News, news and more news!

There's a lot of stuff going on in the FACzen photography world. I'm making good progress in certain areas, still spinning the wheels in others but we'll get there! In the meantime, here's the news of the day!

New PHOTOGRAPHY.TO website launched

Maybe that's not entirely accurate. Let's just say, "updated". Most of the links to the active stuff have been changed or updated, and I've added new pages for new projects. Check it out!

Maintaining a website is an ongoing task. It never ends, there's always something to fix, to add, to change. I'm no expert (I don't think I'd even call myself an "intermediate") so I probably do things the hard way, but my goal is to make it easy to navigate and attractive to my web visitors.

■ The greeting page has been changed to make it easier to navigate. If you know what you're looking for, there are big buttons to guide you. Or you can browse more easily.

■ The "Workshops" button will now take you to a list of different workshops. You can access the calendar from there, and you can sign up online for any session we have scheduled (and some we don't!).

■ There's now a direct link to my Smugmug gallery, where you can browse through all of my art prints and choose which one(s) you'd like to see gracing your walls. New images are also in a featured gallery. Although I haven't enabled a pure e-commerce site, you can easily get in touch to order or discuss anything you're interested in.

■ I need to work on the eBooks section. My goal is to make most of these publications free and available to subscribers to my Newsletter. And of course, there are new eBooks in the works.

■ Speaking of the Newsletter, I'm working on revising the format so that it becomes a simple weekly HTML email with highlights from this blog and other news, plus special offers for my loyal readers. My goal is to add a "0" to the number of subscribers before the end of the year. If I do get there, I'm actually going to have to start paying MailChimp for their services instead of using their free account!

■ Tips. Let's make "Tips" the heading for the next announcement, shall we? 

By the way, if you think the buttons up there are neat, here's the link to the tutorial I posted last year on how to make them in Photoshop in case you missed it. After you set it up, it takes 2 minutes to make a new button!

In fact, here's a timesaver: here's the actual PSD file I created to make my buttons. Feel free to download it and to share it, but if you do, I'd ask you to subscribe to my newsletter and ask anyone you passed it on to, to do the same. Fair?

I'm about to become a published columnist!

I've been published before, but the local newspaper has agreed to publish my "Behind the Shutter" photography tips articles as a bi-weekly column! The first one will appear in Haliburton County Living on June 27th (I hope I'm not jumping the gun with this announcement, but I'm excited and wanted to tell everyone about it!). You can access a virtual copy of this publication here.

A copy of this publication is distributed to every household in the Highlands, so it's the widest circulation paper up here! If you live in the Highlands and you're reading this, watch your mailbox!

Along with each article, I'm creating a "Tips" web page. It will contain additional information, example pictures, eventually a comments dialogue (as soon as I figure out how!) and of course links back to my other projects and programs.

You can access the Tips pages from the main photography.to website. I could put the link here, but in fairness, I won't since you might be reading this before the initial publication date. Eventually, I plan to create ePub versions of these columns and combine them into an ongoing series of eBooks.

If that isn't enough news...

Ten of my images are on display (and for sale) at the Rail's End Gallery & Arts Centre in Haliburton. A couple more are going in next week, requested by the curator. The only bad part is that my framing isn't good enough, so they're in a rack in clear bags.

The Rail's End is responsible for the annual arts festival in Haliburton. Unfortunately, it was too late to participate this year (fourth weekend in July, FWIW), but my application will go in for next summer. This is a juried show but I'm hopeful I can get in. I have to work on my framing.

Spreading the Word

You will find advertisements for my workshops every week in the Haliburton Highlander. In addition, a bare-bones schedule of DSLR workshop dates is in the Haliburton County Summer/Fall Guide 2013 (I had to give them the dates long before I got things finalized!).

Courses & Workshops

I've finished the curricula (or curriculums. Or agendas. Whatever word you prefer) for three new courses. My program now contains the following, in addition to custom courses for more advanced photographers.

■ Basic Skills, a 3-hour workshop for new shooters regardless of what kind of digital camera they have,

■ Introduction to Photoediting, which is another 3-hour session designed to introduce people to programs like Lightroom™ or Photoshop™,

■ DSLR workshop, for new and not-so-new owners of DSLR cameras. This venerable 2-day session will take the newer photographer to the next level, and

■ Mini-tours where I take participants to exceptional venues, such as dawn, dusk and whitewater sites and give them tips on how to achieve better images in the field.

