Springtime and other stuff

I'm still not feeling very creative. But I have been out a few times to shoot some pictures, and I thought I'd share some of them with you.

If you're afraid of spiders, close your eyes:

Someone already said that I had a lot more nerve than they did. I can only respond by saying, "that's not MY hands!" They belong to Irina Popova who has a lot more nerve than me! Shot with my handheld strobe as described
in the text below.

The Richmond Hill Camera Club hired a company to come in and set up a bunch of "critters" for us to photograph. It was a well-choreographed event where some eight stations were set up and about 40 photographers had a chance to shoot what they wanted. The best part about it was that they set up strobe lighting with soft boxes for each setup and provided a remote trigger so that the photographer at the setup could trigger the flashes.

I used their setups some: but I also tried different lighting and my favourite was to use my SB-600 flash off-camera and control it in commander mode -- something the Nikon D300 does well. I usually held the flash in my left hand, low and up in front of the camera, and I usually had the Gary Fong diffuser on the flash to soften the light. What I like about ihis arrangement is that it does cast a soft shadow, to give a 3D feel to the subject and it brings out the texture.

THere are a bunch more "critter" shots from that evening in my April 2009 gallery here.

Aside from that, I have been out shooting a bit more stuff. I found a waterfall -- actually a white water park -- near my house in Minden one day, and took a few shots there and of the "bazilliums" (there are bazillions of trilliums in the woods in May) nearby. There are kayakers who frequent this water on weekends, I'm going to try to get some of them on digital film this weekend. Here are a few shots from that day:









Again there are a few more of these images on my SmugMug gallery here.

OK, a couple more images to share. I was asked to shoot the new Kimco scooters at Humber College and while doing so, Marshall (one of our Chief Instructors) came by and we did a few action shots. The marvellous selection tools in Photoshop CS4 made a closecut selection quick, accurate and easy so I superimposed Marshall and the bike on another picture.

As mentioned in the text, Marshall was riding in the parking lot at Humber College. I superimposed the closecut picture over a shot of one of the nicest riding roads in Ontario, Muskoka Road 13 out of Bala.

And finally (hopefully you are disappointed, not looking forward to seeing the end of this posting...) I was on my way to an early morning meeting when I was greeted by a very misty, foggy morning. But the sun was up, and visible in the fog. It was interesting that the thickness of the mist made looking directly at the sun very pleasant and I drove for probably 15 minutes looking for a place to pull over and get a good image. I was resigned to the fact that I may not find a spot -- by now I was on the 404 highway; then out of the gloom the Slovak Cathedral of the Transfiguration in Markham appeared. I pulled over and took a few images. When I opened them in Photoshop, I couldn't decide how I wanted to render them. I tried a bunch of different effects, and I kind of liked these.

I created a threshold layer and blended it into the original image to produce this textured effect. The saturation on the grass was increased. The image below was done similarly, but with higher opacity. I left it in colour instead of converting to black-and-white because I wanted the subtle shading in the sun to appear.

I'd like to thank all the little people...

Recognition: ain't it great?

I like a lot of my images. But it's SO much better when other people acknowledge that they like them too. So, without further ado (but a virtual drumroll...)

My Mountain Man digital painting took FIRST PLACE in the ADVANCED CATEGORY at the Richmond Hill Camera Club Print Competition this week.

It wasn't the printing quality: All the prints in the competition were put on paper by Costco, all to fit within the same size mat.Three professional judges loved my picture.

Ah, the glory. The adulation. The women falling all over themselves just to be near me... OK, but I'm still proud of the work I did on that picture and I do want to thank Hilarie for teaching me how.

PS. Scroll down to the March 24th blog, or search for "Mountain Man" to find it.

On to bigger and better things. I'd like to show you an image I worked on this week in Photoshop, tell you a little about how I did it, and introduce you to a tool you likely haven't used. I'm also looking for comments: the jury's out as to whether I like this image treatment or not. Do you? Please post a comment. Anyway here goes:

FacZen Photography Tips The pen tool in Photoshop There's a tool in Photoshop that lets you make the cleanest, most precise selections possible of smooth geometrically shaped objects. It's the PEN tool, and it works with Bézier Curves. Greek, right? Well not really. Pierre Bézier was a French engineer who used them to design automobile bodies.They were actually first developed in 1959 by a fellow by the name of Paul de Casteljau (Wikipedia, where you can learn more than you ever wanted to know) I'm not going to try to give a lesson in higher mathematics. What you have to do is try it and figure out how it works for you. Bear in mind that the [alt] and the [ctrl] keys ([cmd] and [option] on a MAC) will modify how the tool works. What you do is to select the pen tool, then draw a path around the object you want to select. You do this by adding points as you go around the object. Put one wherever the curve changes direction or changes shape. Now go back and with the alt key, you can move the points to exactly where you want them. Now click a point with the "convert point tool" which is nested under the pen. It changes it from a linear point to a Bezier one. You will be able to drag two handles away from the point -- and the distance and the direction that you drag them changes the shape of the line joining the points. Try it. It's easier to do than to say. The path is very precise. And because it's a vector, it's perfectly smooth. Blow your picture up and get to work until the line matches the area you wanted to select! Here: (the lines are faint. Click on the image to blow it up to see it better). The path doesn't exactly match the curve. But watch what happens when you drag the handles: Voila! Perfect selections. Here's another view of a different area of the curve: OK. When you're done, you've created a PATH, not a selection. Now you have to save it as a selection and I'll leave it to you to figure out how to do that (hint: there's a "Paths" palette, just like the "History" palette or the "Layers" palette"). Now you can do whatever you want with that selection -- put it on its own layer, fill it, stroke it, warp it, whatever you want! So here's an image I created using this technique. What I was trying to do was to enhance this image of a steering wheel and dashboard. I wanted to add some 'artsy' effects to the dashboard and frame it with the texture and curve of the wheel. So I used the pen tool to select the dashboard and put it on its own layer. I converted the original to a duotone and added some lighting effects to bring up the texture. Then I went to the dashboard layer, added some strokes and stuff in "Filters", played with the blending modes and gave it a green glow. So take a minute to comment: do you like the image? Hate it? Want to pay $1000 for a signed original? The bottom line: There's a selection tool in Photoshop that allows you to make VERY precise selections. It's a little tough to use at first, but it's worth it!

