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You can create widgets to display your photos on your blog in interesting ways. Flickr calls this a badge. You can create an HTML badge or a Javascript badge and add them to your blog. I created a couple of different sized badges that I provide to other bloggers so they can share my Photo-A-Day photos on their blog. IT is a really easy thing to do. First you have to find it. Scroll to the bottom of your Flickr page and locate the link to Tools.

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From there you are going to go to the page where you can download the Flickr uploader and other tools for posting photos to Flickr, but what about expanding Flickr. For that you need to locate the link to Hey! Where is the badge?.

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At this point you are presented with a choice. Will you create an HTML badge or a Javascript badge. Let’s opt for the HTML badge, more compatible with many of the free services that won’t allow javascript. Pick your poison (HTML or javascript) and then we can pick the flavor (content).

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You can now choose to display your photos, a group’s photos or everyone’s photos. If you are looking to just display photos from your own set then you can choose that set. I decided that I wanted to display all of my photos that were tagged with “photo-a-day”

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Once you’ve chosen the content for your badge you are presented with options to choose how that badge is going to look, will it be vertical or horizontal, will you use square images, thumbnails or mid-size images. How many images would you like to display (1,3,5 or 10). Do you want the most recent or a random selection of images? And, do you want your buddy icon (avatar) on the badge. You can also junk everything and style the badge by yourself, but that would be in another tutorial)

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Once you have made your selections you can then choose the colors for the badge. You can change the background, border, links and text. You can also remove the background and border. This is a great way to match your new Flickr badge to your current blog theme. Once this is complete you can get the code so that you can post it to your site.

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On the code page all you can do is copy the code. You cannot edit the code on this page because it will always revert to the code that Flickr supplies. So copy the code and then post it to your blog, there you can make any edits that you wish. Here is one of the options that people can post to their own blogs of my final badge.

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I tweaked the code a bit myself and can probably do much more with CSS however for the basic user going through the steps should take care of most people’s needs.

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I have a Motorola Droid and I often use it to take photos when I am out and about. I take the Droid with me everywhere. I enjoy geotagging my photos and have many different options to accomplish this with my photos. The easiest way so far is to take photos with my Droid and post them to Picasa because they are automatically geotagged because of the GPS in the phone itself. Suppose that you want to collect your entire trip and be able to go back and see them along the travel trail.

If you have an iPhone or an Android phone you can use EveryTrail, a great program that allows you to capture your trips along with location and photos. Every time you take a photo with your camera phone you can title it and post it to your recorded trail. Then you can go back and watch your trip like a slide show but instead of transitions you move along the trail and the photo or video appears at that location.

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If you are going to take photos and capture your trip here are some tips to make your cameraphone photos better.

• Light the subject well
• Play with the White Balance
• Get Close
• Clean off the lens, keep it clean
• Hold Still
• Do not use the zoom, use the manual zoom, move your feet
• Use the highest resolution on your phone.

Here are a few other resources I found on taking better camera phone photos:

Geek to Live: Take better cameraphone photos

12 Tips for Improving Camera Phone Photos

SnapFish: how to take better camera phone photos

Share your best Cameraphone Photos in the comments.

To make your photos into works of art is very easy. You simply go to Dumpr.net and choose Museumr. There you pick your photo or upload a photo and then choose museum you want to hang your photo in.

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Once you choose Museumr then you have to decide where to get your photo. You can upload one from your computer, grab one from Flickr or even from any web url you can find. So you can do some very cool stuff with other people’s photos and send them to those people. Be creative and have fun.

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Once you have selected your photo and museum then you get your finished product.

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At this point you can choose to upload the photo to Flickr, save it to your computer or e-mail it to someone. Here is one of my final products.

What will you make?

• Macro Photography Tutorial
• The Assignment Macro Photography Tutorial
• Focus Stacking – a macro photography technique

And if I get really ambitious I can go for a weekend project after I finish a stack of Pringles. Weekend Project: Macro Photography on a Budget This tutorial is from Make Magazine and includes an article with all the instructions.

You can see my volume of Macro shots on Flickr.

The Canon Hacker’s Development Kit is a piece of code that you can install on your SD card to be able to run all sorts of scripts that enhance and extend the capabilities of regular old point and shoot Canon cameras. The time lapse script is called the Ultra Intervalometer and with it you can set the rate at which your camera takes pictures. So if you wanted to have the camera take photos every 10 seconds as you rode your bike around your town you could do that with the CHDK.

That is just one of the scripts that have been created to automate and unlock special features of your camera. Some other features of the CHDK are enhanced image capture. You can actually capture RAW images on a point and shoot. You can set longer exposure times, you can even see more info like remaining battery life, histogram, depth of focus. The Lifehacker article and the CHDK wiki are great information sources for you to hack your Canon as well. If you do it let me know and share your experiments in the comments below.

Snaps with a Camera Phone

Captured on Video

Checking the photo

Quick camera snap.

Making these are really easy. All you need to do is go to Dumpr.net and click on Celebrity Paparazzi.

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There you can upload any of your photos or connect to your Flickr account and select one of those photos. Then just click on the step 2 section and select how you would like to be photographed. There you can choose from the four options.

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Have fun with these.

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The first thing you need to do is head to Dumpr.net. On the main page click on Photo-to-Sketch.

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This will take you to the next area where you can select your photo. Here you can upload a photo, pull in a photo from a url or link directly to your Flickr account. I link directly to my Flickr account because I can also upload my new creation right away. So here I click on a photo from my photostream. The only issue is that you can only select from the past 40 or 50 recent photos.

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After I select my photo I click continue and instantly my photo is rendered into a very cool looking sketch. I’ve noticed that sketches of people work much better than other items. Each one I made up of my daughter Eva worked fantastic. When I tried her teddy bear it didn’t work very well at all.

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Once the photo has been rendered into a sketch Dumpr.net gives you a ton of options with which to share your cool creation. There are social bookmarks, the ability to send it as a card, or just e-mail it as an attachment or even upload directly to your Flickr account (required that you authorize Dumpr.net as an entity able to upload to your account.). I choose to upload to Flickr and the photo appears right in my photo stream.

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Try making a few of these and please leave me links to your creations in the post comments. What will you create?

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Open that up in Elements. So now you have your logo open in Elements.

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Then open your image. I take photos every day and this is the first year that I’ve started adding a watermarked logo to my images. I’ll use this photo of the sky as my example. I then pull that image into Elements.

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The next thing you are going to need to do is drag the logo into the image of the sky. Make sure the image of the logo is the one that you are on then switch to the pointer tool, click and drag that image onto the Sky image. The logo will appear on the sky photo as a new layer.

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Now take a look at the layers. Layers are your friend, they are not scary and you can do so much with them.

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Now position the logo somewhere on your photo by clicking and moving the layer with the pointer tool. You can also stretch it out so that it is the size you would like it to be. I like my logo to be prominent so I usually put it as a large size in the corner of the image. Once my logo is where I would like it I then change the opacity of the logo layer. This gives it that watermarked or ghosted look. The opacity is on a slider so just move it to where you are comfortable and what looks good to you. I start at, and mostly stay at, 50%.

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And then I save my image.

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Now you are done, and you have a great watermarked and branded photo.