Photoshop Insider

…one of my favorite outdoor photographers, the head of NAPP’s Gear Desk, a Photoshop World instructor, and one of the nicest, most genuine, and fun people you’d every want to meet, the amazing Laurie Excell.

Laurie has one of the coolest, and most demanding jobs in photography training, as one of the instructors for the famous “Digital Landscape Workshop Series” (link) along side photography legends Moose Peterson and Joe McNally. So, how do you get to be that “third instructor” beside Moose and Joe? You have to be really, really good (and Laurie is exactly that). I’m honored to have her here tomorrow as my guest blogger—make sure you check back to see what Laurie has in store (in the meantime, here’s a link to Laurie’s photography blog).

My Evolution as a Photographer
When I was in high school, I thought I wanted to grow up to become a professional photographer. When I was in collage, I took darkroom and studio photography classes, but in the end got distracted and became a graphic designer. In my role as a graphic designer, I mainly worked with other photographer’s images and would occasionally direct a photo shoot. As the years passed, I found myself taking fewer and fewer photographs. Then, once day about fifteen years ago, I quit my job and started to teach Photoshop. When digital cameras started to become popular, I started to shoot once again, but primarily shot “when I had time”, which was either when I was on vacation, or when I needed a specific image for a Photoshop technique I wanted to teach. I eventually moved to into a beautiful house in the mountains of Colorado. It was a log home on the edge of a meadow with only a few homes in the view. I thought I was living an ideal life until I realized there was one area of my life were I wasn’t being fulfilled–my passion for photography. Two and a half years ago, I decided to take some drastic steps in an effort to reconnect with my passion for photography. One day I decided to sell my house and 98% of my material possessions and start to live a mobile lifestyle on a 40′ tour bus. The whole idea was to allow me to feed my passion for photography. This post is about how my approach to photography has changed since making that transition. I hope you come away with some ideas that might have you evolve as a photographer as well.

Here’s a shot of my home on wheels:

Landscapes
When started living on the open road my first thought was the explore all the national parks and make some classic landscape shots. I spent time exploring the West and discovering some beautiful places. I found I kept referring to a few resources for advice on shooting locations over and over again. My two favorite resources were the Photograph America newsletter (www.photographamerica.com) and a series of three books titled Photographing the Southwest by Laurent Martres.

At this point in my evolution as a photographer, I found that every place that I was visiting had been shot so many times before by so many people that I found my shots were not living up to my expectations. Someone else had visited the same location at a better time of year at a time of day that had better light while capturing a great composition. That’s when I turned to Photoshop in an attempt to make up for what were often less than ideal shooting conditions. I also started to learn a lot more about composition and how big of a difference cropping make. Here are some before and after images that show the type of digital transformation I was making:

Before

After

Before

After

I forced myself to take notes after every shooting session to make sure I was (more…)

…one of the most gifted Photoshop instructors on the entire planet. Photoshop Hall of Famer, Photoshop World Instructor, Bestselling Author, and all around Photoshop Uber-Brain; Ben Willmore.

I’ve sat in on Ben’s classes numerous times over the years, and I’ve never sat in one where I didn’t learn something new, or understand something at a whole new level. Ben has a way of connecting with his students that is really unique, and I can’t wait to see what he has cooked up for us tomorrow as my Special Guest blogger, so make sure you check back then.

THREE SONGS, NO FLASH

I photograph a lot of concerts, not for money or fame, but because it is something I truly enjoy. Photographing products, models, sports and landscapes are great, but nothing recharges my photographic batteries like the rush as the house lights go down and the stage lights go up.

When Scott asked if I was interested in being a guest blogger, it was the same day that I was invited by Steve Stevens to photograph him playing with Billy Idol at The House of Blues in Los Angeles. I thought that a look into shooting a concert along with a dash of the new Bridge CS4 thrown in would make for an interesting read. Something a little different.

ISO 640 f/2.8 1/80 sec

Concert photography takes practice and planning. The combination of changing lights, moving subjects and a very limited amount of time to get the shot makes concert photography one of the most rewarding and frustrating experiences a photographer can have. As with all type of photography, the best way to get better is to practice. Since it is not all that easy to get credentials to photograph bigger acts, start locally. Most cities have a couple of bars with live music that don’t mind if you come in and photograph, and usually have little if any restrictions. Most of the time, these venues will have horrible lighting and you will want to use a flash to get a good exposure.

