P&P Blogroll

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Aug 252008
 

As Jason Moore gets settled down in his new digs as the new Web Graphics Designer for Southern Tier Athletics/Worldwide Sports Supply (congrats dude!), we’re filling in again to provide you with the latest and greatest weekly activity for Photoshop and Photography folks (a.k.a. his famous Weekly P&P).  Michael was out and about a lot this week, so it’s just me and Andy filling in.  Thanks Andy for taking Michaels portion as well.  Anyway, here is my portion of it (filling in the middle with I through P).

Indograhams – Again, another fabulous Friday skyline from Scotty.  He also went photowalking on Saturday too!

Invisible Green – Marcus shares a shot from this past weekend with his family, very cute!

Jason D. Moore – If you don’t know this site, then why are you even reading my blog?  Jason is pretty much the standard news outlet for Photography and Photoshop activities.  If you’re not reading his blogroll regularly, you are missing out!

Jen Rinaldi – More clouds from jen on her weekend, and some other cool street photography.  Great vision and captures as always!

Jenny Arnez – Another great site for street-style photography (and also for beach shots this weekend again – are all Jens at the beach this weekend?) ☺

Joel L – I missed this one last go-around, so am making up for it here.  Fair warning, some of the shots and imagery are not for the faint of heart or typical types of photography.  His most recent post is okay, but venture back to July 21st, and you’ll get a taste of third world countries and cultures that are definitely not anything like Western hemisphere living.  Don’t get me wrong, some of the shots are just amazing in the composition, lighting, and in the story they tell, so I would encourage those who have open minds to visit the blog.  It also bears mentioning that some of the imagery is not safe for work (NSFW).

John Nack – Very well-known and regarded, he shares a link to a site titled “Dear Adobe”.  Not often will you find a company spokesperson who willingly will point you to another site that is nothing but rants and vents about their own company (just goes to show you how cool a place Adobe is).  Read this blog – it’s on many peoples’ “must read” lists – including mine!

Laughing Lion Design – In case the P&P isn’t enough for you, Jennifer has a list of PODCASTS to listen to.  I listen to several of these myself.  Great resource here.

Lightroom Killer Tips – Matt comes over the top again with another series of knockout posts showing us techniques about Lightroom.  Over and over again, he and the rest of the NAPP crew just constantly keep me amazed!

Michael Palmer – The third portion of Jason Moore’s fill-in P&P crew was waylaid from his travels, but he nevertheless shared some great floral/insect shots from his trip.  Thanks for sharing Michael, your posts are always a pleasure to read.

Black and White Photography – Some more IR to be sure, but the ones that are back to the “traditional” blac and white theme of the blog are great!  And the fact that he used theterm flautist was sufficiently impressive!  (My sister was a flautist in college – kept playing until she had kids…)

OSBP – One Shot Beyond Photography is always a great source for inspiration.  What a great vision, and the compositions of the shots are always unique, whether the subject is food or models…she really knows what she’s doing!

Photographic Design – Another blogger who will have shots to share from the NAPP photowalk.  Be sure to stop in and give feedbck – it’s what we all thrive on!

Photography of J Brian Haferkamp – A long-awaited update, he shares shots from Millenium Park in Chicago!  Gorgeous city, and great captures Brian!

PhotoKY – Always thoughtful and intriguing posts, Ken outdoes himself this week.  Another MUST READ!

Photoshop Insider – With all the hubbub surrounding the worldwide photowalk this last Saturday, make it a point to read Scott’s post from last Wednesday.  If you ever take a seminar, workshop, college class, or any other form of instruction…try not to be the guy/gal he is describing!

PhotowalkPro – Jeff talks about what he knows best…photowalking!  The master of planning, coordination, and implementation at it was full of information this past week.  So much so that he got some interview time at two podcasts.  Read the whole week if you’re not up to speed on what photo walks are all about!

Well, that just about does it for my portion of the P&P blogr oll for this week.  Don’t forget to stop over at Andy’s blog (Visual Realia) for the lions share of it.

As a house-keeping sort of note, I am going to have to put the weekly tutorials on hold here at CB for a while as I had been using my Windows box for this purpose, and it is now on it’s final legs with 3 thermal shutdowns in the past 24 hours, and one instance of not finding the boot drive.  Thankfully, the images and podcast materials are all on a secondary, as well as on a USB drive.  Now, if only I could find a good Mac replacement for Camtasia, I’d be set!  Any advice, suggestions or feedback would be welcome!

