Creating fun pictures One of the advantages of living in a neighborhood is that children often get to be very close friends as they grow up together. They can be very proud of these friendships. Think about creating an image of your children's friends that they can put on a T-shirt or use on their notebook covers. The image in Figure 2 was created for a greeting card that invited the neighborhood gang to a birthday party and a movie. It was a big hit - both the evening and the card!

Figure 2 Picture of the "neighborhood gang"

Images for coaches Youth sport coaches donate a tremendous amount of time and effort to coach teams. Unless you have coached a team, it might appear to be much easier and more fun that it oftentimes is. Thank your child's coaches for the efforts they put into teaching your child how to play a sport by presenting them with a signed and framed image of the team. This gift will be valued for a long time.

Sports cards and posters Once you are able to create quality digital images and projects from your pictures, you might be able to use this talent to help raise funds for your child's sports teams. At the end of the lacrosse season one year, I chose the best photograph of each player and digitally edited and printed it on a high-quality fine-art paper or photographic paper, depending on the style of the work. These images then were made available to the parents for $20, with the understanding that the entire amount would be donated back to the team to purchase new jerseys for an upcoming season. Nearly all of the images were sold, and the team was able to buy new jerseys in the following year. 

Figure 3 Sports cards and magazine covers can be created to help raise money for your children's teams.

Sometimes it's fun just to create things with no real purpose in mind The images in figure 3 was created just for the fun of it. It was worth a few laughs and ended up in a drawer for a few future laughs.

Figure 4 A newspaper created with Microsoft's Picture It!

If you have limited time for creating these projects, but you need them done, consider teaching your children how to use the applications. Help them come up with a few ideas for projects that they would like to do. Suggest things such as a book or notebook cover, bookmarkers, or pages for school reports. Once they have a little success, they will continue building on it and can become your own in-house design staff. It is amazing to see how fast children can become experts on computer technologies. Who knows - maybe they can even help you do things for your own business or work, which will give you a little more time to get them to all of those soccer practices, while still keeping up with the other household chores!

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About the author, Gregory Georges: Using medium format, 35 mm, and digital cameras, Gregory has amassed a personal collection of more that 12,000 pictures -- all taken purely for the fun of it. He has, in one way or another, used computers extensively for work and at home since taking his first computer class in 1969. As an experienced photographer and avid user of computer technologies, Gregory has the perfect background and passion to write about digital cameras and how to get the most from digital images. You can visit him at his website: www.reallyusefulpage.com .

Digital Camera Solutions is published by Muska & Lipman Publishing of Cincinnati, Ohio. You can visit them at www.mlstore.com/camera.html to find out more about this book.

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