Having fun with picasa

Petra - Aiman with steed, originally uploaded by CharlesFred.

During the recent trip to South East Asia I started experimenting with picasa, a photo editing programme which can quickly be downloaded from the web for free. It can do wonderful things like straighten a photo, make it sharper, lighter, darker and so on, in addition to cropping. It is very fast and very efficient, much better than my expensive Adobe Photoshop Elements programme which I have installed on teh computer here at home.

Now back here, I have picasa installed and have been spending odd bits of time going though old photos on flickr and on my hard disk which needed some treatment, improving them. The result is that, given that I am not taking any photos at the moment, it being to dark and grey most of the time, and wanting a break, that I will be putting some of them onto flickr. It is great to be reminded of the times in the deserts of Wadi Rum, the clear waters of the red Sea at Aqaba, teh blistering heat of Urfa in Turkey and so on.

Today we go up north to celebrate Mienie's (Fred's second eldest sister) 50th birthday, back tomorrow to take in The Return of the King, before Fred goes back to school on Monday. Meanwhile, after last night's Sandra-loos Eebie's we are going to give up on that bit of nonsense.

Further, out in the garden, the buds are shooting and I fear I am just in time in puning the grapevine as there is a danger with the temperatures at the unseasonal high of about 12 degrees every day, that teh sap might soon start rising.