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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We started using the Abacus brand name back in 1978. In these 30+ years, Abacus has become a recognized name as a maker of personal computing, books and software.

A few years back, we started dabbling in the photography arena. Although we have more than 40 years of background in photography, when it was time to get serious about bringing these products to market, we decided to use the Stay Focused name. We felt that this name brings clarity to the customer. We’re hoping the name says: “here is a brand for a company involved with photography”. Stay Focused is now one of our imprints.
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Portraits are one the most common type of photographs. We’d like to share some tips for taking better people pictures.

Direction of the Light Shooting people outdoors offers a wide variety of lighting. Observe and take advantage of the direction from which it is falling on your subject.
Here the lighting originates predominantly from behind the subject. This backlighting produces shadows on much of the girl’s face.	For this shot, we turned the subject slightly so that the light is coming from the side. By doing this, we have added a more “rounded” and fuller look to the facial features.

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