It’s one of my favorite things to do. I get to give stuff away and give people a chance to live out their photographic dreams…
Everyone else gets at least hope out of the deal!
Today I announce the winner of a Canon 5D MK III and Drobo 5D
Congrats to: @WGeorgeCook
Mr. Cook please e-mail me at photofocus@me.com with your postal shipping address and phone number and you will receive your prize shortly.
Didn’t win? There are more contests open. Just check our OPEN CONTEST page on Photofocus.
A popular trend these days is to sign your images when posting online. The thought is to treat the image more like it was being shown in a gallery and less like pixel dust in the wind. The process is really pretty easy to do. I’d also like to state that this is a much more attractive way to watermark a photo.
Here’s the process for Photoshop Users
There you have it… a classy watermark that’s easy to reuse on all your online photos.
Do you have a favorite way to sign your digital images? Share it in the comments please.
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lynda.com Learn photography anytime, anywhere, and at your own pace—from bite-sized tutorials to comprehensive courses. Try lynda.com free for 10 days by visiting lynda.com/ Photofocus.
The HDR Learning Center Check out new ways to use High Dynamic Range photography to make compelling images. Free tutorials and posts to get results. Produced in partnership with HDR Soft.
The Topaz Labs Image Enhancement bundle. Open up a world of creative possibilities with a seamless, integrated workflow. You don’t need to be a Photoshop wizard to look like one. Click here and use the code photofocus to get a 15% discount.
Gigapan.com. The revolutionary GigaPan EPIC robotic camera mount lets you capture and combine thousands of images into one incredible, interactive panorama. Save 10% with the code PHOTOFOCUS.
Drobo - Not only is Drobo 5D fast, but it’s easy-to-use, expandable, flexible, and protected.
To our loyal listeners… I apologize deeply for the delayed post. I broke my own rule about backing up to 3 locations and had to wait for a lost bag to arrive. Hope you enjoy this fun interview. We’ll be back with a bonus podcast from Adobe MAX in a short bit too.
NOTE NOTE NOTE NOTE NOTE: The Photofocus Podcast Feed HAS CHANGED!
Here is the new feed: feed://feeds.feedburner.com/photofocuspodcast
Download episode here… or get it on iTunes
PLEASE BE PATIENT – OUR SERVERS SEE LARGE LOADS ON PUBLISHING DAYS. THE DOWNLOADS MAY GO SLOWLY BUT THEY WILL FINISH.
Rich takes a deep dive with photographer and photograph expert Ben Willmore.
Topics include:
Hosted by Rich Harrington
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This Post Sponsored by:
lynda.com Learn photography anytime, anywhere, and at your own pace—from bite-sized tutorials to comprehensive courses. Try lynda.com free for 10 days by visiting lynda.com/ Photofocus.
The HDR Learning Center Check out new ways to use High Dynamic Range photography to make compelling images. Free tutorials and posts to get results. Produced in partnership with HDR Soft.
The Topaz Labs Image Enhancement bundle. Open up a world of creative possibilities with a seamless, integrated workflow. You don’t need to be a Photoshop wizard to look like one. Click here and use the code photofocus to get a 15% discount.
Gigapan.com. The revolutionary GigaPan EPIC robotic camera mount lets you capture and combine thousands of images into one incredible, interactive panorama. Save 10% with the code PHOTOFOCUS.
Drobo - Not only is Drobo 5D fast, but it’s easy-to-use, expandable, flexible, and protected.
Guest Post by Tom Shue - Follow Tom on Twitter.
Composition is the act of framing the subject with respect to the the relationship of foreground and background elements. Basically it’s how you express a vision and how you want your story told through a photograph. Composition has many elements and each one can have a huge impact on it, let me name a few:
Composition and Cropping are huge topics, so I am just going to try to give you some tips that I use when “Cropping People.”
Cropping people and cropping landscape images are a bit different. With landscape images you usually just crop until you have eliminated the distracting elements (while making sure the horizon line is level). With people, you do the same with respect to removing distracting elements but you must ensure the subject is the primary focus of the frame.
