Travel Photography: Krome Photos service edits pictures for you

by Amy Chen on

A funny thing happens to my travel photos after a trip. After uploading select pictures to Flickr or Picasa, my photos often languish unedited (and unseen) on my laptop. I tell myself that when I finally carve out some free time, I’ll go back and properly edit the rest of the pictures and create a photo book or scrapbook to remember my vacation.

Unfortunately, the photo folders keep multiplying and I never seem to find the time. Luckily, there’s now an affordable online service that can edit your photos for you: Krome Photos.

How It Works
Sign up for a free trial with 25 photo credits and 1GB of storage at www.kromephotos.com. Another special introductory offer gives you 100 photo credits for $2.50. See here for more pricing plans, including monthly subscriptions.

Download the Krome Photo Uploader to your desktop, and upload any photos that you want to be edited. Go off, live life, and about 24-36 hours later, you’ll get an e-mail notifying that your photos have received the “Krome Treatment,” or the talents of a personal photo editor who may improve your pictures with color correction, red-eye correction, cropping, or other tweaks.

You can accept or reject the photo enhancements; a photo credit is deducted from your account balance if you download or share an edited photo. Though it’s nice to have someone else’s perspective on your photography, if you don’t like how a certain photo is cropped or edited, you can easily undo the Krome Treatment. For each photo that you undo, a photo credit is refunded.

Need help deciding which edited photos to keep? You can click on a Before/After button to see the original picture and edited version side by side.As with iPhoto and Picasa, there are also tagging tools to help you organize your pictures.

You can e-mail a high-resolution edited copy to friends and family straight from the Krome Dashboard, which also has easy access to the requisite social-networking tools of Facebook and Shutterfly.

The Bottom Line
Though Krome Photos is not a replacement for Photoshop, Lightroom, iPhoto, or other photo-editing programs, the photo-editing service is a time-saver and could be just the thing to motivate me to edit the rest of my photos myself. As for creating a photo book, that’s still on my to-do list.

Christmas with Jesse James

by Sean McLachlan on

Christmas can be a stressful time. In fact, statistics show that you’re more likely to have a heart attack on Christmas than any other day of the year. Hanging out with family too much can be hazardous to your health.

Some families, of course, are more hazardous than others. Most people don’t have the emotional baggage that Jesse James, Jr., did. He was the son of the famous outlaw but didn’t even know it until his dad was assassinated. He thought his name was Charlie Howard and his father was named Thomas.

Despite living under aliases, the James family couldn’t give Jesse Jr. or his sister Mary a normal upbringing. Junior’s earliest memory was of a gangmember shooting through the front door at a suspected prowler. They also moved a lot and were discouraged from playing with neighborhood children.

Junior was accustomed to his father going around heavily armed at all times. One Christmas while living in his father’s final home, which is now the Jesse James House Museum in St. Joseph, Missouri, Jesse decided to dress up like Santa Claus to surprise his children.

The outlaw came into the house dressed in a costume he had borrowed (not stolen) from a local church. Giving a cheery “ho ho ho” and bearing gifts and candy, he delighted his son and daughter. He asked if they had been good and Junior and Mary said they had. Santa then opened up the bag of goodies and the kids rummaged around inside. Junior felt a gun under the cloth and exclaimed that this wasn’t the real Saint Nick, but his father dressed up as Santa! Their mother then explained that Santa was very busy that year and Dad was helping him out.

So next time a family member embarrasses you at Christmas, at least be grateful they’re not packing heat.

For more stories of Jesse’s hijinks, check out my series: On the Trail of Jesse James.

[Photo courtesy Library of Congress]

New Disney Dream features magical water-coaster

by Chris Owen on

Disney Cruise Line’s new Disney Dream will set sail from Florida on January 26, 2011. On board will be several new features not seen before on cruise ships along with a good dose of that trademark Disney “magic”.

Two big features are getting a lot of attention, the AquaDuck on-board water coaster and Magical Portholes on inside cabins.

Taking advantage of Disney’s vast theme-park experience, the line custom designed an attraction worthy of land-based parks especially for the new ship. The AquaDuck water coaster will sweep guests on a 765-foot high-speed flume ride with uphill acceleration and a swing-out loop letting them look down to the ocean 150 feet below, all in about a minute.

From the “Why didn’t I think of that?” department, Magical Portholes make standard inside staterooms something special. High-resolution cameras stream live digital video to each stateroom, reflecting the scene outside.

Look for Mickey and friends to swim by the porthole of each cabin from time to time too.

