Just got back from my second introductory Photoshop weekend with Hal Schmitt at Lepp Institute of Digital Imaging ... to be known simply as the The Institute at this time ... and I am stoked! It was beyond my greatest expectations. Not only did Hal march us through all the major layer operations but he made them part of a solid digital photography workflow that can be the foundation of whatever additional post processing one might do. After showing us Levels, Hal worked our butts over and over on Curves! Anyone who thought that Curves was just too complicated for the average guy (or gal) just never sat through Hal's workshop. And I don't just mean seeing it in action, but taking advantage of all the more subtle uses including use of the clipping display, white balance, selective curves, the appropriate blending modes and combining with the automatically available mask and on and on. A little overload for some folks but this isn't supposed to be the introductory class ... that was last weekend!
So, I drove up to Los Osos yesterday and today, about 75 miles each way and arrived to excellent coffee and super donuts ... I'm partial to those glazed cake donuts and cinnamon rolls, sigh. The group this week was also much bigger with a wider range of experience and focus. Unfortunately no other concert shooters but mostly landscape and bird shooters, plus Greg who wants to do his own product shooting for his furniture business ... a really nice group augmented by Miss Leah in her "Little Black Dress" who is auditing as a member of The Institute staff.
So, as with each of the previous classes I have taken with The Institute I am overjoyed and feel that I got a lot more than my money's worth and more than I expected ... and I have pretty high expectations of this place. Hal ended the day after I left but the last thing he did while I was there was to run us through one of the new powerful tools in CS3 the Photomerge ... mind numbing but a feature I wouldn't have thought to investigate. The great thing about Hal is he gets his hands dirty ... really dirty actually ... and has personal experience and lots of opinions (but not those ugly religious level ones) that he will debate.
But here's the really impressive thing about Hal from this weekend ... he made a statement based on what he had been taught about a feature that didn't jibe with my experience, so I asked about it ... data saved in jpeg files. Well, we hit a break and Hal went out and tested it and when it turned out to be as I had suggested, he immediately corrected himself. It is very impressive to work with instructors who don't let ego constrict their openness to student knowledge.
Again, my disclaimer from last week: while I am very pleased with my experiences at The Institute and am sharing that with you, I am not in any way associated with them other than as a full paying student and I receive no consideration (other than being the target of extra abuse) for telling you about them. I strongly urge you to consider them if you are in the market for any digital photography education ... sign up for their newsletter as they are adding new classes and other opportunities as they move forward ... I hear they are partnering with some well known field photographers for photo-safaris to amazing locations!
And finally, if you are a NAPP or NANPA member they give a steep discount!
Be Safe!
Dwight
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Thursday, September 18, 2008
NAPP: A Tip from Hal at Lepp Institute
In my last post I meant to mention that Hal had suggested that joining NAPP (National Association of Photoshop Professionals) was a good idea. I have always ignored it as I'm not a Photoshop Professional and said so to Hal. Well, much to my surprise, you don't have to be a full time Photoshop professional to join. Just slap down your money ... $99/year for one year with deals on multiple years! You can also sign up for Layers magazine for $19/year which Hal calls the best photoshop magazine around. But, the kicker is, you get a 15% discount on Lepp Institute classes if you are a NAPP member ... so you actually turn a profit on almost any one-week class at Lepp. Personally I plan to buy a new lens with the money I save in 2009 by having joined NAPP!
Monday, September 15, 2008
Photoshop 1 at Lepp Institute
Once again I spent an amazing weekend at Lepp Institute of Digital Imaging in Los Osos, California. Many of my peers are aware that I am not currently a Photoshop user. While I do use Photo Mechanic to cull, rename and inject IPTC data into my images and LightRoom to do RAW conversion and catalog, I am a fan and user of Ulead's PhotoImpact product. But this must change as I really need to be "Industry Standard" and that is Photoshop. I've known this for a long time and have had installed versions of Adobe Creative Studio since their first version. I just haven't used it, sigh.
