When the Nikon D40 came out in November priced at $599, it seemed like the whole world went ga-ga over it. After all, we've pretty much been conditioned to expect to pay $1,000 to get into the digital SLR game.

But then I found out about the Pentax K110D. It's also a digital SLR, and costs about $100 less than the Nikon. There wasn't much information out there about it. So, after consulting the one person whose opinions on cameras I trust, my wife and I got one.

I've been playing around with the perspective correction feature in Gimp 2.0, and while it's invaluable, I've noticed that it really has a tendency to blur up a picture.

You can reduce this some by not editing JPEGs--it's always best to convert JPEGs into PNG or TIFF format before editing anyway--but it only reduces the problem. And Gimp's sharpen tool leaves a lot to be desired.

Enter SharpControl.

I'm not a serious photographer and I don't play one on TV. But I'm tired of looking at dark, fuzzy, tiny photographs that don't tell anything, so here's a way someone who knows nothing about photography--such as Yours Truly--can take a decent picture.

Giddy Slashdotters are proclaiming the death of film since Kodak has announced it's not going to sell film cameras anymore, at least not in the United States and Europe.

Sorry, I never got around to those promised posts because, well, I've become a genealogy addict. But don't you worry, this post is relevant even to people who are sick of reading about genealogy.

A little over a month ago, reader Gary Berg suggested I give a program called Qimage Pro a look and see what it would do for my digital camera output. And I finally got around to doing it.