Currently on her way across the Atlantic and heading to Port Canaveral, Florida, new Disney Dream is the first of two new ships from the line with sister-ship Disney Fantasy scheduled to sail in 2012.

Photo courtesy Disney Cruise Line

Daily Pampering: New Year, New You at Tides Riviera Maya

by McLean Robbins on

Think that 2011 is going to be “your year” … you know, the one where you embrace your inner yogi, go car-free and finally learn Mandarin? Sure, we all say that … for about a week. But with Mexico‘s Tides Riviera Maya‘s “New Year, New Your” package, you might actually set up the foundation to continue your healthy-living, culturally aware ways all year long.

The resort, voted as one of the best in Mexico by both Travel + Leisure and Conde Nast, is offering a three or five-day package ($3,250 – $5,215+) to jump start your 2011 resolutions.

The package includes a six-hour detox program for body or soul, a daily healthy breakfast, private yoga on the beach and a healthy cooking class. You’ll also enjoy a choice of a cultural or adventure excursion to places like Tulum and Coba or diving in Cenotes, a Spider Monkey Biosphere tour, or boating trip as well as a recreational activity like horseback riding, scuba diving, or biking. All visitors will also enjoy a traditioanl Tezmacal cemony, an ancient spa detox ritual, as well as a Le BootCamp three-month trial subscription so you can continue the wellness journey at home.

We’re just wondering if we can figure out how to bring a beach, hotel suite and staff of trainers/chefs home with us to continue the journey all year long …

Five ways holiday travelers annoy business travelers

by Tom Johansmeyer on

On December 23, 1999, I was trying to get from Madison, Wisconsin to Boston Massachusetts. On paper, it didn’t look hard. I had to catch a short fight from Madison to Chicago and another flight from Chicago to Boston. Unsurprisingly, it was snowing in Madison. It was also snowing in Chicago. Flights were canceled quickly and routinely, and crowds backed up in the gate areas. I was starting to wonder if I would make it home in time for Christmas. I finally made it back some time on Christmas Eve, but it was stressful … and yet another taxing holiday experience in what had become a blur of them.

Holiday season travel is rarely enjoyable for anyone, but it can be particularly brutal on business travelers. The pressures of family holiday obligations converge with business demands, and it all comes on the back of a full year of hitting the road, which can mean 40 weeks or more of round trips and enough miles to have nailed platinum status by the end of the second quarter. The one thing business travelers cling to is efficiency. Even if it doesn’t buy much in real impact, it feels better to get through security faster, board the plane smoothly and make a quick exit from the plane and airport upon arrival.

And holiday leisure travelers just make that exponentially more difficult.The folks who travel once or twice a year – or even less frequently than that – tend to throw a monkey wrench into the finely honed travel operations of road warriors. They fumble for documents at airport security checkpoints, take forever to order something as simple as a slice of pizza (how do you choose from both those toppings?!) After a while, the white-collar traveler, perpetually exhausted anyway, begin to hatch conspiracy theories about how leisure travelers are all in cahoots, intent on making his life miserable when all he wants to do is get home and rack open a bottle of holiday cheer.

So, let’s take a look at five ways you can annoy business travelers this holiday season. I’m not suggesting that anyone on either side of this dynamic engage in any behavior modification … because we all know that isn’t going to happen. But if you decide to try – to annoy either less or more – this is how you can go about it:

1. Your kids: I know this is a tough one. If the end-to-end air travel process is difficult for adults on a good day it’s even harder (a) during the holidays, (b) for adults with children and (c) for children. It really does suck. Do what you can, and make an honest effort. Don’t let your kid “cry it out” or practice his first step. You can give up on good parenting for a few hours without causing any lasting damage. Please try to avoid saying, “It’s only for a few hours; we don’t travel often,” to a weary business traveler.

2. Your awareness: is the airport security line moving forward without you? Do you wait until you’re at the x-ray machine to realize you need to remove your coat and shoes? You could turn around to see the eyes rolling, but that would just consume even more time. This also goes for your trip to the food court. Be ready ahead of time, or expect someone to say something.

3. Spread out: take extra seats in the gate area – for your bags or anything else. And then, let your kids play on the floor between seats, so nobody can walk by. The gate area is crowded already, and this is just a heroic way to make a bad situation worse.

4. Camp near a power outlet: it’s hard enough to find a place to plug in, and business travelers are desperate for the short supply. So, be sure to take up this prime real estate … even though you don’t plan to use it at all.

5. Sense of entitlement: assume the same sense of entitlement that road warriors have. And, I’m actually encouraging this one. Nobody really has a right to feel this way, but it is a formula for some incredible street theater!

[photo by