What's next? Full weekend or even longer field trips. High on my priority list of things to develop and I'm really hopeful of having something for the peak Fall Colours season up here this autumn.

So I've been a busy boy. There's more stuff in the works, but I can't announce it yet, so watch for it!

Creative Cloud

Not for me at this time. As usual, Adobé has come up with some neat new stuff, but not enough to be a game changer for me. Ditto Lightroom 5. I think I'm going to pass and wait and see.

A big issue for me is the concept of ongoing rental. If they would come up with some sort of acceptable solution that would allow you to keep the last version you paid for in perpetuity if you decided to stop, then maybe. But I can't see being hung out to dry if you can't afford to keep paying them sometime in the future.

It's been out for two days and I heard it's already been cracked. I'd rather use CS6 that I bought and paid for than pirate CC.

The bad part is, all the technical blogs I read talk about nothing other than the new fancy features in CC or LR5. No great new tutorials on CS6 or LR4. That said, Glyn Dewis just did one on the liquify filter (here's the link to the YouTube) and although it was about CC, most of it works in CS6.

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*update: it looks as though Adobé may have been listening. The rumour mill says that they've covered most of what I mentioned. I read in a prodesigntools.com article:

• The new CC apps will install and work alongside any older versions of Adobe software like CS6, CS5, etc., and will be able to backsave or export to CS6 file formats.
• In fact, Creative Cloud members will have access to download and install prior versions from an archive of selected desktop releases starting from CS6 onwards.

In an accompanying article, they also said,

“In the event that Adobe decides to discontinue any of the products in Creative Cloud, we will make the most recent version of the product available for download free of charge to active Creative Cloud members for a period of no less than 90 days. Such downloads will not require a subscription and will be licensed on an as-is, no warranty basis …”

What's missing is "what happens if *I* decide to discontinue my membership in CC...". Can I buy a download of the as-is version of the software. If they do that, I'm in.

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Speaking of Software...

I don't post a lot of these, but this is a goodie. Here's a deal for you. I use different plugins in Photoshop, but the one I go to when I want to tweak an image or spice it up is Topaz. Mostly I use Topaz Adjust, but lately I've started using Clarity as well and I love them both.

Topaz Labs has just announced a huge promotion, starting June 24 through July 7. The complete Topaz Bundle is being reduced from $299 to $199 — that's $100 off — and worth every penny.

Click this image to go to the Topaz site. To get the discount, your promo code is 'july4' (without the quote marks). Disclosure: they pay me a little affiliate fee if you click the link and end up buying the software.

Topaz Clarity is not in the bundle, it's $49.95 and I'd be buying it at that price if I didn't already have it. In the bundle, you get Topaz Adjust, DeNoise, B&W Effects, ReMask, Lens Effects, Detail, Simplify, Clean, InFocus, DeJPEG and Fusion Express. That last one lets you access all of the Topaz Plug-ins directly in Aperture, Lightroom and iPhoto. There's a 30 day free trial, so go for it. Give it a shot and see if you like it as much as I do.

Time for some pictures

You know I don't do a blog post without current pictures. So here goes.

My grandson, Ryan Davenport. His graduation was Thursday night. You know I don't go anywhere without a camera... 

When I originally wrote this, I said...

Believe it or not, this was the very first frame, the very first picture of the night. I took a shot just to test the lighting. 100% natural light from a window. Minimal Photoshop, just to retouch the skin a little. 120mm focal length at f/8, ISO 1000, exposure compensation -2ev. This is precisely the shot I had in mind, I planned it while I was driving there. It's very satisfying when the first shutter release worked.

All true, except I now changed the picture. In the first one he was serious, here I got a good natural smile. This is actually 6 frames later, same values except 82mm instead of 120mm, so it's cropped a bit.

The reason I'm posting this is, well, look at the fantastic grandson I have! OK, well actually, I wanted to point out that I used Topaz Clarity on this image, after the basic retouching. It made some very subtle but changes to the image. Not being a portrait photographer, I'm not sure what's good and bad, but I really like this image.

