The Digital Photo Guy

Gear Webinar – Open Registration

Because a number of registrants have not confirmed their attendance, I’ve cancelled their reservations and opened the webinar to the general public. On Saturday, May 15 (this coming Saturday) at 9AM Pacific Time (10AM MDT, 11AM CDT, Noon EDT), click this link and follow the instructions to enter the meeting room. If you want to register for the door prizes, you should use this form. If you just want to attend the webinar, use the above link.

1st Annual California Photo Festival

I just registered for the 1st Annual California Photo Festival sponsored by Light Photographic (formerly Lepp Institute of Digital Imaging). Since this is the first year, it’s a bit chaotic but the line-up is impressive. Rick Sammon will deliver the keynote at the end of 5½ days of field and lecture classes in every aspect of digital photography including nature, landscape, wedding, portrait, glamour, macro and more.

Among the noted photographers and instructors are Rob Sheppard (readers of this site know Rob from a Photoshop Elements webinar he taught), Jim DiVitale, David Wells, Jane Conner-Ziser, Jennifer Wu and many others. Many are Canon Explorers of Light, an elite group of Canon contract photographers.

If you can swing 5½ days and $449, this looks to be an incredibly useful photo workshop.

Discovered by Discovery Channel (Kinda)

About a month ago, I received an e-mail from a person claiming to represent Discovery Channel (Planet Earth, Mythbusters, Deadliest Catch, etc) asking if I could teach them Photoshop via webinar. I was skeptical so I snooped around to make sure the e-mail really originated from DC.

I was told they needed someone to teach two employees, who had never even launched PS, much less used it, to do basic photo and graphics editing. They needed immediate help as well as long-term instruction.

When I sent them a quote, I was told they “didn’t have any money for training” and needed a lower price. I found it curious that a company that had just hired Oprah to narrate a film didn’t have a few thousand dollars. As I negotiated with them, they told me they had an immediate project and would I do the job as a part of the training. At that point, I was getting bad vibes. I told them I would schedule time and resources as soon as I received payment. I never heard back from them. This had taken place over 3 weeks and it was clear their intent was to get me to do the job for free.

Bottom line, be careful. There are lots of companies looking for photographers and artists who are desparate enough to do free jobs in hopes that something will come of it. I hope they didn’t find someone gullible.

I Hate Being a Webmaster

Over the past week, a perfect storm of self-inflicted disasters as well as junk from all the creeps in cyberspace has left me with with anger management issues. If I had a tactical nuclear weapon, I would be inclined to turn parts of certain countries into large, glass parking lots.

A few months ago, I noticed traffic from Russia, China, Ukraine, Nigeria and other unsavory places had increased noticeably. After watching the trend for a few weeks, I went searching for an answer. There were many snake oil remedies as well as a few legitimate sounding fixes. After reviewing about a dozen solutions, I selected what I thought was the most rational sounding. Blockacountry.com is a service that allows a webmaster to block whole countries based on IP addresses. As soon as I applied their solution, my site traffic dropped by 40% which worried me  since I wasn’t sure it was only blocking Russian traffic. Click to read more

Quick Fill Flash Tip

While I was at the Pacific Southwest Railway Museum in Campo, I used the opportunity to make some photos for teaching purposes. Here’s an example of why you want to always be thinking about fill flash.

This old AT&SF (Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe) caboose had been moved so I decided to try a new angle. Unfortunately, the sun was ahead and slightly camera right (notice the shadows). This caused lens flare (spots near bottom of door) in the first photo. I set up my Canon 550EX with a Paul C. Buff CyberSync Remote Trigger to add some fill flash. After a few trials, I got the middle photo which is evenly lit. Had I been more serious about this shot, I would have popped a second flash under the trucks to light up the underside.

The last photo is after I toned down the middle photo in Photoshop Elements. Bottom line, fill flash lit the dark areas and reduced lens flare in one swell foop. The ability to move the flash around until the lighting is even is another great reason for an external flash instead of the integrated pop-up doo-hickey. Click to read more

FREE Topaz Labs Webinar

Eric Yang, Marketing Manager for Topaz Labs will present a free webinar on April 7 at Noon CDT (Central Daylight Time). Eric will demonstrate how to use several Topaz plug-ins and answer questions. There will also be some cool give-aways so be sure to register ASAP. There’s limited seating on a first-come, first-served basis. Click HERE to reserve your spot. You can have as people as you want on one computer so invite your whole camera club, neighborhood or synagogue and project the webinar for all to see.

Using One Tool To Clone Over an Object

When first learning photo editing, students often learn one tool at a time and tend to use that tool for everything. Sometimes, that’s not a bad approach. For example, some use the Marquee Tool to select everything but quickly discover that perfect rectangles and ovals rarely exist in real life.

Today’s Video MMT hopes to speed up your “Ah-ha!” moment by demonstrating how the Marquee Tool can be used to remove an object from a complex background. The first photo below is the original, the second is a close up of the area we want to fix and the last is the final result. View the video in the Archived MMT area (free registration required).

Russian Traffic

I’ve noticed a huge surge in traffic from Russian IP addresses. I don’t believe my charm and skills are that appreciated by Russians so I can only conclude that there’s a big push to hack and scam US sites. I’m going to block all Russian and Chinese traffic but, before I do that, if there are Russian or Chinese readers who actually visit my site for benign purposes, please let me know.

UPDATE: Just heard from Roger at LensRentals.com (see end of MMT) that they have a 5% discount going on right now. Sounds like a great excuse to rent a wide angle or macro or both and join me at the Anza-Borrego Desert Wildflower Workshop next weekend (3/13 & 14) or the following weekend (3/20 & 21). If you rent a lens from LensRentals.com and e-mail a copy of your invoice to me, I’ll take 5% off the price of the workshop. (Cannot be combined with other offers or discounts).

Duh! forgot to include the discount code: PIXEL5. Somedays, it’s better to stay in bed. I don’t know when the discount promo ends. Send LensRentals an e-mail if you think you’ll use it in the near future.

Yeah, yeah! I know today is Friday and this is a Monday Morning Tip but I won’t have time this weekend so it gets posted today. If it bothers you, just wait until Monday to read it. Sheesh!

Topaz Labs releases Adjust 4

Until recently, I pretty much used plug-ins to make specific adjustments, not create a final result. When I bought the Topaz Labs bundle at Photoshop World, I was more interested in using the tools to help me tweak photos, not produce a finished, final image. But, as they say, “Even an old dog can learn new tricks if properly motivated!” (OK, so I just made that up) Maybe it’s just laziness in my old age but I’m beginning to like several presets in the new release of Topaz Labs Adjust 4. Some were available in Adjust 3 but I never really explored them thinking I could do better than some geek engineer who’s probably never seen sunlight, much less a dSLR.

Here are some side-by-side examples of Adjust 4 presets versus my normal workflow:

One photo in each set (I’m not telling which) is my normal workflow. The other is a Topaz Adjust 4 preset where I simply clicked a button and said, “Do it!” There’s no right or wrong but do you have a preference? BTW, one photo is an HDR produced with DP-HDR. Click for more examples