Today is the first really spring-like day of the year in Amsterdam. A hazy but sunny day, temperature about 19 Celsius (about 66 F), so it felt nice for my wife and I to take a stroll for an hour or so around our neighbourhood with my camera this afternoon.
I snapped quite a few pics, real amateur snapshot stuff. Some crocuses in bloom here, some daffodils there, plus quite a few of the buildings and architecture of the World Trade Center and surroundings.
I’ve uploaded those photos to Flickr where you can view them as a slideshow. Contrast these views with the winter snow scene from just a few weeks ago.
One thing you’ll notice from the photos is that the area where we are in Amsterdam – the Oud-Zuid district – isn’t the typical Amsterdam scene that might spring to mind. Most of the residential buildings in this area were build between 1900 and 1935, so relatively modern constructions. So it’s not an area of pretty 17th-century canal-side houses – for pictures of those, see my TypePad photo album of last year’s Gay Pride Parade in August, with photos taken along the Prinsengracht downtown.
The other thing is that this is the first time I’ve really used Picasa to any extent. This really is an excellent photo management and manipulation application, and its free. What I especially like is that I just insert my camera’s memory card into the PC; Picasa opens and loads all the pics, I fill in some details in the dialog box and that’s it. It then deletes the photos from the card which then goes back into the camera ready for next time.
The collage pic you see here was automatically created by Picasa from the ones I took today. Neat! A much bigger (1600×1200) original image than the one I have here (I used Paint Shop Pro 7 to make this smaller-size copy).
How easy it all is.
Edit: Oops. Yes, it is all easy as well easy to not pay attention. That collage pic was just too big (400 pixels width), so I’ve replaced it with one at 300 pixels width.
Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.
Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.
