Thank you for sharing. These pictures are FANTASTIC!

Probably by taking a course or courses at your local community colledge or vocational school. There are numerous books that offer everything from feature descriptions to "100 basic tricks" which can be helpful but don't always give you a good nuts-and-bolts foundation. Getting in and just cliking and experimenting is always fun but usually raises as many questions as it answers. My son is working on a Graphic Arts degree and told me he was amazed at how many people in his first "basic" classes were people my age that just wanted to know more about the software. Good luck in your search.

I live in a small farm town in Ohio that has a print shop in town. I have taken digial pictures in the form of jpeg to them to print that have come out very good and they will print as few as 1 print or as many as I want (got 125 once). The moral of my story is there may be a place like that close to you that is cost effective, willing to work with you, and most portant, you can see on their monitor/equipment what they will see before it prints and make sure the picture is still as you envisioned it.

Dear Nikon13,

I'm a hobby woodworker at times and like to read magazines on that subject. A while back I saw a product for people who need glasses but have trouble putting safety glasses over their prescription glasses to saw wood. The solution was adhesive magnifiers that you could stick onto the lenses of regular safety glasses to replace the prescription glasses (sort of make-your-own bifocals). With something like that you may be able modify a pair of off-the-shelf reading glasses into bifocals that fit the specific distances you will be looking at. Or, you may be able to adhere one to your viewfinder. I forget the exact product name but can find it if you would like (I never throw magazines away).
I have recently had to make the leap to bifocals and am NOT enjoying the experience.

I have not used silkypix myself but a couple yeas ago I tried a couple dozen free editors I found on the internet. One of the better ones I found is Photoscape. It comes with very good selection of filters and tools for correction and editing, is compatible on any software systm from XP on up, takes up just under 25Mb of disk space and is very easy to use. Another good freeware program is GIMP. It resembles Adobe Photoshop a lot and is very powerful for freeware licensing software. The only downside is that there is a learning curve.

I currenly use Adobe Photoshop CS3 which I really like but there are both cost an learning factors involved there, and it is always more fun to spend time and money out taking pictures than poking on the computer.

Good luck with whatver your choice and have a great year of picture-taking in 2012!

I like the vignet in the first picture. I think it works well with the composition, ths size of the barn and especially the blue sky. I personally would like to see the barn lightend up more so that the color is more apparent before the vignet is applied but that's just me.

The truck is a really cool picture! Again, just me, I would have got rid of the phone/power lines. But if you're going for absolute location accuracy you nailed it.

My wife just got me an SX130 Canon for Christmas. I'm about half-way through the owners manual now but it looks pretty amazing for a point-and-shoot camera. Like you, I would welcome any info or advice others may have.

OK, I sort of understand. But the first two responses so far are from people who DO want to learn. Believe me, there are those who don't!

If you're dissatisfied with your pics, then of course it makes sense to try to find out how to get them closer to your personal vision.

But when I'm doing a critique, I try to say, "What were you trying to achieve here?" Then, based on what they say, I'll try to suggest as many ways as I can think of, to help them get closer to what they want.

It's the people who reject any suggestions that freak me, especially if they then say, "I don't care what anyone else thinks". If they really didn't care, they'd not ask anyone else's opinion.

Cheers,

I really like Roger's reply here. Many times people with very helpfull views fail to get them across because they start their input with "You did this or this wrong, here's what you're supposed to do", as opposed to "What are you trying to accomplish, and how can I help?" I understand the ego portion of "I know how to fix this, just listen to me" but it's always easier to explain an oppinion to a receptive listener than an antagonistic one. And besides, as others have said, they may truly think their picture is not broken and were going for a specific effect.