I was doing an experiment with lighting for our Camera club and this was an easy way to illustrate Rainbow color effects using nothing more than a new DVD, placing a black cloth underneath as a background, water drops, bubble soap and a very small pocket flashlight. This only takes a darkened room on a table to achieve. This does require you to have a tripod and use time exposures to allow recording light as it travels across the surface of the DVD. When you run the flashlight beam across the surface you will notice the light beam being split into colors reflecting off the coating on the surface of the DVD. Raise and lowering the height of the flashlight will give you different colors and moving the flashlight around the perimeter of the DVD for 4+ seconds time will give you washes of color. This can create some very nice color screens to be used for screen savers or just a little fun in doing oddball types of photography you might want to share. I mixed it up a bit by using a rather large syringe to create different size drops of water on the surface of the DVD and then later used children's bubble soap to create blotches of liquid. The constant raising, lowering and rotation of the light and the material you add to the surface gives you tons of creative images. It becomes a little addictive as to what other twist you can bring to the setup. Be advised you will have to remove dust, lint and spots in your favorite photo editor to clean up your images.

Since I have only been part of this great web sight less than a year I am not sure how much this topic has been discussed. I have for years saved all of my shots on DVDs along with portable hard drives. Now that I am taking more than just family and vacation shots is the "cloud" worth the time and investment? Nikon is offering an unlimited space with their Nikon Image Space. Does anyone use this? If so, how fast is it, do you back up your back up and if Nikon does dissolve into financial melt down will my memories be accessible? I am not a pro and I do not make money on my clicks but I have been shooting some nice imagery lately and hope to keep improving. We do travel a great deal and I want to continue to save what we see. Thank you. Lastly, has anybody used Nixplay?

I watched and read all of the Hype that Luminar AI posted prior to its release and pre-ordered it when I was able. After a couple of months when it was available I downloaded it to my IMac. After trying it out for a week or so, I really couldn’t find much improvement over Luminar 4. I ended up asking for a refund and they did refund my money. I have removed it from my computer but still kept Luminar 4 for the sky replacement feature, but now understand that Adobe Photoshop has included a sky replacement feature, I don’t see where I will be using Luminar 4 much at all.
I rack this experience up as “Lesson learned”.
My go to’s are LR, PS and plugins Topaz Denoise AI and Topaz Sharpen AI.