I’ve finally gotten a few hours to concentrate on editing the photos that I took at the Wildlife World Zoo last Saturday.  Since these are all single exposures (no bracketing), I skipped the whole “let’s-try-to-make-an-HDR-out-of-nothing” process, and decided to stick to the basics in Paintshop Photo Pro X3.

I found that the software does a fantastic job of providing options to the user, from the very basic “One Step Photo Fix” that could very quickly clean up a batch of snapshots from the family picnic, to a full gamut of sophisticated tools for adjusting the images down to the very fine details.  The user interface is intuitive and well-organized, and the software loads up much faster than the previous version did.  All in all, I’m very satisfied.

I edited twelve shots tonight and uploaded them to Flickr.  Here are just a couple that I especially liked (reduced in size):

I’m still trying to decide where and what I want to shoot this weekend.  I have a few ideas–the problem is that I want to do them all, and I know I can’t be everywhere at once.  I’ll wait until the weather forecast is more precise and then make my decision tomorrow.

I was checking online today for some local classes or workshops that might be interesting and helpful in learning all the in’s and out’s of exposure and focusing, and I found a workshop that is presented by Arizona Highways magazine that sounds like it would be perfect.  It’s a five-hour classroom course taught by one of the professional photogs for the magazine that covers all the basics of all those mysterious combinations of f-stop, ISO, shutter speed, and focus.  The workshop is in late March, so I’m pretty sure I’ll sign up for it.