Firefox 3.0 and PicLens

If you use the Firefox web browser, version 3.0 is now available. It's supposedly 2 to 3 times faster than version 2 and when I first used it I noticed it to be decidedly snappier.

A pretty spiffy plug-in for Firefox is PicLens. It works with many photo or video sites. For example, if you do a search on flickr, you can use the PicLens plug-in to view the results in a cool, 3-D wall of images sorta way. Spiffy.

As a photographer one of my continual quests for learning the craft includes studying other photographer's work. One way I do this is occasionally scanning through flickr photos to find images of which I can reverse engineer the lighting. Now that I've used it, wouldn't want to do this without Piclens.

My wife has an art blog for which she needs example images for the assignment each week. She'll search google images and use the Piclens plugin to scan through them. She loves how much easier and quicker it is to view this way. (Note: her use of the images is legal under fair use laws, as she uses them for a nonprofit educational purpose. Be careful about how you use an image. Just because it's on the internet, doesn't mean it's fair, and legal, and honarable to use.)

Piclens also works on www.heywood-photography.com. So if you have Firefox 3.0 and install the PicLens plug-in, then go to any of the galleries at heywood-photography.com. Just click the PicLens icon in the upper right corner of your browser window, its right next to the search bar. Now you can see the images in the cool, wall of images style that PicLens creates. Nice.