I was going to add some kayakers, but I figured you've suffered enough. Maybe next time. Instead, I'll show you last night's dinner

Both are HDR's, but processed differently. The infrared element and rotisserie on my new BBQ do a fine job on chicken! I threw the asparagus and peppers right on the grill after the chicken was done, a little olive oil and teriyaki seasoning, 3 or 4 minutes, that's it. Great dinner!

So I guess that'll do for today! A lot going on.

— 30 —

July is supposed to be a quiet time!

It's been hectic. There's been a lot going on, and some things have kept me from picking up the camera in the last little while. The disturbing part is that for a while, I didn't feel much like shooting pictures. It's a little odd, because I have a couple of new toys, one of which I haven't succeeded in using yet.

Part of the reason might have been that it's just been too hot. I was driving back up North last Saturday and decided to stop at one point to take some shots of a field with harvested hay rolls. I had a picture in my mind but didn't really capture it, although I "worked the scene" as Scott Kelby suggested in his recent seminar. What caught my eye as I drove by was this:

Too bad there weren't any clouds in the sky. And that the temperature was in the mid 30's (over 90°F). This was about an hour away from my house and I took solace in the thought that 5 minutes after getting home, I'd be in the lake!

Anyway, I stayed there about half an hour, trying various things. I chased a couple of butterflies around but they never landed so I couldn't get a shot. The best shot of the session was this one:

Originally I was going to post this exactly as it came out of the camera so that I could say, "See! Exactly as it came out of the camera!". However I never leave well enough alone. I sharpened the left and warmed it up a bit, and I blurred the right just a touch in Lightroom. But otherwise, it's "Exactly as it came out of the camera"!

I ran a basic DSLR workshop on Sunday. The students were excellent: they had great vision and a feel for composition, so it was a pleasure to work with them. One got a very cool picture of a grasshopper on my woodpile; I've spent 2 days looking for the little guy so I could emulate it, without success! I did take out the bellows to show them how it worked, and found these teeny tiny bugs on a daisy:

These guys are about half the size of a grain of rice, to put it in perspective. I missed the focus by a touch, though.

I got a candid shot of one of the students at lunchtime. Bear in mind, this is outside, in sunlight, at mid-day. Just the time when you're not supposed to be able to take good pictures. I was trying to get a backlit shot for the "lighting" lesson and this worked out pretty well.

Here's a 100% crop of the original image. I was surprised how much texture appeared, given that the light was coming from behind her. I did some enhancement in Lightroom:

Next I took it into Photoshop and did some more work on it. Primarily I focused on the eyes, but then I added a "Glamor Glow (Nik Color Efex Pro). Then I brought it back into Lightroom, took out some more skin texture and lowered the red saturation a bit.

When I posted the un-cropped image on the NAPP site, I was accused of over-smoothing the skin, a la "Fotoshop by Adobé". So I reworked it a bit, same concept but less effect. Here's what I ended up with:

I'm pretty satisfied with this shot. Maybe I should shoot something other than rocks and trees sometimes!

I shot some more macro stuff with the bellows. The jury is still out on the focusing rail that I got (I don't like that the control that lock the positioning and the screw control to move it are both on the same side. I don't have enough hands!). Anyway, this is a 4-shot focus stack on a flower bud that's about the size of a grain of rice (when I think of a better comparison, I'll let you know!).

And yesterday I picked some raspberries, so I shot this single frame. This one is a virtually untouched original:

Until next time! TTFN.

— 30 —

A Magical Drive

This evening's experience was magical. I hope I can share it through this narrative because I wasn't able to capture an image of what I saw other than in my mind and memory.

I chose to drive home from Toronto after dark this evening. For those who don't know, I live about 2 hours Northeast in the Township of Minden Hills, part of the Haliburton Highlands, or as some call it, "God's Country". To get here, you go North on Highway 48, which curls East through Bolsover and Kirkfield, then ends at Highway 35 in Coboconk. I'm 46 klicks North of that, on 35. Driving South this morning, we had some relief from the rain of the past few days, with broken clouds, the sun peeking through here and there, which gradually turned grey as the day progressed but cleared up later on. It was blustery and windy all day but relatively clear when I left Toronto around 8pm.