So, it’s likely back to audio podcasts (or videos of me) from the Mac for now.  Tomorrow will likely be a no-blog day though as I will have a very busy day (unless I can get it done in advance).  So, look for shots from the photowalk on Wed. as well as a new tutorial!  Until then, happy shooting and keep watching those apertures!

 Posted by admin at 12:01 am  Tagged with: , , , ,

Photowalk checklists

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Aug 222008
 

As all the hubub over the Scott Kelby (NAPP) photowalk hits a fervorous peak, we are all getting everything together for the walks, looking forward to meeting new people, visit old friends, shoot in new areas, and just enjoy the camraderie of a photowalk with your friends and peers.

However, this is still an occasion where you are taking your gear out on a shoot.  So, it is always good to stay organized and make sure everything is ready to go.  What does this mean?  It means prepping your gear beforehand.  And of course, checklists can be a handy way to make sure all your gear is ready to go.  So, here are ten things to do to prepare for a photowalk.

  1. Charge your batteries, and the spares!
  2. Clean your lenses, wipe them down and use lens cleaner to get everything spiffy.
  3. Decide what items you will be taking with you and what you’ll be leaving behind.
  4. Pack your gear and make a list on a 3×5 card of everything you will have.  That way you can check against that at the end of the day to make sure you return home with everything you took in.
  5. Check the weather beforehand and plan your clothing accordingly.  This also means perhaps including some protective elements like towels and such for your camera gear in case there is a chance of rain.
  6. Get a good nights sleep.
  7. Verify the starting time and place for the shoot.
  8. Print out a map of how to get there, especially if the location is unfamiliar to you.
  9. Pack a few munchies (granola bars, pretzels, etc.) and maybe a bottle of water or two.
  10. Have fun!

SO, check your lists.  Twice.  And have a good photowalk this weekend, wherever you are.  Happy shooting and we’ll see you back here Monday!

 Posted by admin at 8:41 am  Tagged with: , ,

What's This? – Week 8

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Aug 212008
 

As readers have reminded me, I fell behind the 8 ball a little on sharing a “What’s This?” pic since we started our move from SC to CO.  So, now that things are settling down again, the weekly photo challenge returns with gusto.  See if you can decipher the object I’ve cropped down to this:

What's This? - Week 8

Any ideas?  Feel free to share them in the comments section below.  Correct guesses win…well, not much, just bragging rights.  But bragging rights are better than nothing, eh?  So venture a guess, who knows – you may get to brag!

In other news, the NAPP photowalk is coming up this weekend, so if you’ve not registered in a city near you, venture over to http://www.photoshopuser.com/photowalk to see if you’re near one that has any openings left – it should be a lot of fun, and that will have more than bragging rights for prizes!

I’ve not mentioned them in a while, so if you have 5 minutes to 5 hours availabe, stop over to 1001 Noisy Cameras for all the latest on camera news and information.  They’ve got everything from reviews, to sales ranks, and links to relevant blogs and official rumors of upcoming gear.  While they admittedly state that the rumor comes from DPReview, there is a suspicion that Canon will announce a 50D at Photokina this year!

 Posted by admin at 5:00 am  Tagged with: , , , ,

Brush it, Baby!

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Aug 202008
 

There is always something coming up that throws me for a loop and last night, it was a “thermal event” on my main Windows computer that I do my image editing from.  The room that the computer lives in is a tad warm, and as you may recall, we’ve been without A/C for a while now.  I am going to have to do something to keep that computer cooler, but for now, it means my 40D shots are not editable in PS3 because I only have a license for it on the one computer.  I have CS2 on the Mac, which won’t recognize the images, so I went about installing DPP there last night.  It did prreclude a “What’s This?” post for today as I had anticipated, so in lieu of that, I’ve got another topic waiting in the wings that should be of some interest, and that’s brushes!

We all know about the brush tool in Photoshop, but all the options that go along with it can sometimes be confusing.  Well, never fear, the “Canon Blogger” is here (me), to help explain it all to you.  Let’s go ahead and get started then.  As far as brushes go, there are four main elements that can adjust the type of brush that is applied to your document.  These are opacity, flow, size, and hardness.   Today I am going to look at the hardness element of a brush.

If you click on the various standard brushes in Photoshop, you will get brushes of various sizes and hardness.  This is all fine and dandy, but if you want a truly custom brush for your work flow, you need to really tweak the size and hardness depending on the image you are working with.  Brush hardness refers to the degree to which a single click of the brush will feather from the center to the edge of your brush size.  Here, it may be best to give you examples of what this means so you can see exactly what it does.