There are some things that you might have heard like “I have to shoot loose to leave space to fit an 8″ x 10″ frame” or “Cropping in post is for farmers”. Don’t get caught up in the words, just remember to think before you shoot. Try to remove distracting elements in the viewfinder and frame the subject based on the intended final use of the image.
You are going to have several opportunities to crop your image.
When making images of people, you may find yourself cropping a full length, a three-quarter, a bust or a headshot image. Each one of those crops will have some rules that you might want to consider.
These cropping rules are the ones that I use. Please try them and see if they help you make better images. Thanks for taking time to visit today.
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This Post Sponsored by:
lynda.com Learn photography anytime, anywhere, and at your own pace—from bite-sized tutorials to comprehensive courses. Try lynda.com free for 10 days by visiting lynda.com/ Photofocus.
The HDR Learning Center Check out new ways to use High Dynamic Range photography to make compelling images. Free tutorials and posts to get results. Produced in partnership with HDR Soft.
The Topaz Labs Image Enhancement bundle. Open up a world of creative possibilities with a seamless, integrated workflow. You don’t need to be a Photoshop wizard to look like one. Click here and use the code photofocus to get a 15% discount.
Gigapan.com. The revolutionary GigaPan EPIC robotic camera mount lets you capture and combine thousands of images into one incredible, interactive panorama. Save 10% with the code PHOTOFOCUS.
Drobo – Not only is Drobo 5D fast, but it’s easy-to-use, expandable, flexible, and protected.
Click to watch the tutorial
While this class focusses a bit on how to use Photoshop for video and DSLR video workflows, there’s tons of tips in it that will help any user. Hopefully it gives you a few fresh ideas to try out.
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This Post Sponsored by:
lynda.com Learn photography anytime, anywhere, and at your own pace—from bite-sized tutorials to comprehensive courses. Try lynda.com free for 10 days by visiting lynda.com/ Photofocus.
The HDR Learning Center Check out new ways to use High Dynamic Range photography to make compelling images. Free tutorials and posts to get results. Produced in partnership with HDR Soft.
The Topaz Labs Image Enhancement bundle. Open up a world of creative possibilities with a seamless, integrated workflow. You don’t need to be a Photoshop wizard to look like one. Click here and use the code photofocus to get a 15% discount.
Gigapan.com. The revolutionary GigaPan EPIC robotic camera mount lets you capture and combine thousands of images into one incredible, interactive panorama. Save 10% with the code PHOTOFOCUS.
Drobo - Not only is Drobo 5D fast, but it’s easy-to-use, expandable, flexible, and protected.
NOTE NOTE NOTE NOTE NOTE: The Photofocus Podcast Feed HAS CHANGED!
Here is the new feed: feed://feeds.feedburner.com/photofocuspodcast
Download episode here… or get it on iTunes
PLEASE BE PATIENT – OUR SERVERS SEE LARGE LOADS ON PUBLISHING DAYS. THE DOWNLOADS MAY GO SLOWLY BUT THEY WILL FINISH.
Rich takes a deep dive with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom product manager Sharad Mangalick.
Topics include:
What else is in the new app?
Lightroom 5 beta resource list — http://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjournal/2013/04/lr-5-beta-resources.html
Connect with Adobe on social media:
Hosted by Rich Harrington
Get it here – http://traffic.libsyn.com/photofocuspodcast/PF_4_25.mp3
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This Post Sponsored by:
lynda.com Learn photography anytime, anywhere, and at your own pace—from bite-sized tutorials to comprehensive courses. Try lynda.com free for 10 days by visiting lynda.com/ Photofocus.
The HDR Learning Center Check out new ways to use High Dynamic Range photography to make compelling images. Free tutorials and posts to get results. Produced in partnership with HDR Soft.
