Single-Serving Photo

Not that it wasn’t official before, but now there is a real website for the workshops I’m doing with my colleague in the coming months.

A photography workshop, for anyone not “in the know,” is basically where you can meet other photographers, either hobbyists or working professionals, and together learn about photography techniques in a hands-on and very one-on-one environment. The workshop format is widely used and very popular for exactly those reasons. It’s great for learning, great for networking, and is usually a very good time besides.

Right now, Death Valley in April 2008 is the only workshop up on the site, but we are thinking about doing some of these (I’d love it if anyone has thoughts about these or their own suggestions):

• Cape Cod, early winter (for late November, ’07)
• Boston or New York City urban/street (probably not till spring ’08 when the weather gets nicer)
• Acadia National Park in Maine, either winter ’07 or summer ’08… Or both!

Those locations are more local to us, so we’d be able to do them at a much lower cost, maybe $199 per person for a day or two, depending (not all-inclusive, though, of course).

Leave a comment if you have ideas for workshops you’d like to see or any other thoughts, and please do keep an eye on the website for upcoming sessions!

If you’ve been using Adobe Lightroom since Beta 1, as I have, and if you’re using a Mac, there is a very good chance that you’ve run into the awful “change modules” error. This error usually strikes when your catalog is being updated during a version upgrade, when other Adobe software on your computer changes, or for any number of other unrelated reasons (as I discovered).

What happens is roughly this: you open the program and the splash screen remains indefinitely. If you click it, it disappears, but Lightroom’s main window does not open. You receive a very minimal menu bar including “Lightroom,” “File,” “Edit,” and perhaps “Window.” The File menu is shortened and only allows you to open a catalog. I presume that this is what Lightroom would look like if you could put it into a state where it has no catalog open. During normal operation, you basically always have a catalog open.

Once there, you can try to open your catalog, but as soon as you do, you will receive the error: “An error occurred when attempting to change modules.” Feel free to click OK on that message, it will simply drop you into a weird, incomplete Lightroom interface that has no side panels and no film strip.

Having battled this error two different times now, I am confident I can offer some advice. (more…)

I feel like I’ve been on a streak of article writing lately, which is good, but I’ve also been neglecting the original charter of this site—to post experimental and spontaneous photos. Fortunately, I’ve been taking a lot of experimental and spontaneous photos, I just haven’t been posting them. So, without further ado… the New London Pier on a foggy morning.

This first one has a pretty wavy tone curve applied to it (in Lightroom), which brings out that great bit of light in the sky while not plowing all of the foreground shadow into an inky black mass. There is also a split tone (blue for highlights, brown for shadows) that I think gives it a very interesting feeling.

Prints Available—Click to Visit the Gallery

This one is almost my favorite minimalist composition ever, and that’s saying something. I’m a big stickler for minimalism (if you didn’t know), but what really grabs me about this is the wonderfully placid reflections in the water on the left and, if you look closely, the ever so subtle and soft point of land coming out on the right edge.

Prints Available—Click to Visit the Gallery

Enjoy.

As part of my contribution to Blog Action Day, I posted a story about being confronted by a park ranger while photographing using flashlights in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Although I believe the ranger overstepped his bounds and acted with undue suspicion under the circumstances, my colleague and I reacted—in my opinion—in a completely appropriate way. We were very polite and understanding of the issues at hand and we recognized that Tennessee might do things a little bit differently than Connecticut. For example, in Tennessee, photographers get frisked under suspicion of poaching.

Anyway, it’s a good idea to hold up your end of the bargain if you do get approached by an officer of the law, and to act in a way that reflects positively on yourself and on all of us as photographers. Especially if there is a video camera in the officer’s car…

Yesterday, I ran across this article, 5 Things Photographers Should Do When Confronted By Police. It contains some helpful tips and might be useful to you in your travels.

It’s also a good idea to know your rights in these situations, and to help you I will once again point you toward Andrew Kantor’s Legal Rights of Photographers (pdf)¹ guide, a somewhat abridged yet very straightforward and understandable overview of your rights as a photographer (at least in the United States).

For a slightly more technical view, you may wish to read The Photographer’s Right by Bert P. Krages II (attorney at law). Although no advice given by an attorney from outside of your state could be said to be formal, anyone out there from Oregon just struck gold. For those of us who aren’t from the pacific wonderland, at least you can say that this advice was cobbled together by someone with actual legal training.

If you want to dive in yet further, please do visit the forums at PhotoPermit.ORG where you can read all about your rights, current events, and first-hand accounts of being hassled or confronted by authority figures both various and sundry.

1. Linked with permission. If that copy is down, get it from me [back]

I’ve been a devout Photoshop user for over a decade. The first version of Photoshop that I ever laid hands on was 2.0… That’s pre-layers, and also the first version available for Windows! I started using it seriously around version 4.0 and I have kept up with nearly every version since then. I remember distinctly the addition of effects layers, shape layers, and the creation of the verb “to Photoshop” (which Adobe officially frowns upon).

Originally, I used Photoshop to create everything from promotional stickers and web graphics to letterhead and stationery. Eventually I moved to Illustrator for layout/drawing stuff, but Photoshop remains a huge part of my daily life. As the owner and sole employee of Fisheye Multimedia, I am called upon to repair and modify photographs for my clients and to manipulate newspaper layouts for framing. As a photographer myself, I spend hours upon hours in Lightroom and Photoshop, tweaking masks, adjusting curves, cloning and healing, and so on.

I am a very particular Photoshop user with specific needs and expectations established by years of use. Photoshop CS3 is a piece of crap. (more…)