assignments. For this kind of travel my equipment list varies widely based on the specifics of the assignment. The other 75% of my travel has me tending to other aspects of our business. For this kind of travel I keep myself photographically ready for whatever interesting or unexpected I might encounter.

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This is the first “Fun Tip” that I’ve written. It has no purpose whatsoever except that it’s a fun thing to do.

What does a fish see? A fish views the world differently than we do. A fisheye lens attempts to duplicate that view, but the cost of one can set you back $600 to $1000. Some cameras including the Nikon D3100 and D5000 let you reproduce this fisheye effect for FREE.
This is the “before” photo. To get the most from this effect, you should compose the photo so that it is centered. Also leave empty space around the main subject (not too close to the edges)	Using the Retouch Menu on the Nikon D3100 and D5000, I’ve turned this shot into a pseudo-fisheye photo. Experiment and you may encounter just plain fun!

First a little background.

As an avid picture taker, I learned early on that unless I had a way to organize my pictures, I would find it increasingly difficult to keep track of my growing collection of photographs.

Although I’ve been taking pictures on film since the 1960’s, it wasn’t until 1998 that I began my digital collection. I discovered a software program called Thumbs Plus for the PC and have been using it regularly to catalog and manage more than 100,000 of my digital photos. By adding keywords to an individual photo, I am able to easily and conveniently locate and retrieve photos from the past. Thumbs Plus has dozens of other useful features but for my purposes, organizing is its most important feature. For the past decade Thumbs Plus (and 3 or 4 upgrades) has been one of the most used programs on my computer.
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