Via Melissa Lyttle

Women photographers present their take on beauty at Beyond Compare.

Here is French photographer Brigitte Lacombe's striking portrait of Burmese dissident Aung San Suu Kyi.

The site is sponsored by Dove. “Dove's hope is that this work will increase the number of women who take great care of themselves and who feel truly beautiful every day.”

Managing photographs has never been easy. I have them in plastic boxes, card board boxes, archival boxes, albums, hard drives, canvas bags. They are every where and it drives me crazy.

If you are digitizing all your images, like I am, consider using iView Media Pro. If you are a weekend photographer Apple's iPhoto or Google's Picassa may be better bets.

Read David Pogue's review of both programs here.

This is old news, but one that I couldn't let go by without some comment.

I think it is terrific that the world has mobilized to help those affected by the tsunami disaster in South and South East Asia. But I find it offensive when organizations of any guise decide to extend a helping hand under false pretenses or under duress.

Do it out of the goodness of your heart but do not expect anything in return. To act in any other way is simply un-Godly.

Via Steve Outing

Apparently there have been some fake tsunami photos floating around the internet. Hope none made a newspaper.

A trained photo editor with common sense, knowledge of the Internet, and equipped with software to help identify simple fakes may be journalism's best line of defense.

Mr. Outing points to a New York Times article that should put your mind at some ease if you suspect images have been altered.

With those tsunami photos, software wouldn't have done much good. They were real images of people watching a big wave on a Chinese river, not the December tsunami. Editors puzzling over those photos might have saved some embarrassment by doing a careful image archive search, or checking a rumor site like Snopes.com.

Noticed that I have been gone now for about a week? Well, I have been swamped. Really swamped with a move from an apartment to a house. My wife and I are now owners of a 26-year old home. No matter that it will take us 30 years to pay the loan off, but this way at least our hard-earned money doesn't disappear into the ether.

So, the last week has been full of drama, or was it a joke? A mortgage broker, a real estate agent and a lawyer are on the edge of a cliff … Well, jokes aside, it was a stressful week, full of 11nth hour wheeling and dealing. I am glad it is over, though the move from apartment to home took an interesting turn when we had movers do their thing in sub-zero weather. Not fun at all. But that too is done. Now the task of unpacking and sorting through 20 years of junk.