I've been into digital photography for over two years, and in that time, I have taken close to 3000 pictures (the equivalent of 125 rolls of film). I printed out my favorite photos either on photo paper using an inkjet printer, or I uploaded the photos to the Internet and then had them professionally printed (www .shutterfIv .com or www.ofoto.com). This still leaves me with around 2850 pictures that I have never printed. Some of these pictures I deleted and never saved; the rest are saved, either on my hard drive or on CD-ROMs. Most of the photos were placed in folders with titles like Zoo June 2002, so at least I can fmd them.

The question was, what to do with the 2800 plus pictures. Roxio Easy CD Creator has a program for creating a very basic slide show using digital photos. I used it a couple of time for photos of a couple of birthday parties.

I'm sure the people I gave them to, looked at my photos at least once. Well, at least I hope they looked at them. Until I came upon 3D Album, I didn't have a satisfactory way to electronically view my digital photos.

My solution is 3D Album. With this program, I can turn my digital photos into 3D Photos shows. With 3D Album you can easily and quickly create animated 3 D photo collections to which you can add music, text and voice-over narrations. Your digital albums can be shown on your computer, burned onto a CD for distribution to your soon to be amazed friends, turned into a screen- saver or placed onto a web page or into a compressed file for e-mailing. You can also create a self extracting exe file.

The program is so easy to use it requires virtually no effort on the user's part. Within seconds (OK in the interest of honest reporting, minutes), I had completed my first 3D Album. The hardest part of the program is the selection of images to add to your album. Once that is done, you organize the photos in the order you prefer, select the 3D style, add text, music or voiceover if you like, and your masterpiece is complete. You can always go back and change anything. The program comes with 23 different styles and there are at least 30 additional styles on the Internet, and more are constantly being added.

For my fIrst project, I selected photos of my nephew Benjamin that I took on a recent visit to Baltimore. While in Baltimore, we all took a ride in a tethered heliwn balloon at Port Discovery. Because of the balloon ride, I selected the hot air balloon pre- sentation style for my project. This style places your pictures on the exterior of the balloon. Your pictures revolve around the balloon surface. The balloon itself floats over a scenic mountain background. You can even add clouds to your project that the balloon floats into, but I decided that the cloud effect was a bit too much for my liking. For this first project, I left. out text but added some nice music to finish off the project. The poet in me wanted to use Simon & Garfunkel's song, Cloudy, but I didn't have the song on my computer, so I selected some classical music.

Some of the other styles include spheres, photo cubes, theater, tunnel, fades, dissolves and from the Internet site a 4th of July style with the American Flag. The 4th of July style is called National Day and starts out with flying jets. Our flag then covers the screen and the photos appear on top of the flag with flying stars appearing between pictures. Another cool style is called Gateway, and it appears as if your photos take up an entire wall in an art gallery. The photos seems to move towards you and open like a door into another room where your next picture is displayed. MY descriptions do not begin to describe the stunning way that your photos are displayed. While creating your project, you can change the display style with just a click of the mouse.

The program is very easy to use, but just to make sure that you can create your own masterpieces to show off your photos, the program includes a tutorial CD that shows you how to use the program. As I mentioned before, the 3D album Internet site has over thirty new styles available for free downloads. While at the web site, check for an upgrade. When I checked, there was an upgrade available. The download (using a cable modem) didn't take very long, and once downloaded, took seconds to install. They didn't provide any description as to what the upgrade added or fixed, and to be honest, I didn't notice any new features after the download, and while it may have been a download to fix some bugs, I didn't notice any before the upgrade.

My description of how the finished albums look doesn't give the program justice. I am going to see if I can upload a small sample onto the club's web page so that you can see how great the program is. Besides showing off the program, it will give me a chance to show off some of my digital photos. Normally, at the end of my reviews, I add a line stating whether or not I like the program. Is there anyone reading this review that can't already tell what I think about the program? For the one reader who isn't sure, I'll just state that next to my digital camera, 3D Album is the second most important tool that I use for digital photography. OK, maybe the third most important thing with second place going to my cute son who is the subject of a good number of those three thousand digital photos that I have taken.