I have two good reasons not to use a flash in these circumstances; images taken with a flash will look flat and boring. Good concert shots are about the energy coming off the stage and nothing will kill that quicker than the flash firing straight at the performer. The second reason is that if you ever get to shoot bigger acts in bigger venues, you will not be allowed to use a flash. If you are not used to pushing the ISO or slowing down the shutter-speed, but instead have relied on a flash to get the exposures you want, you will be in for a very frustrating shoot.

ISO 800 f/3.2 1/160

BEFORE THE SHOW
I get a lot of questions about the camera and lenses I use to shoot concerts (more…)

I gotta tell ya, people are lovin’ that free “Instant JPEG from Raw” utility Michael Tapes and Imagenomic created! Look at some of these comments posted by readers on Wednesday:

• “Works fantastic, Now I can shoot just in RAW instead of RAW+JPEG and get more pictures on the cards. It makes life alot easier and I can hand out the smaller sized JPEG´s much faster. Thanks for a great tool!”
• “Great program and it works so fast that I thought it was NOT working. You made my day.”
• “THANK YOU!!! you’ve literally saved me! “
• “Wonderful! Literally dropped my jaw after the first extract. I’ve already processed about 20 directories. THANK YOU!”
• “It works just fantastic!. The clearest jpegs I have seen after first shooting in raw, and then converting them.”
• “Wow, this is really useful! Big thanks Michael and Scott. I was exporting 600 RAW files the other night after a rugby tournament I shot and it was painful waiting 2 hours for them to turn to jpgs.”
  
• “This utility is a boone. Thank you very much indeed for it! “
• “It’s amazing. No more RAW+JPG!”
• “Michael-thanks for giving back to the photo community. As an aside, the program works with DNGs. Nice work!”
• “…thank you for a great little utility!! Very quick and effective!!”
• “Adobe’s PS development group have done a great job for CS4 and Michael Tapes has done a great, great, great …….great job for photographers, that too at free of cost and he deserves all credit and best wishes for making our lives so enjoyable in this profession.”
• “Thank You so much, it’s awesome!!!!”
• “I think this utility should be licensed by the camera manufacturers and adobe, implemented in the software that comes with the camera and/or Lightroom and Photoshop, and the RAW+jpg setting should simply disappear from cameras forever. Thanks so much for posting this. This is truly fantastic!”

Michael, if you were running, I’d vote for you! My thanks once again for doing something so cool and useful for our community!

Yet Another “Raw Is Best” Rant – NOT!

[ed note; Michael included a video demo with this post, and you’ll find it on the 2nd page—click the “More” button].

As a long time advocate (fanatic!) of shooting Raw format only, my most frequent response to the inevitable question of “why shoot raw all of the time?”, is because you never know when the shot of a lifetime will jump into your viewfinder. And given that truth (if you accept it), one would surely want to capture that shot of a lifetime in the best quality format that their DSLR is capable of. And that, of course is raw. The reasons why have been well stated time and time again by Scott, me, and countless others. In fact, while many were still debating the efficacy of shooting raw at all, I created an entire DVD about how to shoot raw faster, better, and easier than shooting JPEG. In that DVD I touched on a subject that kept haunting me to the point where I needed to do something about it. That is why I created the free utility called Instant JPEG from Raw.

First Some Raw History
As many did, I resurrected my passion for photography back when convergence of technology brought together 3MP digital point-and-shoot cameras (in my case the Canon Powershot S20), along with the IBM MicroDisk (340MB), and the Epson 1270 printer. Finally one could go out and shoot several hundred photographs, work on them in the amazing digital darkroom called Photoshop, and print them such that people would think they were looking at a real photograph. It was a grand time of creative resurgence and discovery. This was followed by the biggest moment in the recent history of the digital SLR, the introduction of the Canon D30. It also was only 3 megapixels. But for the first time ever, those pixels were silken and magical, and at worst rivaled the quality of film, and according to many beat it when printed to 8×10 or smaller. It was also smaller, higher quality, and quite more affordable than the then reigning king of DSLRs, the Nikon D1.

Thankfully my wife was insightful enough to convince me to buy the D30 instead of the Canon G1 P&S which had also just been released She said to me that we could not afford the G1 ($1,000) and that I must buy the D30 ($3,200)! She knew in her ultimate wisdom, that a G1 purchase would only have satisfied my gear lust mentality for a week or 2, and would be followed by the inevitable D30 purchase for a total cost of $4,200. Hence we could not afford the G1 <g>. Thankfully it still applies today. D300 vs. D90 – 85 f1.8 vs.85 f1.4. “We cannot afford the cheaper one!” Have I mentioned how much I love my wife?