The Creative Juices are starting to flow

More input from the world of, "gee it's boring out there". I'm not feeling really creative with the camera in hand, but when I sit down to Photoshop, it gets better.

There's no colour out there. Everything is muted greens and browns, and, especially after the early April snowfall we had, white. Blah. So I did two things: found colour where it was and punched it up in Photoshop, or got rid of it to create monochrome images. I also tried to focus on shapes and motion. Anyway, here's a couple of my efforts:

This image was really of two dull, lifeless, faded canoes. I selectively increased the saturation, painted a reflection of the sky in the open water, and cropped it tightly to emphasize the curves.

Today, as I was driving back to Toronto, I noticed a stark, lonely laneway in a pine forest by the roadside. I made a U-turn, parked and tried unsuccessfully to capture the essence of the scene. Sometimes I see something in a scene but can't figure out how to capture it in camera. I took this shot to record what was there:

Then I shot a few exposures with camera motion (I seem to be stuck temporarily in that genre!). When I got it home and started playing with it in Photoshop, I cropped it and decided that even that effect was boring, so I looked for some filters to add an interesting effect and came up with this result using the reticulation filter.


There's still art out there at this blah time of the year!

Model Releases

I posted to the blog this morning, and forgot to tell you one thing.

Remember the painting I posted a couple of posts ago? The one of the "Mountain Man"? Scroll down to see it. There's a story to be told.

Iris and I were at the High Falls Gorge centre in upstate New York last summer. I took a bunch of nature images during the day and when we were done, and wandered back into the building itself around lunch time, I saw this amazing man there. Turns out he works there: his name is George, and his job involved working outdoors, maintaining the natural and beautiful surroundings (sounds like an oxymoron: how can you maintain it and still call it "natural"? I'll leave that topic for another day).

Anyway, I was taken with George's appearance, especially the beard. I asked him if it was all right if I took his picture, and he agreed, and posed for me in the light from a nearby window. I liked the composition so much, I forgot to take more than one exposure!

So I did some photoshop work on the shot, and then, during and after Hilarie's course, I decided to try to paint it. I loved it. I got to thinking that George might like it too, so I tracked down the High Falls Gorge website and sent them an email, asking if they could put me in touch with him. I admit that I had an ulterior motive as well; I didn't have a model release from him, and thought I'd try to get one.

To make a long story short (how come whenever anyone says that, it's too late?), they wrote me back: George has passed away. He died of cancer a few months ago. They loved him and are dedicating a cabin to his memory, and I'm sending a print of the painted image for their dedication.

So: model releases. If I use this painting for my own purposes, in fact even if I sell the image as art, or if it appears in a dedication to George somewhere, I wouldn't have a problem with copyright or issues around using his image. But what if a beer company saw the picture and decided that it would make a fantastic background to a print ad, or if it was used by a Hollywood producer in a promo for a new film called "Mountain Man"? Or if I submitted it to a stock photo agency? And what if George (before I knew he was dead) or one of his relatives saw the picture and decided to sue me? You never know what might happen with one of your images.

Get the subject, or if it's a kid, his/her guardian, to sign a model release. You can Google the phrase and find some suitable wording, or drop me a note for a copy of the form I use. This is like insurance, folks. You should do it...

Spiffing up boring scenics

I was debating which of two photographic techniques I wanted to talk about today. I haven't been doing much photography over the past few weeks because I've been busy with work and other stuff, but there were a couple of learning experiences I wanted to share.

I decided that a discussion on spiffing up some forest shots in the boring and ugly early spring would be good to do first since it might inspire a few of you to go out and try it, instead of sitting at home bemoaning the fact that the world isn't pretty out there right now.

The other topic worth writing about is a foray into HDR, because the results can be fascinating and the technique is not entirely intuitive. I teased you a couple of weeks ago with an unfinished HDR image, I can document how I did it, but I'll save it for next time.

Before I get into it, I had occasion to shoot the Group photo for the Humber Motorcycle Instructor cadre a couple of weekends ago. I was looking forward to it because I have the new D300 and last year's shot, with the D70 was excellent. I looked forward to surpassing it. I was a little disappointed. Last year's was better. Somehow I managed the perfect exposure last year (I don't mean in terms of f/stop, etc -- I mean the ease of manipulation of the RAW file, the resulting super sharp image). Odd, because I used the same lens, the same camera location. It just showed me that you don't need 12 megapixels to do a sharp 18" wide print. Anyway, here's this year's shot:

As in previous years, I learned that you have to take several exposures when you're doing a group shot. Invariably, someone will have their eyes closed or a funny expression on their face, so you have to have a backup photo that you can clone a face from, etc.