Here I am going to present a brush as applied to a document with a 50% gray background, with all other variables except hardness kept constant.  I then adjust the hardness from 0% to 25% and then 50% and 100%.  As you can tell, as I increased the hardness, the amount of the brush that that is filled increases relative to the hardness level.

Check these out:

Brush 1

Brush 2

Brush 3

Brush 4

Notice how in each instance, the edge of the circle gets slightly sharper and sharper, with less of that “feathered” look.  Pretty neat, eh?  That’s what increasing the hardness does – it decreases the feathering or fading of a brush into the background.

I’ve often found that when learning all the tools of Photoshop, Lightroom, Bridge, Flash and everything else, that it helps to just take things one step at a time, and make comparisons between various settings.  Here, making just one change to one element of the brush options demonstrated to me (and hopefully to you) what impact changing the brush hardness has on the quality and type of brushing that you add to your imagery.

What brushes do you like?  Are there any particular settings that you find useful for certain types of imagery?  What about other tools?  Are there any tools that you just wish you understood better?  Feel free to share your own thoughts on brush features either via email or the comments.

Anyway, that’s it for todays post.  Tomorrow the “What’s This?” should be back up and running as I swing back into gear there.  Hope everyone enjoyed the post on brush features/options.  Clearly, there might be more content down the road that will illustrate various features of Photoshop tools, so make sure to share your own thoughts on what content would be of use so I can include that.  Until tomorrow then, happy shooting and watch those apertures!

 Posted by admin at 1:38 pm  Tagged with: , , , ,

Feedback and More Fodder

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Aug 192008
 

First off, I’d like to thank everyone who has been taking the time to share their thoughts and feedback both in the comments and via email – it’s always fun to get the insights of others. A few people had mentioned some loose threads though that I’d not tugged on in a while, so I thought I’d give an update as to the activities and status of those projects. (As an aside, I am probably becoming famous for starting projects and never finishing them – I do eventually, it’s just that I keep adding more projects so the others start to fade as new ones come into focus.)

1st – The How-to’s of Website design: I did take a leave of absence on this primarily because there is an area that I am not as fluent on that I was hoping to find some help in the form of a second contributing author, and that has not come to fruition yet. So, if anyone is interested in co-authoring a book on the subject, feel free to let me know!

2nd – The Online Photography Test: The Basic test is complete, and the Advanced test is about 90% complete. I’d like to get some ideas and more feedback before taking that phase to completion, so again, if anyone has some suggestions on good questions for an advanced online photography test, I am all virtual ears! As for the Expert Test – I am nowhere near getting ready to even put that one out there. I am of the old school variety in that I don’t think it’s right for someone to pose a question for others to answer if they cannot provide some basis of an answer themselves. (The idea is that how can one teach or offer knowledge if one does not have that knowledge themselves.) Although higher education and high schools are rife with examples of this – I, in good conscience, cannot pretend to be an expert when I have so much more to learn on the subject of photography.

3rd – The Weekly “What’s This?” series saw an abrupt halt a few weeks ago, and I never came forth with the answer. The last shot was this:

What’s This?

And the answer is: the grill from the front of our microwave. Unfortunately, we are no longer in the house, so I can’t capture a full version of the appliance to show you a zoomed out perspective. But anyway, thanks for those that waited patiently to discover the answer. I should have a new “What’s This?” back up and running tomorrow.

Finally, as I endeavor to get back into a steady routine of tutorials and regular writings, I have a video tutorial put together for this week. Since I did get a few questions from people who asked if I could show the method for achieving a panorama rather than just writing the methodology out, here is the “outtro” for how to post process a series into panoramas. Since the podpress plugin is still misbehaving, I’ tried an alternative means for feeding things for the time being, but that doesn’t seem to work either.  So, I am going to have to go another week with a link to both the Flash and the Quicktime!  Sorry again for the continued inconvenience.

I’m not adjusting the iTunes feed just yet as I have confidence that the podpress developer will have an update coming sooner rather than later, but if people wish to add the secondary feed to their readers, that will be in play until the original feed comes back online. I am posting it to the podpress feed link too though as a test to see if it comes back online, so if you subscribe to the original feed and it shows up, let me know. Otherwise, continue to visit the blog (which is preferable anyway) to catch the flash version. Hope you all enjoy it!

I’ll be back tomorrow with a Wednesday Walk around the Web, and a new installment of “What’s This?”! Until then, happy shooting, and watch those apertures!

 Posted by admin at 8:30 am  Tagged with: , , , ,
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