I'm Alex. I work at Microsoft Live Labs, includiing on Photosynth. I'm not much of a photographer--my Canon point an shoot is from the sale rack at Fry's, and I don't think I have used many features beyond the flash--yet I have been able to create some great synths. My favorite shortcut for creating synths is my Eye-Fi Card and Windows Live Photo Gallery. → Eye-Fi puts the images on my decktop automatically → I just open the date folder which Gallery makes for me automatically, and drag them onto the synther window. It's the lazy man's way to keep my photos organized. And lately I have mostly been playing around with video game synths, kind ironic to rebuild 3D world into 3d through a 2D photo as a proxy, but a good test of the accuracy of the tools...