I put some effort into arranging the people this year, according to height. It worked, but I think I'll do something different next time because the group is too big, the photo too wide. I had to clone in all kinds of vegetation around the sides. I'm thinking about shooting from higher overhead, getting people into a more square grouping.

OK: let's get out in the forest!

FacZen Photography Tips A silk purse from a sow's ear! You know that expression, right? In this case, I had the camera out with me and the whole world was just shades of mud, with a sprinkling of snow. So I tried something different, something that I mentioned before: I tried moving the camera during the exposure. Here are a few images I took over the past few days: Early Spring 2 Early Spring Forest Giant Still Frozen On the Lake So what do these pictures have in common? Lots of obvious things, but there's one point that really stands out in my mind: No Photoshop!* They aren't even cropped! They are exactly what came out of the camera! All of the effects that you see here were created by moving the camera during the exposure. * OK, not quite. You have to know me better than that! All I did was to open them in Camera Raw, tweak the exposures slightly, REDUCE the clarity to make them softer and increased the vibrance, a minor curves adjustment to the dark tones, then opened them in Photoshop, straightened a couple of them up slightly, added a new layer and stamped my signature and date on, applied a bevel/emboss to the signature layer and reduced its opacity, saved them, flattened them, then saved them again as jpegs. Like I said, no Photoshop! So let's get physical. What do you have to do to capture these kinds of images? There are two main things that effect the kind of results you will get (apart from the obvious, making sure the exposure is right, the composition and focusing on the right spot). They are: shutter speed, and how you move the camera. Of course you know I'm going to tell you to experiment. Digital film is cheap and you might be amazed at the different feeling you get with different techniques, but after some playing around, I decided that for me, an exposure around 1/15 second was the best. Slower than that and you get too much blur and it's hard to control; faster and the effect is too harsh if you can see it at all. I also discovered that you have to move the camera parallel to the direction of the trees. In other words, up and down. But look at the last image. I moved the acmera at about a 30 degree angle for this one. Different effect! So I set the camera so that I would get a good exposure at that speed (some were shot at a very low ISO and some with a very small opening like f/22). Then I focused on the the main object in the picture and as I released the shutter, I swung the camera upwards. Although the rules of composition still apply (rule of thirds, interesting foreground/midground/background, etc), they become less critical because the motion, the "painterly effect" adds an interest of its own. So pictures which would be exceedingly boring, in fact downright ugly what with all that mud and muted colour, become interesting. For what it's worth, I had a couple of these printed as 18x12 images and they're out being framed even as we speak!

I'm so ashamed!

Hi, my name is Glenn.

"Hi, Glenn"!

I'm a blog-a-holic. And it's been 34 days since I Blogged. I'm so ashamed.

I could tell you how busy I've been (I've been busy!), how I've been focusing on other things (I've been focusing on other things), how life has thrown me a few curve balls (life has... you know) but in reality, I haven't been motivated for the longest time.

It's winter, coming into spring. You know, that time when the earth renews itself, when animals come out of hibernation, where the days start to get longer and warmer... SO WHEN'S THAT GOING TO START?

There are a few exceptions. This roadside rock formation gave birth
to an Ice sculpture with that blue colour one normally associates with
icebergs.

Truth be told, this is the ugliest time of year. That crisp, white snow is caked with mud; the trees are naked, the earth is brown. the melting ice on the roof is dripping down in the house. Yuk. But OK, we got through it! I went for a walk on a muddy country road without putting on gloves or a hat, I did shoot a few pictures, the creative juices are starting to flow again.

That said, I'm lying. Just a little. I have been doing some stuff over the past several weeks, not the least of which was to attend Hilarie's Pixel Painting Workshop 10 days ago, and, well, I've added another brush to my palette, another tool to my chest. Throughout the course I kept bemoaning the fact that I'm not an artist. Several people challenged me on that but I still think I'm not one. I did manage to create a couple of images that I like, here's one:

Mountain Man. Created by painting on top of an existing image,
using Photoshop and Corel Painter 11

The course was an eye opener. There are other things in life than sharp focus. And as I read somewhere and have said before, photography is all about what you put INTO the picture; painting is about what you leave OUT. So if you have a photo that would be great except for the background, then when you create it as a painting, DON'T INCLUDE THE BACKGROUND!

Anyway, I was out shooting a few pictures today, a different technique so I don't know how they're going to come out. I'll share them in the next Blog. For today, I'll add a couple of images I took a few weeks ago, of people ice fishing on 12 mile Lake.

Portable Ice Hut. It was really chilly out but nice and warm
inside, despite the fact that there was no floor.

It was already starting to thaw. In fact, most of the ice fishing huts had been brought in for the season. These guys were being quite careful how and where they walked.

Not this guy, though. He blithely drove his truck out on the ice, through foot-deep puddles of water. Apparently there was about two feet of ice thickness, even on a warm day like this one.

