Saturday, January 14, 2006

Castlemaine Festival of Gardens

Every year at the beginning of November we go up to Castlemaine in the goldfields region for the garden festival. We try to visit as many gardens as we can in the 3 or 4 days we have off. 2005 was no exception.

I took a whole album of photos with the digital camera and the other day was wondering how I can turn it into something for the internet. Rather than posting them here, or alternatively in the photo gallery my ISP provides, I decided to play around with the features available through the free software Picasa2. If you have a digital camera and haven't downloaded Picasa2 yet, you are missing out on a great freebie. It allows you to organise your photos quickly and easily, create slideshows, screensavers, collages, even "movies", as well as websites. You can view all your photos in a timeline too which is quite interesting.

Anyway, back to the website I created. I haven't fiddled around with it too much, just added captions to most of them before uploading to the internet. I'd have to learn more about it to get it exactly the way I'd want it to look, but it's not bad for a few minutes' work. Click here!

5 comments:

Alice said...

As well as admiring your photos I did a bit of a search on Google. Looks like this is another trip to Vic. that we must make. It would certainly be worth spending a few days in the area to have a look at those beautiful gardens. Thank you so much for mentioning them. Glad you enjoy them, too.

Stuart said...

I love walking through other people's gardens. So many ideas and so much inspiration. Great pics Val.

Val said...

Alice and Stuart,

do you have the Open Gardens Scheme in the ACT and Western Australia, respectively? The drought has slowed things down a bit here, but there are always a few gardens to see on the weekends.

Alice, I know about Floriade in Canberra - must get there one year.

Val said...

Our "new projects" consisted of keeping the various cuttings alive until we got home, finding a place for them and then keeping them going in the garden. That little aluminium plant is doing very nicely.

Alice said...

Val - there are about 4 varieties of that Lamium (aluminium plant), with either white, yellow or mauve flowers and different varigations on the leaves.

Yes, we do have Open Garden Scheme up here, but sometimes when there are several gardens open on the one day we find that it's too expensive. They often charge $5 per person, per garden. We could finish up paying $50 for the two of us to see 5 gardens. Maybe that doesn't sound like a lot, but it makes a difference when you are retired. We prefer the ones where a flat fee, usually about $10 each, covers all gardens. Bundanoon (in the Southern Highlands south of Sydney) and Burra (south of Canberra) do that and we really enjoy the day out - tired but happily inspired.

If you come to Canberra, Val, please let me know; as I will if we go to Castlemaine.