As I drove North, I could see the occasional flash of lightning on the horizon to the Northeast. It lit up a small segment of sky but I could still see stars above me. I figured I was driving into a storm and hoped it would pass to the East before I got home. I stopped for a coffee at the Tim Horton's in Beaverton, about halfway home, then continued up towards the Bolsover cutoff which, as I said, turned me due East. I made that turn somewhere around 9:15pm. The lightning was continuing off to my left, North of me. As I made the turn, I looked ahead and saw...

The moon. It had just risen above the horizon. It was 'waning gibbous', which means it's a couple of days past full, but it was that dusky orange colour that one relates to the 'harvest moon', its colour reminiscent of the brilliant fall foliage. It was about 3 times the size of the normal moon (it looks so much bigger when it's right on the horizon) and it was directly in line with the road, so it looked like I was driving right to it.

I thought about pulling over and taking a picture. I thought that if I turned my high beams on, I could illuminate the road ahead around the same brightness but there was no way I could do it. I was captivated by the scene evolving in front of me.

I drive a Subaru Forester. It's a stable, safe cocoon in the windiest, snowiest, blusteriest days. I was about the only car on the road and it was like floating in some sort of time and space machine along a thread of road, flying toward the moon. Not just for a moment, either: for a solid 10 minutes or so! And to top it off, every now and then, the world was split by a lightning bolt to my left, although I could still see the moon and stars. After a while, the moon rose a bit higher and wisps of cloud appeared across its face and eventually it was hidden from view. By now, the storm was further East and the moon was replaced by brilliant flashes of lightning that illuminated the whole sky and detailed the clouds above and ahead of me. Not just a little arc of sky, the whole world in front of me!

At Coboconk, when I turned North, the rain started to come down. Soon I had the wipers on high, and my high beams lit the rain which appeared to be coming down in sheets of big fat water globules. If it had been colder, I would have thought I was in a snow shower but no, it was just heavy, huge raindrops. As I turned into my driveway half an hour later, the rain stopped as if someone had flipped a switch and when I looked up, stars!

You had to be there. There aren't words to describe the experience. I wish someone had been with me to share it with. Maybe with this writeup, I managed to convey the magic of the drive. As I said, the only images I have are buried in my mind.

I want to share some new pictures with you.

Last week, my friend Ron called me and asked me to help out with a shoot he was doing, some portraits. I had this picture at the time of my last post, but couldn't share it until I received permission, which I now have. I brought strobes and stands and reflectors and backdrops... Ron brought his D3S! He did the serious shooting, I handheld my D300 to test the lighting setup but captured this image while Ron was doing something else! I asked the young lad to look at his mom and it worked! Here:

By the way, if you want teeth like hers, contact Dr. Ron Goodlin. That's what this shoot was about... Ron's a phenomenal photographer and an even better dentist! Lighting was with 3 studio strobes — two with umbrellas and one (the hairlight) open with barn doors. The large muslin backdrop should have been a bit more out of focus but this is just as it came out of the camera, no Photoshop at all! OK, I'm lying. Well, sort of — I used some negative clarity control in Lightroom, with an adjustment brush limiting its scope to the ladies' faces.

The studio stuff is for sale for a very reasonable price. I just don't use them enough and would rather have a new lens! Contact me.

Last weekend, I did some more fall colours. Here are a few images.

Everyone else does a "red leaf on a wet rock" (I got a laugh watching Judith do it at Buttermilk Falls: exactly like Shannon and Linda did a couple of years ago!). Just to be different, I did a "red and yellow leaf on a log". I didn't put it there, I swear! It was there! It was!

This weekend, I was with Rosa, my artist friend. She hates my HDR's. She says I use my Left Brain and take all the emotion and feeling out of my shots with all that hi-tech post processing pixel manipulation. So here are a couple of non-manipulated images that show what it really looked like out there. It was a dreary damp day and I think these images convey that feeling.

Is she right? I think she might be. I'm working on formulating my goals for the Gales of November shoot on Lake Superior (Wow! Only 2 weeks away!) and this might form part of them. Stay tuned!