Allow me to leave you with one more image. I was asked to shoot some photos at Humber College, some detail shots of a new straight truck they had in their training program. While I was at it, I shot a 5-shot burst and created an HDR image. I shouldn't post it before I clean it up completely, but... here it is

Enhancing Photographs

Someone very close to me lost his daughter to cancer a few years ago. He has prepared a manuscript for submission to a publisher and asked me if I could do something with a couple of pictures he had, one for the cover, one for the inside. I was more than happy to help out. I asked him if he minded if I wrote up my workflow in the form of a Photoshop tip on my Blog and he readily agreed, but he asked that his name not be revealed. I replaced his name and removed that of his daughter for this article.

FacZen Photography Tips Some Photoshop techniques The purpose of this article is to walk you through the thought process and the steps I took to produce the requested image. I know that not everything I did was correct, but my intention is to show some of the things you have to think about when you're asked to do something like this, and maybe a little bit about how I achieved the results I was looking for. Before I agreed to go ahead, I need to know if the photos were of sufficient size and quality to work with. I received the photos as email attachments. Both were .jpg's and both were large enough. It looks like they were taken with a point-and-shoot camera of some reasonable quality. On close examination, the focus was off (the wall was in focus but not the girl) and some areas were blown out by overexposure, but it wasn't too bad. This is the original photo I received (reduced in size for this Blog) My first question was, "what do you want to do with this picture?". I was told that he wanted it as a cover picture for the manuscript he was submitting and that he would be printing it in black and white on a standard HP Laserjet printer. He wanted the text to frame the image but I decided to make it part of the finished picture. He told me he wanted the title to be large, the subheading medium and his name to be small. Since he told me he was submitting it to a publisher, I thought it would be wise to produce a sufficiently high quality image to be printed on a press. I knew that 240dpi was generally fine for both a laser printer and a press; and I decided that 5"x7" would be a good final size. I figured he probably wouldn't be printing in colour down the road, so I was going to convert the photo to black-and-white. If he wanted colour later, I'd have to go back and redo it. Using Bridge, I opened the picture in Camera RAW. I wanted to do a few things there before taking it into Photoshop; for instance straightening it up (Bridge has a great tool for aligning an image horizontally) and doing the monochrome conversion. While I was in there, I reduced the exposure and added some recovery for some of the blown out white areas, and did a little preliminary curves work to start bringing the face out. Use the sliders when doing the black and white conversion, especially the red one for the skin tones. All right, into Photoshop (CS4). First step: ctrl-J to duplicate the background layer and ctrl-S to save a PSD file just in case. I use lots of keyboard shortcuts, so ctrl-0 (that's 'zero', not 'o') will blow it up full sized. Normally one shouldn't crop until later, but I knew what I wanted so I went ahead and did it now. I preset the crop tool to 5" x 7" x 240ppi, then I dragged on the image and moved it around and resized it until I saw what I wanted. I wanted her off-centre, looking into the image and I really hated the way she was standing with her shoulders forward and hands hanging, so I cropped the bottom. I also cut space off the top: to my regret, so I had to fiddle with it later as I'll show you. I opened up a curves adjustment layer and blew up the image so I could see the effect on her face. Then I ran the sharpening tool at a very low density (10%, I think) over her jacket, hair and face. Here's what I had at this point. The tile and the brick wall are distracting. I needed to do something about that, and remember, I want to lay some text over this picture. I created a new duplicate layer from the background layer, then applied a Gaussian blur to it. Next came a quick and dirty technique. I activated the sharp layer, then I simply erased around the girl with a soft brush. The Wacom tablet helped, it's a lot easier to be accurate with that than with a mouse. I could have done a fancier selection, but this did the job. Now the background was in soft focus and the girl was sharp. OK, next step. I have to lay a title over the top of the picture but I didn't leave enough space above her head. Oops. Now I could start over or... I could use a new tool in CS4 -- content-aware scaling. What I did was to select everything in the picture from the top of the girl's head downward, then I dragged the top handle down using this sneaky tool. That left more room at the top without affecting the proportions of the girl. Now I simply selected the top portion and using regular scaling, I dragged it down to seamlessly mate with the rest of the picture. One more thing before I show you the next step: I wanted the text of the subtitle and author's name to stand out, so I wanted to put a graduated dark screen at the bottom. I also wanted to hide those arms that were in a funny position. So I created a gradient map adjustment layer, clicked on the mask and laid in a graduated screen. I dropped the opacity until it looked right to me. Blurred background, rescaled, and prepared for the text! The white keyline is to separate it from the black background of this Blog. OK, now the text layers. I chose 36pt Hobo Std and grey type for the headline, and added a drop shadow to the layer. Then I used Palatino italic and regular in smaller sizes for the subheading and author. I went back over the image and fixed a few things: a white artifact at top left, and I used the burn tool on her face to darken it a little. Done. All that was left was to save the .psd file, then flatten the image and save it as a .jpg. Here's the finished product (with some typographic changes to preserve anonymity). This image can be used as requested for printing on a laser printer, and if the manuscript ever gets published, it can serve as a front cover with almost no additional modification. The white keyline is to separate it from the black background of this Blog. Sounds like a lot of work? Maybe, but everything was straightforward. The lesson is to use lots of adjustment layers so that your work is non-destructive and to save frequently as you go along. The whole thing took me about 45 minutes to do. I hope it gave you some ideas for your next project, and some hints about what to look for and how to achieve what you have in mind. I'm obviously not the sharpest PhotoShopper around, so if I can do it, so can you!