So, in my quest forward, I have read several Photoshop CS3 books. I really like Martin Evening's book. I didn't care for Scott Kelby's book. I am currently reading Blatner, Chavez and Fraser and like it so far. And I really like the ever prolific Tim Grey's "Photoshop CS3 Workflow" book. But I was very surprised to discover that Hal Schmitt's Photoshop 1 course really smacks down the books! :-) Really, no kidding. From making great sense about the organization of menus and panels and their flow in your workflow, navigating about the images, how to approach each tool and where to look for options, to the ever popular 'learn those damn keyboard shortcuts' drumbeat [although I must take off one point for Hal's failure to include the shortcuts in his handout!] Hal has good image material on which to demonstrate and practice what is taught. The whole weekend had a super flow and Hal used the inevitable student errors in navigation and option selection to bring home his experiences on these same paths and reinforce his teachings.
A word about Hal: besides photographer/Photoshopper, he is a winemaker. Oh, wait, while that's true it is not where I want to go. Hal is an Instructor. He knows how to instruct people. I am sure he would be great teaching enology. He spent quite a while instructing aircraft fighting for the Navy at Top Gun and while his vast experience in this area goes almost unmentioned (although there are several pertinent photographs that keep popping up), it is clear why the brass would have selected him for such a job ... he really is a "Natural" at instructing. In my 30 plus years as a computer person I have taken many classes. And I have given many seminars, lectures and presentations to both handfuls and auditoriums of people on fairly esoteric computer topics ... my specialty was Operating System modifications in machine language for one of IBM's two mainframe Operating Systems, VM. I understand about teaching arcane and unintuitive topics. So does Hal. Plus he is much more personable than I am. :-)
So, I finished Photoshop 1, a weekend course, this past weekend. I will take Hal's Photoshop 2 next weekend. I won't bore you with how he divides topics or what specific tools/techniques are in each segment. I will mention that I am signed up for Hal's LightRoom 2.0 weekend next month even though I will have to miss a significant portion of it to go shoot at the Santa Barbara County Harvest Festival at Rancho Sisquoc for my both of my corporate clients ... but Hal, the winemaker, will understand. And so you know that it's not just Hal that I like at Lepp, I'm also signed up for Andy Katz's winery and vineyard photography workshop the first weekend in November and Kevin Ames photographing women week long seminar also in November. Lepp really has something for everyone! I am already reviewing their 2009 courses and have found two for which I am budgeting ... but that's another story!
I need to include a couple of other things. First, my wife and I have a truck camper and she likes to come up to Los Osos, well actually Morro Bay, with my daughter and camp out while I go to Lepp. There are numerous RV parks, public and private in the area that make attending classes into a vacation with extensive photo-ops. Second, I am not affiliated with Lepp Institute of Digital Imaging, it's employees or owners or sponsors in any way and am not compensated for sharing my thoughts about them. I have just found that every experience with Hal and Victoria (his much more of an artist wife) has been much more rewarding than I expected and plunged me forward into areas that I have resisted. This is a place you need to check out if you want to be one of those "Advanced Amateurs" who all seem to have the best of all possible worlds in photography. In fact, I think there are still slots open in all the courses for which I am signed up ... although there are some 2008 courses that are full. So, check out the courses as well as this lovely little coastal town.
Be safe!
Dwight
So, in my quest forward, I have read several Photoshop CS3 books. I really like Martin Evening's book. I didn't care for Scott Kelby's book. I am currently reading Blatner, Chavez and Fraser and like it so far. And I really like the ever prolific Tim Grey's "Photoshop CS3 Workflow" book. But I was very surprised to discover that Hal Schmitt's Photoshop 1 course really smacks down the books! :-) Really, no kidding. From making great sense about the organization of menus and panels and their flow in your workflow, navigating about the images, how to approach each tool and where to look for options, to the ever popular 'learn those damn keyboard shortcuts' drumbeat [although I must take off one point for Hal's failure to include the shortcuts in his handout!] Hal has good image material on which to demonstrate and practice what is taught. The whole weekend had a super flow and Hal used the inevitable student errors in navigation and option selection to bring home his experiences on these same paths and reinforce his teachings.
