I went for a little walk on Sunday with my camera, just to see what would look photogenic in the early evening sunglight. I took a few macro shots, nothing that really stands out, but things that were representative of the season. When I got home I thought my pictures were ok, but nothing outstanding, but they'd look ok as a collage. I have been using Raw Therapee to view and edit my photos, or if I'm doing HDR, then I'm it's been Photomatix, but both bits of software focus on the fine details of your photographs, rather than applying jazzy special effects. When I bought my last desktop pc in 2001, a copy of Microsoft Picture It!, however Microsoft have discontinued their range of digital image suite products and my copy of Picture It would not load on my new laptop, as my OS is Windows Vista. Picture It! was no substitute for Photoshop in the depth of its feature, but it did have many good basic editing tools such as edging tools to create a nice border, shading, softening and clone-stamping; so, I was quite peeved to find it was no more, and I might have to fork out £££s for Photoshop.

I had heard of Picasa, while searching for my raw-editing software when I purchase my new Sony A240 DSLR, as my former FinePix software would not support my new images. Making my collage was realively simple - a case of adding the photgraphs to from your file to a tray, then moving them into the base. You can then roate, resize and, if you choose, randomly shuffle the pictures. The addition of a 'back' option would be nice, as if you are like me, and can't help but the think the next shuffle will be just that tinsy bit better than the last... well, I'm sure you understand that the grass isn't always greener.

Well, I think I'm quite happy with my wee collage, and I hope to improve on my technique as time goes by.