We're talking about doing a couple of Photoshop courses in Toronto and maybe up in the Haliburton Highlands (the latter coupled with a photo workshop). Both basic and intermediate level. I'm not the principal instructor, we're talking with a professional trainer, but maybe I can help a bit. If you're interested in participating, in sharpening your skills or learning basic PhotoShop, drop me a line and let's talk!

Winter in Haliburton

OK, I admit it. I'm tired of winter. I'm bored with pictures with snow in them. I'm not motivated to take more of them. Yes, I see scenes that I'd like to shoot, but I really don't feel like going out in the cold to capture them.

Mind you, I did drag myself out yesterday, and I'm glad I did. I had read that there was a "Dog Sled Derby" going on in Haliburton, so I thought I'd mosey on up there to see what there was to see. The weather was actually nice — around 0°C and sunny and there were some interesting images to be had.

Races ranged from a 2-mile course for kids with up to 3 dogs in a team,
to an 8-mile race for grizzled veterans.

The dogs were smaller than you'd imagine from reading Jack London stories,
but they're powerful and wonderfully trained.

After an 8-mile race, this guy wasn't the least bit exhausted.
Of course he wasn't the one pulling the sled!

It was quite an eventful day, with crowds in the hundreds. That evening there was a blues concert featuring Jack de Keyser (which I missed, unfortunately). I overheard a discussion near me between one of the organizers and his friend, talking about the large number of well known musicians who had homes or cottages in the Highlands and who owuld be in attendance. Someone from the Guess Who was mentioned, but I didn't catch the name.

Photographically, I paid attention to what the pundits say: and I opened up one stop because the camera tries to expose for 18% grey instead of white snow, and will underexpose everything... NOT! Thankfully, I was able to compensate in-computer, because this D300 seems to KNOW what you want and exposes properly!

Anyway, there are more photos of the Sled Dog Derby in my Gallery here.

The Pixel Painting course is a month away! If you are attending, you should have your graphics tablet by now and need to be practicing with it until you're comfortable. In a week or so, you should go to the Corel site and get the 30-day trial version of Painter X and install it in your laptop.

If you're NOT attending the course (either because there was no space available or because you didn't know about it), go to http://www.photography.to/ to read about it and leave us your name so we can contact you when the next session is scheduled. It will be soon!

We're working on developing other courses and workshops as well. There's a "Basic Photoshop" course, and an Intermediate followup, and then we're working on an outdoor photography weekend getaway up here in the Highlands for late Spring/Summer. Watch this space!

