SPRING IS SPRINGING here. It was sunny and 65 degrees, and my bulbs are coming out of the ground even as the last patches of Thursday’s snow melt. (I shot this with the Toshiba and, inspired by SmokyBlog, applied the PhotoShop “brushstrokes” filter.)

I don’t use PhotoShop much. For simple cropping and brightness/contrast editing (about all I do for the quickie photos I tend to post here), I use an elderly (and cheap!) program called MicroGrafx Picture Publisher. It’s not as good as PhotoShop, but I can open it, crop, adjust contrast and brightness, size, and save as a .jpg in about the same amount of time that it takes for PhotoShop to load. (Okay, not quite, but it seems that way). I do like PhotoShop’s “fill flash” setting, though. You can see an example of it in the photo of the InstaWife I posted here at the TypePad test blog.

UPDATE: A very cool gallery of photos from a Marine aviator, here. Shot with a Sony DSC-F707 digital camera. There’s a lot of very impressive stuff in his portfolio — just keep clicking.