We only got to know the D30 by trial and error, as there was no authoritative documentation. The early adopters, along with Michael Reichmann and others, banded together to discover the mysteries that lay within this magical camera. Raw mode was one of those mysteries, but the only way to convert raw files (in fact the only way to even view raw files), was to develop/process/convert them in the then immature Canon raw software. One could view very small thumbs in the slow software, but to see the full size 3MP file, it would take about 2 minutes per file. Yup! Two+ minutes per file. No wonder people did not adopt raw early on. No way to even view your files, until after a several hour “conversion” session that completely tied up and/or crashed your computer. And that was just to view the files, before you edited or adjusted them. I went on record at DPReview saying that Raw was not ready for prime time (link). And it was not. But then the magic was discovered…

The Embedded JPEG.
The holy grail turned out to be that Canon thankfully had embedded a JPEG (more…)

…none other than the man behind the “Whibal” white balance reference card, and the popular “How to Shoot Raw Without FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt)” Camera Raw training DVD, Michael Tapes.

I’ve known Michael for a number of years now, and when he heard a few weeks back that I didn’t have a Special Guest Blogger lined up, he proposed a very interesting idea. I don’t want to let the cat out of the bag, but he’s on to something that a lot of people will really be into, so make sure you check back here tomorrow to see what Michael will be unveiling. Should be fun!

So I bet you’re asking, “What’s a video guy doing as a guest blogger on a (primarily) digital photography site?” Well, I’m here to tell you why you need to jump on the online video bandwagon… and do it now! But first, for all of you that would feel a little cheated that you came to Scott’s blog today and you didn’t get a cool tip or trick to take with you, here’s how to turn Timelapse Photos into beautiful video in Photoshop CS3 Extended in just a few easy steps:
1. Choose File > Open and direct it to your folder of images. Make sure that they are numbered in sequence.

2. Select the first image and then click the “Image Sequence” checkbox (as shown below).

3. Select your Frame Rate. This will also determine the overall duration of the clip as it makes this calculation based on the frame rate.

4. Click the Play button in the Animation timeline or simply hit the Space Bar to render the video clip into RAM.

Here’s a video clip where I show the technique and talk about it in a little more detail: (click here).

If you’re using a 10-15 megapixel camera, then your images will allow you to create 4,000 – 5,000 pixel wide video files. This is many times larger than Standard Definition or High Definition video files. In fact, you can go out and shoot once, and then chop up the resulting monster video file into 30-50 Standard Definition video files for sale as a collection on DVD or website. You can see me demonstrate this technique with one of Moose Peterson’s files by viewing this video clip here:

Why Online Video
Now on to my main discussion point… the reason Photographers should jump on the online video bandwagon as soon as possible. To say that online video today is (more…)

I totally messed up, and didn’t have anyone lined up for today as a guest blogger, so sadly what you’re now experiencing is “Lame Blogger Wednesday.” (Finding and coordinating a guest blogger each week may actually be more work than when I used to blog on Wednesdays. How I long for those days. ;-).

Anyway, I’ll get right on making sure I’ve got somebody lined up for next week, but in the meantime, we’re all stuck with Lame Blogger Wednesday. I know. It stinks.

The Photoshop Guys; Un-Retouched

As NAPP’s Executive Director I work in the same building as the crazy guys we refer to as “The Photoshop Guys” and the LayersTV Guys, so you can imagine that one of the questions I get asked most frequently is, ‘what are they really like?’

Maybe you’ve heard that they are exactly like what you see on the podcasts, and that’s true to a large degree, but there are things that don’t come through on the shows and I want to give you a look at some of the stuff that happens behind the scenes.

Dave Cross (above)
In most ways, what you see on PhotoshopUser TV is what Dave is like… when he’s training. Truly professional. Of all the guys, he is known as “Mr One Take” because it’s so rare for him to make a mistake. But when the camera isn’t rolling, people would probably be surprised how quiet and reserved he is. Even if you greet him in the morning with an enthusiastic, “HEY! How’s it going Dave!?” You can expect his extraordinarily polite, very measured response to be, “good day.” A true gentleman.

In spite of his reserved manner, there are 2 things you can mention that cause that extra little spark in Dave’s eye and he’s absolutely happy to talk about, his family and Canada. He’s a real, proud, family man. And even though his current job as a Photoshop Guy has taken Dave out of Canada, you can’t take Canada out of Dave. His cell phone ring tone is Oh Canada (the Canadian national anthem) and it’s absolutely hilarious any time his phone rings in a staff meeting because whenever he gets a call, everyone in the room stands up immediately until he answers his phone. We all love our Canadian!

But what would a peek behind the scenes be without a funny Dave story. As many of you may know, Dave Cross was the first full-time trainer hired to help Scott with the seminar (more…)