It's a New Year – that means a clean slate and a fresh beginning! 

To help you get off to a good start in 2012, here's a comprehensive list of Artists Network competitions. Whether you work in watercolor, acrylic, pastels, oils…we've got a competition for your skill level and your medium. So mark your calendars – enter and your work could be seen by galleries, collectors, enthusiasts and fellow artists alike!

A new Google Plus (G+) daily photography theme.
#WorldCultureSunday

I really love cultural photography. So I thought I would be well suited to curate one of the photography theme days that are so popular here on G+. Since there seems to be nobody else doing a culture theme, I'm jumping in. I can't wait to see the photos which the G+ community will bring to the table. 

Lightroom 3.6 Bugs – Fixed


- Rapid advancement through the grid can make the preview processor die
- Lightroom does not write to the correct metadata fields after editing capture time
- Lightroom crashes when saving keyword to file
- Certain JPG files appear to unsupported or damaged upon import into Lightroom
- Publish to HD fails in LR 3.5 for publish collections created in 3.3 or earlier
- Entering a custom aspect ratio in Quick Develop leaves the Crop Ratio menu black
- Default scrolling behavior on OSX 10.7 makes non-scrolling mousewheel actions work backwards (Mac only)
- Incorrect aspect ratio displayed in menu when crop is copy/pasted or applied via Previous button in the Develop module (Mac only)
- Copy/Pasted Crop Aspect Ratio lost on edit
- Copy/Pasted/Previous crop loses aspect ratio lock when adjusted in the Develop module
- Tethering doesn’t work with the Nikon D3x
- Error thrown when exporting video from slideshow and Lightroom is running as a 32-bit application

Did you ever think your photos could sing?  Well, they still can't…  but.  They can make some pretty interesting noises with the use of a cool program called "Photosounder".   The program seems to have potential in many areas which are actually practical.  But I'm just going to point out this one feature which turns images into sound.   If you watch this video for a while you'll start to see patterns in how it's working.  It's using color, shape, relative postition and other visual features to produce a "sound fingerprint" of the image.  

By manipulating an image your can create new sounds.  Create an image and then start changing it in Photoshop and listen to how the "music" of your photo changes.  The examples in the video below are based on fractals which of course have patterns and symmetry of a sort… I wonder what plain 'ol photographs sound like?

I don't know the practical uses of this in photography… but it seems like it could be a lot of fun to play with.

It's a both when you're browsing your RAW photos outside of Lightroom or Bridge,, yes?   You are forced to attempt (and usually fail) to browse for a photo by file name.  If you are not very vigilent at good naming techniques upon import (and most people are not) then you're screwed.  Why?  because Windows is not capable of displaying a thumbnail of your NEF file, so you just get some generic icon.   Well, problem now solved.  Nikon has released a codec for 64-bit versions of Windows Vista and Windows 7 which will allow you to display your RAW NEF files in your explorer browser.  Hooray!

Download here: http://nikonimglib.com/nefcodec/