I took this photograph in Boorowa in mid-western NSW, Australia. I was intrigued to see a sign pointing to Internet Access. I wondered how old it was.

Anyway, I think this photograph needs a new story. How would you use this photograph? It is yours to use. The high resolution original is here.

These photographs were taken at Boat Quay, Singapore. Years back it was a busy port with small boats and sampans lining the shores, busy with crews loading and unloading their cargoes. These days it is a tourist mecca with restaurants, bars and pubs. One can eat and drink outside, under the stars, by the Singapore River. It is busy of an evening and relatively quiet by day.

During my first job in Singapore the programmers, designers and I would occasionally set up camp in a quiet coffee shop by the river and work there, swapping files via a local wireless network set up by our Macs. Our office was a kilometre or so away in Chinatown.

Shao Ping and I did not go to Boat Quay all that often. We would take our visitors there for dinner or a drink. There are a few bars that are the haunts of expatriates that work in the CBD. I never felt that comfortable in those venues. I felt that there was an air or pretension in those places.

I took these two photographs with a Sony DSC-70 digital camera. I sat the camera on a stone fence and left the shutter open for a few seconds.

Created a tip sheet for Photoshop Elements ~ version 3 admittedly but still useful for later incarnations of the software. I am running a workshop for Year 6 students from a neighbouring primary school on Monday. They have been collaborating on a project with our Year 7 students. They would like to repair and modify some photographs, hence the workshop. You may find the tip sheet useful. It is a pdf file ~ about 1.3mb. I created it using Comic Life and ‘printed it to pdf’.

Last Sunday I paid a quick visit to Bulli Beach. It was a sunny morning and I was able to take a few photographs of the rocky shelf.

This post was sent to the following accounts via email simultaneously: WordPress, Flickr, Twitter and Posterous.

See the full gallery on posterous

Posted by email from Watershed (posterous)

Addendum: The post and gallery above was more of an experiment than anything else. I set up seven digital photographs. Each was 650 pixels wide. I emailed them to my Posterous account as attachments and by using a dedicated Posterous email address I was able to simultaneously create this blog post, an elegant blog post in Posterous with a slide show, a gallery in Flickr as well as a Twitter alert. All with a single email.

The only problem that took place was that the seven photographs were each resized to a width of 500 pixels for the blog post in WordPress. I have a narrow custom template and as a result it was thrown out a little. I manually resized each image to a width of 400 pixels. Normally I would not upload the seven images to a blog post as above so this is not really an issue for me. This feature in Posterous is not even a day old as yet and I am sure it will improve. Posterous continues to amaze.

This afternoon about 1.00PM the skies opened up and we experienced a hail storm. They are not that unusual in our region. The storm passed and there was a lull. Then there were a few claps of thunder and a second hail storm began. This was quite an intense storm.

Sootie went outside to investigate despite his initial fright with the thunder claps. He took cover under the barbecue but when the storm was finishing he decided it was all too much and raced back inside. Shao Ping and I took a few photographs and some movies on the Casio digital camera. I took a screen shot of the weather radar. The storm came up from the south.

How did I create this post and the gallery? The digital photographs in the gallery were taken with a Nikon D70 and a Casio digital camera. The video was taken with the Casio digital camera as well. I resized the digital photographs to a width of 650 pixels using Adobe Photoshop Elements. I auto corrected the colour and levels of each image. Finally each was saved using the Save for web… option in Elements. This option gives the user a great deal of control over the quality and file size of the image. I created the gallery using the Create Web Photo Gallery… command in Photoshop Elements. I converted one of the supplied templates to one that matches my web site. A little clunky but it works.

The combined file size of the two original video files was 67mb. I opened each in Quicktime Pro, added one to the other via a copy/paste and saved the combined file using the Broadband Medium setting. The size of the output file is 2.1mb.

The screen shot of the weather radar was named and saved using Sharpshooter. The image above is a collage of four of the gallery images. I created a blank Photoshop Elements file with dimensions of 400 x 266 pixels. Resized four of the gallery images to 200 x 133 pixels and dragged each onto the blank photoshop file canvas. Then saved it using the Save for web… command. I uploaded the files to my host using Cyberduck. The blog post was created using WordPress. All of this was done on an Apple MacBook Pro 15″.