Have you been using photoshop and the brushes tool just stops showing the size and only the cross-hairs?  You know you did not go into the preferences and change it to show cross hairs. You have restarted photoshop and its still not the right tool setting. Don’t panic,  Its a simple fix. You have the CAPS Locks button on. So no need to check the preferences nor to restart the computer. Just click it off and resume work.

If that did not solve your problem then here is another fix. If your brush is just not showing up completely then you can try this. Go into the control panel and under Display > select Settings > then click on the Advanced button > and then go into the troubleshooting folder.Adjust your  slider under “Hardware Acceleration” one or two notches to the left. Then your brushes display should work normally. Hopefully you will not notice much, if any decrease in performance.

I hope one of these solutions works for you.

If you watch closely Best Buy has been selling new Nikon D200’s for $599.00 plus tax and shipping. They list their sale on or about the 15th of the month for the last . They only run it for 48 hours. I caught the last one and bought it. The D200 is a great camera for that price point. I had my eye on a D90 but it still $900 and does not have a sealed body. Plus they say the video capabilities are just about worthless. If you set you home page to DealMac.com it will tell you when this deal comes back around plus of course lots of other great deals. I have also found many compact flash memory card deals.

If you find a good camera deal online then know some of these pitfalls. The digital SLR camera deals that are too good to be true work like this. First of all they are going to sell you a Non-USA model of camera. This is not so bad but Nikon or Canon USA will not repair it under warranty. So if you choose this route then do get a third party warranty. I personally like SquareTrade Ok but we are not done yet. These “gray market” dealers will only be selling you the body alone. They will pull out the battery, the charger, and even the camera strap. They then will try to sell you these back at a very high price. The good news is you can buy them off of ebay for much less. If you tell them this then they most likely will tell you the camera is not in stock and not complete the sale. Also be carefull of buying from a place that does not show you their address and phone number. I have heard of people getting burned from filling out an order form online and having their card charged and never recieve a camera.

I was all excited about having the new version of adobe bridge running on my machine. I enjoyed the last version quite a bit. However it was running painfully slow. I tried changing the cache and some other setting to no avail. I have the latest update from adobe. So I did some research and found a single reference to someone with my same problem. It turns out if you have two monitors Bridge requires that each one have 64meg of Vram available. Well I am still running a dual G5 with the ATI 9600 video card and it has 64meg total V-ram. They mentioned you could run in thousands of colors mode or go into the preference and turn on software acceleration.

I have officially launched my new 360 Degree Quicktime VR Panoramic Photos website. I have had an amazingy fun time shooting and building these Panoramic Photos. I use my Nikon D200 with a Nikkor 10.5mm lens and shoot 10 HDR, high dynamic range, photos of a scene. I have shot both interior and exterior locations. I have a special nodal point tripod head that rotates the camera directly over the center of the tripod. I also take a shot directly up and one directly down. I then take these shots and blend them in a program called Brackateer that makes the HDR file from my three RAW files of each angle. I then take the HDR files into a program called PTGui.

PtGui will align and build the equirectangular image and form it into a
continue reading "360 Degree Panoramic Photos"

I have been contemplating listing my photos with Getty’s sub royalty-free photo company, istock for some time now. Here is some recent news that caught my attention. Getty Images Inc. agreed to a $2.1 billion buyout from the private equity group Hellman & Friedman LLC. The San Francisco-based Hellman & Friedman offered $34 per share in cash for all of Getty’s shares, a 39 percent premium over
continue reading "Getty Images Agrees to Multi Billion Dollar Buyout"

I was able to use this grip now for over 300 shots. I can say that it is not as nice as the Nikon MB-D200 battery grip. It is actually a bit large for my hands and it feels a bit cheap. However after reading some reviews. It seems that that is the same exact description for the Nikon MB-D80 battery grip. So for half the price I don’t feel so bad. One saving grace is that the AF button on it is nice and an option not on the MB-D200 unit. Plus I understand the reason for making it all plastic so as to save weight. Overall its a product I would recommend buying.

I was doing a search for a Battery Grip for the D80 and found that there is a third party maker for this item. Opteka makes one at half the price. S o I ordered one from 47thstreet photo. Actually it was $10 cheaper to buy it on Amazon.com . Which was reselling it for 47thstreet photo. I will post later how well I like it and if its as good as the MB-D200 unit from Nikon.