FacZen Photography Tips A couple of Photoshop quickies! Both of the tips today are Photoshop related. The concept will work in other programs, I think, but the details might vary a little. And both tips involve repetitive actions, that is, things you may want to do more than once. Tip#1: Signing your photographs — putting your signature on a brush. This is incredibly simple. I saw it first in the Adobe Photoshop CS3 for Digital Photographers book by Ben Willner. You can create a custom brush in Photoshop, so that you can simply stamp your signature (or copyright notice, or anything else you might want to put on a bunch of images) onto the images. And the beauty is, you can use any of the blending and colouring methods you want to the signature. Start by getting the signature into the computer. One way is to open a new document in Photoshop and sign using a Wacom graphics tablet or equivalent. Make the document a reasonable size (you can crop later) and set the resolution to 300 ppi so you can use it on images you are going to print. Use a nice smooth brush tool — in the example here, I used a 13px hard brush and black ink on a 1000 px wide document (I forgot my Wacom pen up North, so forgive the roughness — I did this one with a mouse). Flatten the document so you have a nice solid black on white image. Then crop it making sure the signature doesn’t stray off the sides or top or bottom. Another way to get the signature in is of course to do it with a real pen (or marker) on paper and scan it in. Here comes the tough part. Go up to the “Edit” menu and select “new brush preset”. Give it a creative name (oh, something like “my signature”!) and click “OK”. Believe it or not, you’re done! That brush will now appear at the bottom of the list of brushes available to you and Photoshop automatically saved it for you in your default brushes list. Now if you want to use it, when you have a document open, go to the brushes tool, select your new brush, resize it using the “[“ and “]” keys (or drag on the toolbar), put your cursor where you want your brush to appear and simply click. If you were smart, you would have first created a blank layer to put the signature on. If you were really smart, you might have added a layer mask on that new layer, put the signature on the mask, inverted the mask (so it’s a white signature on a black background), and then you’re free to do whatever you want with the new layer, such as a gradient, layer effects like glow or embossing or drop shadows. You can move it around, resize it, anything you want! That’s what I did in this example. Click image to enlarge Cool, or cool? Took me longer to tell you about it than it did to do it! Tip #2: Creating an action to aid your workflow If you’ve used Photoshop for a while, you have probably used “Actions”, or at least played with them. Here’s how you create them and use them. I do ID photos for a safety course. I set up my camera and lighting and each person steps (OK, sits) in front of the camera and I snap a photo. They’re all basically the same. I need to print them at a specified size and they need to be cropped to a specific spec. I always underexpose a stop or so — they seem to come out better when I work from a darker image and adjust the levels, but the levels adjustment is always about the same. Then I drag the image onto a full-sized sheet (8½ x 11) and print them ganged up. OK, that tells you what I’m trying to do. I used to do them one at a time: open the image, adjust the levels, crop it, save it, drag it onto the print template, go back to the image and close it and go on to the next one. Not too bad a workflow, but I decided I wanted to do it more efficiently. So I created an “Action” to accomplish the same thing and I discovered I cut my processing time in half (literally!) by using it. Here it is. Your mileage may vary, and obviously you’re not trying to do exactly the same thing I am so your action steps will be different from mine. The thing is, though, that the levels adjustment and the cropping is NOT identical for all the images. So I want to stop the action in the middle to let me adjust those things for each image. Here goes: Open one sample image to work on. Now if you’re a reasonably intelligent person, you won’t work on your originals. I select the folder in Bridge, copy it and paste it into itself (open it and hit paste), then renamed the copy as “originals”. Those don’t get touched. So with an image open, click on the “Actions” palette and on the flyout menu at top right, you’ll find “new action”. Once you click that, give it a name, and hit OK, photoshop is recording all your keystrokes until you click the “Stop” button at the bottom of the palette. The “Record” button will be red. Click image to enlarge OK, like I said, the first thing I want to do in my workflow is to adjust the levels, so I go to the levels dialog (image->adjustments->levels, or actually I prefer to use the CS4 adjustments preset which does it on a separate layer) and I adjust the levels for this photo. Remember, they’re all going to be similar, but not necessarily identical. Click image to enlarge Next, I want to crop the image. So I select the crop tool (in my case, I have a preset for the final image size (1.75” x 2.25” at 240ppi) and I go ahead and use it to crop the picture. Don’t worry, I’ll show you how to pause your action so you can crop each one individually. Click image to enlarge Now I sharpen the picture by going to Filters->sharpen->smart sharpen and I choose the sharpening parameters I want to use (a whole other discussion!). Now I flatten the image (or since all the layers are visible, I can just hit Ctrl-Shift-E). Finally, I want to save my work so I hit ctrl-S to save. OK. We’re done recording, so I click “Stop”and my new action is saved to the default action set in Photoshop, ready for me to use. Now if I were to open another image and click on the “play action” button, it would give me the exact same cropping and levels adjustment I did on the sample image. If I’m not happy with that, and I want to be able to change it before finalizing the action, I need to do one more thing. Select the action in the palette and expand it by clicking the right-facing arrow at the left of the action name. Now you can see all the steps you created. Click image to enlarge There is a little tick-off box beside each step that contains modifiable instructions (second column on the left, circled in the above screen capture). Click it. That inserts a pause for you to change things before you invoke the action step. You’re done. Test it. Open another image. Click the “run” button for the action. In my case, it stops to let me adjust the levels, then it continues when I click "OK", and it stops again so I can move or change the cropping box, then it goes on to save the image automatically. Click image to enlarge Then I drag it into the print template, highlight the image again and hit Ctrl-Shift-W to close it and take me back to Bridge for the next one. Click image to enlarge Print templates. Click image to enlarge This morning, I edited 44 photos and prepared them for printing in 30 minutes. ‘nuff said? OK, now get to work. Think how much more efficient you can be!

It’s 30 below and all’s well!

For the last two mornings, the thermometer outside my bedroom window has said -30°C. The sky is a crisp, hard blue and the stars were out overnight, like the proverbial diamonds in the sky. A perfect time to get some exquisite time exposure star shots.

Are you out of your mind? Did you not read where I said it’s -30°C? I’m sure the camera would do just fine, but these old bones are not going out there in the middle of the night in these temperatures. I did go out during the day yesterday, to chop some firewood and a short walk, and I did bring the camera, but I failed to capture the essence of the cold. I need a picture of someone bundled up, with their breath condensing in the air and icicles hanging from their nose or beard. However everyone I know is staying indoors where it’s warm.

Does this say "cold" to you? I don't feel like I captured that, although the spiderwebby frost under the eaves is from the condensing vapours from the furnace exhaust. And the icicles say to me, "I hope this isn't going to cause an expensive roof problem!"

So I ventured out and asked someone to pose for me, when I stopped at the bank in Minden. I lied and said I was working for a newspaper...

I actually went out knowing in advance what I wanted to shoot, and set it up. I'm not good asking people to pose for me. This guy wanted to know what Newspaper I was working for and I had to assure him he would not be recognizable in the picture.

Except the dog owners, of course. But then I would have to go out at the same time as them and get them to stand still long enough to get their pictures. Oh, and the ice fishermen. I don’t know what’s so attractive about snowmobiling in -30° temperatures, out to a freezing hut and dropping a fishing line into a hole in the ice, when you could just go to IGA and buy some fish if you really wanted some. Again, it’s hard to catch pictures of them from in here by the fire!

I haven’t posted anything here for a while. Mainly because I’ve been (a) working on some projects that has kept my attention and (b) I’ve been lazy, still in “holiday mode”. I haven’t taken a lot of photos in the last while, but as soon as it warms up, I’ll get out there. Actually, there are two people who want me to shoot business type portraits (both of them want them closecut so they can use them on various backgrounds. One wants an overhead shot, holding some test equipment, for use on a flyer). I’ll try to line those up for next week.