The Topaz Labs Image Enhancement bundle. Open up a world of creative possibilities with a seamless, integrated workflow. You don’t need to be a Photoshop wizard to look like one. Click here and use the code photofocus to get a 15% discount.
Gigapan.com. The revolutionary GigaPan EPIC robotic camera mount lets you capture and combine thousands of images into one incredible, interactive panorama. Save 10% with the code PHOTOFOCUS.
Drobo - Not only is Drobo 5D fast, but it’s easy-to-use, expandable, flexible, and protected.
Photo by Scott Bourne – Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons
The other day we posted about a nifty plug-in from Digital Film Tools that emulates film. The reaction was amusing. All 12 of the remaining film shooters in our audience felt the need to subject me to the appropriate amount of faux outrage. Their responses were predictable and I think come from the same general set of misconceptions.
If you’re young, and were born into the age of computers, you may tend to romanticize about the good old days you never experienced. I’ve shot more film than most of you. Digital only became available in the last half of my career and I spent more time shooting film than I have yet shooting digital. I was there. I did it every day. I lived it. It wasn’t that great.
Those of you who are of the religion of low – light would have hated it. Tri-X had – (insert Jaws music here) GRAIN! You would equate that to noise and you would hate it. But you would get it at ISO 400 not ISO 25,600 like you do now. “Low-light performance” wasn’t a phrase I ever heard uttered by anyone back in the day.
There was no Photoshop. No HDR. No stitched panoramas. And if something went wrong you were stuck. Retouchers were very limited in what they could do. They were few, expensive and slow. Negative retouchers were even more difficult to find. Essentially – you had to get it perfect in the camera. You had to make compromises.
Film was expensive, and processing more so. The chemicals used in the process were so dangerous that the EPA regulated them. They were officially declared bio-hazards. The heavy metals involved are still doing damage to our ecosystem.
It was hard to make very large prints from film. If you shot for publication you had to use very expensive drum scanners that weren’t all that good.
I could go on – but the fact is, it wasn’t all that much fun. And just because it’s hard to do – doesn’t make the result any better. Nobody cares. Seriously. Your photos aren’t better because you worked harder to make them. They are still just your photos.
Now I know there are a few beanie-wearing “ARTISTES” out there who say that’s the way it should be. To them the process is more important than the outcome. They have a right to their opinion. I have a right to mine too. And I try my best to get it right in the camera but sh*t happens. And when it does I am grateful for the new digital tools that can fix it. If you’re one of those hung up on the process – then you are probably not making great images anyway.
If I’m lucky enough that 100 years from now, my images are still in circulation, and people are still talking about them, nobody will look at my work – either digital or film – and say “I wonder if that was Tri-X?”
It’s silly.
The image is what matters. Period. How you got it is only important to you and those in the camera club you are trying to impress.
Shooting film doesn’t make you an artist. Neither does starving, wearing a beanie and a scarf for that matter. Having vision, heart, dedication to craft, earned and learned skill, a genuine story to tell, empathy and passion for your subject, etc., THOSE things make you an artist. The process? It’s just like the hammer to the nail. The sooner you get that, the sooner you move toward being great.
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This Post Sponsored by:
lynda.com Learn photography anytime, anywhere, and at your own pace—from bite-sized tutorials to comprehensive courses. Try lynda.com free for 10 days by visiting lynda.com/ Photofocus.
The HDR Learning Center Check out new ways to use High Dynamic Range photography to make compelling images. Free tutorials and posts to get results. Produced in partnership with HDR Soft.
The Topaz Labs Image Enhancement bundle. Open up a world of creative possibilities with a seamless, integrated workflow. You don’t need to be a Photoshop wizard to look like one. Click here and use the code photofocus to get a 15% discount.
Gigapan.com. The revolutionary GigaPan EPIC robotic camera mount lets you capture and combine thousands of images into one incredible, interactive panorama. Save 10% with the code PHOTOFOCUS.
Drobo – Not only is Drobo 5D fast, but it’s easy-to-use, expandable, flexible, and protected.
