Single-Serving Photo

You remember the National Association of Photoshop Professionals? NAPP? Their president, Scott Kelby, is like the Photoshop guy, he teaches Photoshop and Lightroom and travels all around the world doing seminars and evangelizing for Adobe (in an indirect way, as a representative of over 30,000 people who use Photoshop professionally). He’s as close to a Photoshop guru as you can realistically get before you become Thomas Knoll or Russell Brown.

What I’m trying to say here is that you really couldn’t learn Photoshop (or Lightroom) from any better folks than Scott Kelby and his Photoshop crew (Corey Barker, Pete Collins, RC Concepcion, and of course Matt Kloskowski). Normally this type of instruction costs a few bucks or at least a trip somewhere. But not this week.

This week only, presented in a live format, Scott and his crew (he calls them “The Photoshop Guys”) are doing a series of retouching presentations that you can watch for free. This starts tonight at 6 PM EST. The presentations are, in order:

• Wedding Retouching (tonight, Dec. 5)
• Digital Makeup (Dec. 6)
• The Next Level of Retouching (Dec. 7)
• LIVE Show – Audience Participation in Q&A (Dec. 8)
• Tips from the Industry (Dec. 9)

My understanding is that the fourth presentation is the only time that The Photoshop Guys will take any questions directly from the digital audience, but all five presentations will be streamed live.

To tune in, just visit Retouching Week on Photoshop User. It looks like the video and chat feeds are having some problems at the moment, but since the event has not yet started I’m sure the IT screw at Photoshop User will be able to work out all the bugs before it gets underway tonight at 6.

I don’t know about you guys but I’ll be tuned in!

Yes, you heard me. Free as in “no charge.”

Over the course of two years, BBC-produced Wildlife Magazine published a 12-part series on photographing the locations and creatures of nature written by talented photographers and including spectacular images. Until now, you would’ve had to find the 12 specific issues of Wildlife in order to read these tips, and for the effort it probably wouldn’t have been worth it. I, for one, am a lazy person, having grown up in the age of the Internet where any and all useful information is a click away, so rummaging through magazine back-issues is right out.

Fortunately for people like me, Wildlife has released all 12 “Photo Masterclass” articles in PDF format on their website for free download. Regrettably, the PDF files are print-restricted, so you can only view them on a computer. If you have GoodReader on your iPhone or iPod Touch, however, you can take these lessons with you wherever you go. (GoodReader is how I take every single Canon and Nikon DSLR manual with me on my workshops I’ll write more about that later on).

To view and download all of the Photo Masterclass articles, visit the Photo Masterclass page on BBC Wildlife.

[Edit: It appears that they have taken down articles 11 and 12; they no longer appear on the site. Unfortunately I don’t have local copies of the articles to share with everyone, so they may be lost forever.]

It’s been quite a hiatus for me and for Single-Serving Photo. My last post here was back in February, and so much has happened since then! First of all, if you’re reading this, thank you for not deleting me from your feed reader or taking me off of your bookmarks list. I know I haven’t been the chatterbox I once was, but I don’t like to post link wrap-ups and two-sentence thought fragments just for the sake of putting something online.

Anyway, on with the show!

First things first, JPG Magazine is back! After being effectively shut down due to budget and business problems, JPG has resuscitated itself mostly thanks to the outpouring of support from its community and highly visible demonstrations such as savejpg.com which presumably gave investors the confidence they needed to pump more necessary capital into the parent company of JPG Magazine, 8020 Media.

Now that JPG has risen from the dead, maybe I’ll actually contribute something! You should, too.

Second, my little hands-on instruction business, ArtPhotoWorkshops.com is going to be doing a series of low-cost, short “photo-walk” workshops in the New England area. Starting with Cape Cod in a week and then Boston after that, I plan to take us out to Newport, Rhode Island, possibly Northampton, Massachusetts, maybe even out to the Quabbin Reservoir for the nature lovers.

If there are places you’d like to explore and learn technique, composition, and mechanics of photography, leave a comment and I’ll see if we can visit them!

I just returned from Las Vegas and Death Valley on a workshop, no photos to show yet, but I think it was an extremely successful trip. Death Valley is by far one of America’s most impressive sights, I recommend seeing it once in your life (or if you’re crazy like me, twice). Las Vegas is a very challenging location to photograph, but I think I was able to snag at least a small number of cool images in between games of craps and tall beers!

There are a few other cool things I want to share, so stay tuned for kite photography, painting with a car, and my opinions on both.

In my instruction I get asked a lot about how the five most fundamentally important settings of the camera work together to achieve the effects you desire. It can be hard to penetrate the curtain of photographic jargon, some of which can seem counterintuitive, so I decided to take a minute to explain all of this stuff at a very high level. If you have specific questions of your own, please leave a comment below and I promise that I will answer them.

The only five settings that you need to know are:

• Shooting mode
• Aperture (or f-stop)
• Shutter speed
• ISO sensitivity
• Exposure value (EV)

After the jump I will explain in detail. (more…)