So, Kenmore has invited me out to visit them and see cool Kenmore things at the Kenmore Blogger Summit. That will be this weekend. In advance of that, though, they asked me “What is your most unusual, yet practical, use of a common household appliance?” Why are they asking me this? Because, I assume, Kenmore is sick and tired of selling refrigerators to people who want to keep food cold, or blenders to people who just want to make smoothies. Where are those brave souls using stand mixers to trim the hedges? The split-level oven as bunk beds for tiny fire demons? Where is the creativity, America?

Anyway, Kenmore is having a video contest: Submit your most creative, but practical, use of an appliance for a chance to win prizes from Kenmore (I think it’s Sears gift cards in varying amounts, like $100, $50, or $25).

To enter:

1. Be in America. Sorry, un-America.
2. Record a video of unusual, but practical, appliance use. Cover up any non-Kenmore branding (you can use whatever appliance you want, but they can’t use videos that show another company’s brand. Just stick some tape over the name). If the videos are large, uncompressed Quicktime videos 1920 x 1080, 16:9 those are best, but not necessary. Mine won’t be. But the larger video size the better, they say. I say just shoot it on your phone and send it right away. THIS SHOULD NOT BE STRESSFUL.
3. Submit a video TO ME, by e-mail: backpackingdad at backpackingdad dot com.
4. I pick up to 5 good videos, and send them in to Kenmore, but I’m on a deadline, so I need your video sent to me by Wednesday, January 18th, at 5pm PST (Pacific).
5. Wait, and wait and wait and wait and wait. I actually don’t know how long it will take for them to pick a winner.
6. That’s it.

How much effort should this take? I don’t know. I pulled out my phone and shot a video in 24 seconds. Don’t think too hard about it. Just send a video in.

Here’s mine.

Again, you have to have a U.S. address to win a prize, so sorry un-America.

Then.

Now.

Happy Anniversary, beautiful.

I took a picture at the park last week that I really, really like. I’m not a photographer, but I’ve tried pretty hard to learn how to use a point-and-shoot camera as well as I can because that’s all I have, and I want my pictures to look good. The fewer pictures I see at the end of a day that I don’t want to keep, the better. This picture just struck me as a keeper.

But…it’s not really a great picture, as pictures go. It’s probably about as good as I could have made it, naturally, in the conditions I was in and with the camera I was using (my smartphone camera, because that’s all I use now). Seeing it, and knowing it could have been so much better if I was better at this, or if I had a better camera (and knew how to use it), or if I had some fancy post-production software (and knew how to use it), bummed me out.

But Adobe just released a beta version of Lightroom 4, and it’s free to use for people with Adobe accounts (I have one because I use Acrobat) until the end of March. I downloaded it (it took a long time, because the file is huge), and imported my library to get to work.

The controls were easy enough for someone like me, who doesn’t know jack about jack, to just go in and start messing with sliders and buttons until after about ten minutes I ended up with this:

I like this picture a lot better. It looks more like the image in my mind, even if it isn’t as faithful a reproduction of the actual light in the actual world at that actual moment.

I don’t know if I’ll buy Lightroom 4 when the beta license runs out in March, but I already like it more than the native Picasa editor I’ve been playing around with. And I tried GIMP once but it scared the crap out of me. I’m going to play with Lightroom for a bit.

(Editor’s Note: This is not a sponsored post. Lotus linked to the release on Google+ and I checked it out. I trust her about photography things.)