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!

Photography is awesome and I love it, but it’s super expensive sometimes. Photographers often commiserate with one another about the high price tags on tripods and ball heads (or sometimes they gloat, but the nice ones commiserate), and if you get into studio photography you are often getting into a whole new world of expenses from strobes and stands to backdrops and gels.

Now, it definitely pays off to have the right tools for the job, and that starts to become glaringly apparent when you’re doing work with people, but for so-called tabletop product photography you can often get by with some home improvement supplies and a little ingenuity and patience.

After the break, the resident product photographer and editor at Handmadeology shares a $12 product studio setup that yielded the image on the right. (more…)

camera dial by Lee Reynolds

Being an excellent photographer is 50% vision and 50% technical prowess. Seeing the art all around you is only useful for the photographer who can capture it, and perfectly executing that capture means wrangling the piece of hardware you love so much, the camera.

These days, most photographers are shooting digital. Digital photography is freeing in a lot of ways, but it is also more complicated. Camera manufacturers have sought to close the gap between the pro and the semi-pro by providing all of these different shooting modes, and even though I still believe you only need three, it’s not unusual to see mode dials with 11 or 12 settings on them! You don’t need all those settings to get full control! Haje Jan Kamps helps me explain after the break. (more…)

I just read a very cool article by Alex Koloskov over at AKELstudio’s “Atalanta Photographer Blog” about how he was able to get great macro detail on a small medical brush with clear bristles when shooting on a white background (for a catalog, I would guess).

Here’s a little taste of what the final product looked like using his techniques (this is a 100% crop of the final photo, click for the full size version):

Head over to Alex’s blog to see his lighting setup and read his tips on how to pull this off.

Just like HAM radio enthusiasts (of which I am one, by no coincidence), photographers tend to be whores for equipment. If there is one thing that’s more exciting than actually taking pictures, it’s buying all the equipment you think you need before even going out there. Some call it “retail therapy,” which is a deceptively medical phrasing for “it feels really good to buy stuff, and I enjoy feeling really good.”

Whether you need this junk or not is a completely different question, and one that I could certainly answer for you, but I doubt you’d listen to me. Who am I, anyway, other than another guy who loves buying stuff he doesn’t need?

You know who you should listen to? Scott Bourne.

I’ve been writing this blog for a little over five years now, which seems like a long time to me, but Scott has been writing about and teaching photography for six times that long (yes, thirty years), so he deserves your attention for at least the next ten minutes… Which is all it’s going to take you to breeze through his newly updated DSLR Camera Lens Buying Guide on Photofocus.

Within the Guide, Scott offers tips for choosing what to buy and gives examples of each basic type of lens in both Canon and Nikon flavors.

For all of you Sony, Panasonic, Olympus, and Minolta shooters out there, don’t worry… I’m sure there’s another blog out there for you guys! Ha ha!

But seriously, these are good tips and you should listen to what Scott has to say, he speaks from immense experience.

Scott Bourne’s DSLR Camera Lens Buying Guide via Photofocus