The only other thing I’ve done is to frame and put up some prints up at TrueNorth. As I mentioned earlier, I had printed 5 images on canvas, now, how to frame them? Since I didn’t know any better, I didn’t leave enough canvas to stretch them over a frame; so I took the easy way out. I went to Michael’s and bought 5 matching frames. Then I took them apart, threw out the glass and spray-glued the canvases to the back of the matte. That worked. Here’s a photo of the wall with the pictures on it. Hope the arrangement looks good: I don’t like doing things all lined up…

photos arranged on my dining room wall.

One of the projects I mentioned above is the Pixel Painting Workshop that I’m putting together with Hilarie McNeil-Smith. If you’re not in the loop, then you wouldn’t know that the course is over-subscribed by 100%! That means that we have 12 spaces and there are 24 people who want the course! I’m working on Hilarie to schedule a second session, but we’ll have to wait and see when that can be. Probably in the Fall.

In anticipation of the course, I've been doing a little painting. I have no idea what I'm doing (which is obvious from the results above) but it's fun. I'm SO looking forward to learning how to do this!

OK, it figures. I go out for a walk ONCE without my camera. And two deer walk out of the woods 50m away from me, cross the road, and stop and wait in a little open area. I walked up within about 20m and stood and watched them as they watched me, for at least 15 minutes. AND I DIDN'T HAVE MY CAMERA.

One was a yearling and the other was either a large doe or a buck who had shed his antlers (they do that this time of year). We just stood there and watched one another. I was thinking, OK, that would make a good photo. And that, and that, and... grrr.

I had gone out to bring in some firewood, and knock the icicles down, then I thought I'd watch the sunset over the lake for a couple of minutes and see if anyone was at the ice fishing huts. I thought of bringing it, but I had my arms full with firewood. Oh well, next time. I found where they like to cross and I'll hang out there late in the afternoons.

What else is new? Well, I’ve offered to adopt a dog. Ginger is a 7 year old Golden Retriever and she’s currently in foster care under the auspices of Golden Retriever Rescue. I met her, and I’ve offered to adopt her, but I’m waiting to be contacted for my home inspection (they’re serious about the environment the adopted dogs go into). Should happen in the next couple of weeks.

I’m posting a “silly” picture here. This is the best I can do BEFORE taking Hilarie’s course. She gave me a little guidance (OK, a lot…) but then she sent me a picture showing me “…and this is how you SHOULD do it…”. I’m not posting her picture. Suffice it to say it’s a lot better than mine! She’s an artist. In my dreams, I’d like to be one…

This is Ginger. I'll know in a week or so if she's going to be my dog.

No tip today, except drag out any book you have on Photoshop (including Photoshop User magazine, which you ALL should be getting. Go here to join NAPP, it’s worth it!) and try some stuff. Get really comfortable with layers and adjustment layers and masks. They’re probably the most powerful tools in the program. Oh, and STAY WARM!

My Book Arrived!

I picked up my book at the mailbox today!

It was exciting to see my own work printed and bound. However I have mixed feelings about the results.

The photos came out excellently. So did the text. My layout was great. The book quality was superb. So what's with the misgivings?

While I knew what size book I was ordering, when I got it I was initially disappointed. A 10"x8" book is too small for a coffee table. It's nice and all, but it's small. Also, I only produced a 40-page effort (on purpose -- it was a test) and it's very thin.

So: if you're doing a Blurb book,

• make it bigger (both the physical size and the number of pages. Also the image sizes on the pages).
• do order the premium paper. It's outstanding.
• I think I worried too much about sharpening and finishing. All my pictures were National Geographic quality (OK, I'm not talking about the images themselves, although they're pretty good! I mean the reproduction).
• While the printed jacket is really nice, I'm worried about damaging it. I think I'll hard-print on the cover of the next one.

So my next book will be (a) coffee-table sized, (b) have at least 60 (more likely 80) pages and (c) I'll create my own custom layout grids using a full page bleed size in PhotoShop.

While I'm writing here, I thought I'd remind everyone that the Wacom Bamboo Fun graphic tablet is very reasonably priced right now! Staples has it for $99 (the Fun includes a mouse and a software bundle). It still takes a bit of getting used to, but I'm at the point where I use it for everything. If you buy the one without the mouse, you need an extra USB port to plug one in. The Wacom mouse (by the way, it's pronounced "wack-om" not "Way-com", if you listen to the British voice on the tutorial) only works on the graphics tablet, but that's OK, it's pretty good.

And finally, we've set the date for the Pixel Painting Workshop: March 14/15 at Humber College. Drop me a note if you're thinking about attending and I don't already know about it. Details will go up on the photography.to website in a few days.

Have a geat New Year's, everyone. I wish you all health, happiness and prosperity in the year to come.

PS: Food for thought: I'm thinking about a trip out West this summer, in a car not on the bike. Maybe make Alaska? Anyone interested in coming along?

I'm a published author!

It’s been a busy couple of weeks. Well, busy in the sense that I’ve been working on a project and have been sitting in front of the computer for lots of hours to get it done.

The project? My first Blurb book. Yes, now I can say that I am a published photographer and author. The fact that it’s self-published, and I only ordered a couple of copies to see how it turned out does not have to come up in conversation. UNDERSTAND?

I put together a 40-page 8x10” (landscape) hardcovered book with a sleeve. It’s called “The Path of Least Potholes”, and to find out why, I guess you’re going to have to buy a copy! Blurb is not that simple to use, but considering we’re generating a whole book here, it’s not that bad. I’ll talk about the process and some of the mistakes I made (me? Misteaks?) in my photo tips section below.

