The Digital Photo Guy

Registration Page is Active

The registration page for Gloria Hopkins’ webinar is now active. If you’re a member of San Diego or Northern San Diego Photography Meetup Groups, use discount code “Meetup” for $5 off. If you’re a registered reader here, use discount code “TDPG10” for $10 off. If you buy Gloria’s book, Natural Design, for $19.99, send me a copy of your invoice for a $20 discount code. That’s like getting the book for free! If you’ve taken more than 5 classes with me, not including Palomar, MiraCosta or other community college classes, send me an e-mail and I’ll apply the Exalted Frequent Learner discount.

Learn Photographic Composition in Just 3 Hours

Gloria Hopkins, award winning artist, photographer and author will present a 3-hour webinar class covering her amazingly easy-to-understand concepts of composition and design. In just three short hours, your photos will improve dramatically and noticeably.

Composition is a complex topic because it means different things to different people under different circumstances. In an effort to simplify composition, many photography instructors leave out too much and make it even more mystifying. For example, many religiously follow the Rule of Thirds (RoT) and always try to place the center of interest in an RoT intersection. That can be as bad as never applying RoT. How many contort your brains to identify the Golden Mean? How many are so geeky as to actually understand how a Fibonacci spiral applies to your photographs? Gloria can reduce all that to basic concepts that anyone can understand and apply.

All my students know I hammer cropping as the single most useful technique in Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. Read this article by Gloria to see how she brings structure and clarity to HOW cropping makes a good photo even better. During the webinar, Gloria will use actual photographs and a technique she developed called “compositional maps” to guide you through the process of evaluating and enhancing photos. Not only will you learn how to compose photos, you’ll also learn how to evaluate photos so you can more quickly sort winners from losers. No more agonizing whether a photo is compositionally salvageable or a lost cause.

Register for the webinar today. If you buy Gloria’s book before the webinar, I’ll refund the cost of the book. Citizen, it don’t get no gooder’n that!

You can’t the swamp out of the animal. Just another way of saying a leopard never changes it’s spot or, in this case, once an engineer, always an engineer.

Earlier this week I was frustrated, annoyed, irritated, upset and generally mad about the complexity of modern software tools. Today, I am in harmony with my environment, my wa is at peace and the timbre about me is as still as Waldon Pond at midnight. For a brief, shining moment, I was transported back to those good old days of yesteryear when I was a 25 year old engineer on a mission! For just a few hours, I was that laser-focused, computer-for-a-brain engineer who could solve any problem created by another human! For half a day, I was once more an unstoppable force, powering my way through a problem on pure brain power!

I figured out how to put PayPal buttons directly on my workshop pages so a student only needs to click once to be taken directly to PayPal with all the infomation already in place and ready for his credit card. Over the past 20 years, I’d gotten rather lazy about solving technical problems. As a sales and marketing executive, my focus was strategy and tactics, not the minutia of bits and bytes. I was “The Big Picture Guy” and left the details to my staff to handle. But, deep down inside, I was still that geeky engineer who once told a customer, “This is what it will cost. If you want warm and fuzzy, it’ll cost you more!” as my manager sat in the back of the room and died a slow, agonizing death.

The point to all this is that, A) I feel great and B) Anyone can make this stuff work with a little patience and determination. Of course, all this effort has extracted a price. I feel like I just ran a marathon. I’m wiped out from the mental extertion and my brain will probably be mush for a few days. By next week, I’ll be back to my slug self and whining about dis ‘n dat.