Couple of days ago, Brad Moore (Music Photographer extraordinaire – Photo assistant to Scott Kelby) came to me with an image that he shot on his way to a Bluegrass festival. The shot was from The Desert Inn in Yeehaw Junction in Florida. He didn’t think much of the mood in the area other than “Hey.. I think this image would do well as an HDR shot. ..”
While normally someone would look at the image and say “Eh, Sky’s not too good – environment is blah – kinda decent building but I should’ve been here at X time” and then throw the image out – I usually just perk up. See, I consider myself to be (Photographically speaking) Part Artist – Part Technician. I love making pictures of people and landscapes. I equally love making artwork in Photoshop – and both of those are satisfied very well inside the world of HDR – specifically 1 shot HDR.
There is a general feeling about HDR that you need 3-5 images to play with in order to produce something. I call – hogwash. You are hereby given permission to go out there and do whatever you wish in the world of HDR – including single shot HDR images. This frame would have been something that would’ve been thrown away normally, and there was so much to it.. if we just spent some time coaxing out the nuances of it.
Is it a picture? Nope.. but I never intended it to be – hence the textured overlay on the shot. I just wanted it to be pretty… plain and simple. I didnt want to get into the argument – didnt want to talk techie specifics. I just wanted to make something cool. So much so, i’ve even added a section of it on my personal collection of stuff (gets rotated a lot though). Check out the Before and After movie of the shot!
Now, I want you to make something cool too – and if you do, i’ll give you a prize! Let’s do this- let’s add a link below here for you to download a copy of that NEF source file that I started with:
Go ahead and play with it and make something that’s your own. Once you do, send me a message via Twitter (making sure you’re following me) or send a message through the contact section of this page. Point me to where -you- posted your image. We’ll go ahead and choose a winner from there.
This is a really cool announcement today! Ever since the Intuos4 came out, my tablet usage has really skyrocketed (a lot had to do with the performance of the mouse – see my original post here). While I think that the tablet is now one of those must have accessories in your creative arsenal, one of the things I’ve always wondered about is whether these tablets would ever go wireless using Bluetooth technology. Now I have to wonder no more with the release of the new Intuos4 Wireless tablet. Check out some information below:
“Vancouver, WA – Feb. 1, 2010 – Today, Wacom® announces the Intuos®4 Wireless professional pen tablet, a highly-anticipated product featuring Bluetooth wireless technology. The new Intuos4 Wireless is expected to be warmly embraced by photographers, designers and artists who seek the freedom of wireless technology as well as the control and comfort benefits inherent in Wacom’s professional line of pen tablets. The liberating experience of being able to move about the room and work “unattached” from a computer also makes the Intuos4 Wireless an excellent tool for use at a collaborative work session or in a classroom setting such as an art class or photography seminar. In addition, the medium-sized Intuos4 Wireless fits easily into most computer laptop bags, making it a wonderful input solution for mobile creative professionals and students. ”
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I for one totally welcome the wireless tablet. We’ll be showing it off on Layers TV taping TODAY. For more information on this, please make sure to visit www.wacom.com
Hey everyone! I just noticed that our new season of Layers TV is up online, and i’m excited to share it with all of you! This week we have Worldwide Design Evangelist Terry White (also the writer of the Terry White Tech Blog and the Best App site showing us how to be able to use AVCHD footage inside of Adobe Premiere CS4. The part that has me excited about the entire thing is that this kicks off our Interview Series for Layers TV! Terry is such a great person to start this off with, and boy does he just let you have it! In one episode, he shows exactly how to use camera footage to setup and export his Best App podcast. Thank you so much for coming on!
School of Visual Arts – Masters in Digital Photography ONLINE
Being an educator, I am a big fan of getting yourself educated. My ability to be able to share with you guys here on a day to day basis makes me very happy. However, I do understand that there are people out there that are looking for an Academic route to be able to solidify their body of knowledge in the digital world. The more the digital world evolves, the more ‘leaders’ are going to require solid knowledge from students coming up in the field.
To that end, the School of Visual Arts in NYC has started their Masters in Digital Photography program ONLINE! I think SVA is one of the great academic institutions, and the ability to be able to get that kind of education in an online environment is such a great opportunity. If you are one of those professionals who is out there looking to work on their Masters, be able to do it in one of the most rigorous and challending environments, and work with some of the best industry people – this is where it’s at.
Photoshop Hall of Fame member, and Photoshop World Dream Team Instructor Katrin Eisman chairs this department, and was kind enough to send me some additional information on this program. Make sure you check out the videos below for more information:
The theory behind shooting portraits on a green-screen background is a good one: Give yourself a solid color that’s easy to select. The problem has always been that it isn’t easy to automate extracting subjects from the background—until now. Here’s a method to create a Photoshop action to extract your subjects and place them in a new background.
1 PREPARATION IS EVERYTHING
Your chances of success in a project like this will depend on the work you do up front. You need good, consistent lighting of the green screen, some distance between your subjects and the background to avoid shadows, and all the portraits should be framed in a similar way. Also, keep your graphic elements in a specific folder. For our example we’re going to use a series of “karate kids.”
There is certainly going to be a bit of excitement with this contest- let me tell you! Canon and Vimeo have teamed up with Los Angeles and New York based commercial director, DP and photographer Vincent Laforet to produce a contest called “The Story Beyond the Still” and I absolutely love this idea!
Simple concept – Vincent was given an image, and using a Canon 7D he was tasked to make a 3min prologue video for a short movie called “The Cabbie”. The end of his video ends with a picture. That’s where you come in. You take the picture and include it for a few seconds, then you do an interpretation of that picture, picking up where Vincent left off – for no more than four minutes. The end of the movie should be a picture of -your’s-.
The contest will be done in rounds. When the winner of the round is decided, everyone will be shown the winner, and the process starts again for the new movie. I can see the creative juices just going into overdrive on this as it requires photographic and motion point’s of view. Absolutely brilliant!
Designing a Layers Tshirt in Photoshop – Matt Kloskowski
Today, Matt also Uses Photoshop to put artwork onto a tee shirt, in only a way Matt can. Check out the tutorial below:
Couple of days ago, Brad Moore (Music Photographer extraordinaire – Photo assistant to Scott Kelby) came to me with an image that he shot on his way to a Bluegrass festival. The shot was from The Desert Inn in Yeehaw Junction in Florida. He didn’t think much of the mood in the area other than “Hey.. I think this image would do well as an HDR shot. ..”
Photoshop
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Indesign
Dreamweaver
Fireworks
Premiere
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After Effects
Lightroom
Acrobat