I got an email from them telling me my book has shipped. Can't wait to see it! I'm published!

Last week when I started writing this, I was staring out the window at the snow coming down. I was up in “True North” (as I am now), of course. The lake was now iced over. a couple of nights before, there was open water and the setting sun lit the steam coming off it, reminiscent of a misty dawn. It was tough to capture on camera.

When I woke up the next morning, it was -22°C and everything outside was crispy crunchy. It was a beautiful winter day and when I walked down to the dock, Susan from the Inn across the road told me to check out the frozen ice crystals on the fresh lake ice. They looked like giant snowflakes, so I went back for the camera and took a couple of shots.

These crystals were about 2" (5cm) across. I false-coloured the image to make them stand out.

I also took a couple of shots of my axe, embedded in a log I was splitting for kindling. I painted the background, since it was kind of messy. I’m calling it, “That’s Life NOT in the Big City”.

When I came back in, I waited for the camera to warm back up to room temperature, then set it up to take a couple of self-portraits to use for the back flap of the book. Don’t you hate pictures of yourself? I do…

This is my workstation up at "True North". I've since moved a larger widescreen monitor up here.

By the way, last week I got a few images at the landfill (OK, the “dump”) when I dropped off a bag of garbage. It’s not going to win any prizes as ‘prettiest photo of the year’, but it does tell the story of what they do there. They’re feeding a whole mountain of stuff into that big red machine which reduces things to one or two foot size chunks. Then they plow it all in (that’s why they call it a ‘landfill’.


Planning is well under way for the Pixel Painting workshop we're doing with Hilarie McNeil-Smith in March. Watch this space for an announcement in the next week or so.

I did buy the Wacom tablet I mentioned last time: Future Shop has them on sale for under $100. If you're planning to attend the workshop, you need one. The Wacom "Bamboo" is $79 but the "Bamboo Fun" is only $20 more. You get a mouse with it as well as some software, so it's worth it. It's seamless. No issues with multiple monitors, no locking up the computer, works great.

FacZen Photography Tips You too can be an author! There are a number of online companies who will help you publish your own book. The one I used was “Blurb.com”. They seem to be quite affordable, much less than the likes of Vistek or Black's, and from what I’ve seen, their quality is quite high. There are some limitations but there are some workarounds that can make your book fully customized and looking just the way you want it. The first thing to do is go to the blurb website and download their software, called "Booksmart". Version 1.9 is the current one as I write this. My book cover Even though I put together a small book (only 40 pages) as a first test, I realize that workflow is an issue. Jim Camelford (he’s published a couple of hefty tomes) gave some hints which I unwisely ignored, so here they are again, but in my words. The concept is like this: Blurb offers several designs from a small square book to a large format coffee table sized book (13x11”). You can have as many pages as you like in it, up to 440 pages (now THAT would be a book!). There are dozens of page layouts provided by Blurb, but you can’t modify them. So if you don’t find the layout you want, you’ll have to work around it. You make .jpg files to fill the containers they provide. So if a page has two 5x5.5” image containers in it, that’s what you give them. The problem is, you’re probably going to end up cropping your pictures to fit their layout, unless you use a larger container and drop the pictures wherever you like in it. You could drop, say, a 5” x 3” image in a box and align it top or bottom or middle. You could also use a full-page bleed, create a suitably sized image in PhotoShop and position things where you want. Text too. Work with a grid, though, especially if you're going to put a customized page opposite a standard one. All files should be prepared for printing: proper exposures, clean cropping, sharpened appropriately, 300 dpi resolution and high quality. You get out what you put in. You could just drop your pictures into the Blurb containers and let the program resize or fit them. But then the sharpening and resolution wouldn’t be optimum and, well, it is your book, so you decide. Pre-plan your text. Blurb has several default styles: body text, headings, captions, etc. Choose the font, size and colour for each of these and store them as defaults. You should make everything consistent through the book. The thing is, PLAN YOUR BOOK FIRST. Collect all your photos and text in one place then make subfolders for each section (which could be just one page!). Decide what fonts and colours to use and preset them. Decide on picture sizes and prepare them in advance. Here are a couple of things Blurb doesn’t tell you: 1. You don’t need to import pictures into their library. You can just drag them from Explorer or even Bridge directly into the program. 2. Resize them according to the pixel sizes given in Blurb. Not 6”x6”, 1801px x 1796px. By the way, in Photoshop be sure to enter “px” in the crop size box or you’ll end up with inches. 1801 inches is one HELL of a big file! One of the page layouts from my book. 3. If you’re working in Word to write the text, set the font, size and colour to what you want in the book. If you have to, change the page colour so you can see your text (I couldn't figure out what was going on until I realized I was trying to look at black text on a black background!). 4. Try to be consistent. Your book will look MUCH better if pages look similar throughout. Stick with only one or two fonts and colours and sizes; try to keep the page layouts the same or similar. Creating the book is a tedious process. And "niggly". I scrolled several times through the book and found little problems every time. Remember, this is going to be printed, so you have to get it right. When you're all done, you connect to the Blurb site and upload the book for printing. Remember, it's a pretty big file so it will take a while even at high speed. Then you need to tell them how many copies, where to ship them and give them the usual credit card information. My 40-page book was $33 (I chose premium paper), plus shipping. So go for it! You can be a famous author and published photographer just like me!