A word about Hal: besides photographer/Photoshopper, he is a winemaker. Oh, wait, while that's true it is not where I want to go. Hal is an Instructor. He knows how to instruct people. I am sure he would be great teaching enology. He spent quite a while instructing aircraft fighting for the Navy at Top Gun and while his vast experience in this area goes almost unmentioned (although there are several pertinent photographs that keep popping up), it is clear why the brass would have selected him for such a job ... he really is a "Natural" at instructing. In my 30 plus years as a computer person I have taken many classes. And I have given many seminars, lectures and presentations to both handfuls and auditoriums of people on fairly esoteric computer topics ... my specialty was Operating System modifications in machine language for one of IBM's two mainframe Operating Systems, VM. I understand about teaching arcane and unintuitive topics. So does Hal. Plus he is much more personable than I am. :-)
So, I finished Photoshop 1, a weekend course, this past weekend. I will take Hal's Photoshop 2 next weekend. I won't bore you with how he divides topics or what specific tools/techniques are in each segment. I will mention that I am signed up for Hal's LightRoom 2.0 weekend next month even though I will have to miss a significant portion of it to go shoot at the Santa Barbara County Harvest Festival at Rancho Sisquoc for my both of my corporate clients ... but Hal, the winemaker, will understand. And so you know that it's not just Hal that I like at Lepp, I'm also signed up for Andy Katz's winery and vineyard photography workshop the first weekend in November and Kevin Ames photographing women week long seminar also in November. Lepp really has something for everyone! I am already reviewing their 2009 courses and have found two for which I am budgeting ... but that's another story!
I need to include a couple of other things. First, my wife and I have a truck camper and she likes to come up to Los Osos, well actually Morro Bay, with my daughter and camp out while I go to Lepp. There are numerous RV parks, public and private in the area that make attending classes into a vacation with extensive photo-ops. Second, I am not affiliated with Lepp Institute of Digital Imaging, it's employees or owners or sponsors in any way and am not compensated for sharing my thoughts about them. I have just found that every experience with Hal and Victoria (his much more of an artist wife) has been much more rewarding than I expected and plunged me forward into areas that I have resisted. This is a place you need to check out if you want to be one of those "Advanced Amateurs" who all seem to have the best of all possible worlds in photography. In fact, I think there are still slots open in all the courses for which I am signed up ... although there are some 2008 courses that are full. So, check out the courses as well as this lovely little coastal town.
Be safe!
Dwight
Wednesday, September 03, 2008
Equipment Review: 1j - Canon TC-80N3
I'm running late as usual. But I grabbed a minute to mention Canon's TC-80N3, which is a very flexible and handy "cable release". It can do multiple exposures with timing, self-timer, long exposures, plain old "cable release" duty so you don't touch the camera for very sensitive exposures where you need to reduce jiggle, etc. Amazon currently has it for about $139. 
I use mine when doing table-top tripod long exposures of band equipment, normally with my Canon 5D and 15mm fisheye.
And, if the provided cord length isn't enough for you, there is a 33' extension cord, ET-1000N3, for about $80 at B&H, that let's you get way back far from the camera, either to be in the picture or to be away from the camera so as not to scare wildlife!
If this is too pricey for you, Canon also has the RS-80N3, which is just a simple cable release which Amazon has for about $48. You really need one of these in your camera bag if you use Canon EOS bodies with the N3 adapter.
I use mine when doing table-top tripod long exposures of band equipment, normally with my Canon 5D and 15mm fisheye.And, if the provided cord length isn't enough for you, there is a 33' extension cord, ET-1000N3, for about $80 at B&H, that let's you get way back far from the camera, either to be in the picture or to be away from the camera so as not to scare wildlife!
If this is too pricey for you, Canon also has the RS-80N3, which is just a simple cable release which Amazon has for about $48. You really need one of these in your camera bag if you use Canon EOS bodies with the N3 adapter.
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