MAY 2013

May 2013

Three days of inspiration at PSW

Olympus mounts toughness Get up early & stay out late.

Your best images will happen at dusk and dawn. Save that harsh, midday sun for processing your images indoors. Watch how your portfo-lio changes when you start shooting an hour before sunset and the first hour after sunrise. Your images will pick up an entirely new dynamic quality and I guarantee you will get a great bump in attention from these new images when you make a social media post.

There is nothing worse than getting hyped up for a few months for an event only to watch it fizzle when it begins. Thanks to an amazing NAPP production that didn’t happen here! You would think that a day that starts with a two hour drive (1:58 minutes of that in the dark) to Orlando at 4:45AM would start a little sluggishly. Not the case. I switched between some rock-n-roll and a NAPP audio podcast to keep myself entertained in the same way I would prep for a Springsteen concert in this same town. I checked in with some overly cheerful women at the booth who handed me my lanyard and what felt like a 600 pound book that was the syllabus to nearly every class over the next three days. The keynote was better than advertised.

There is always a surprise whether it be an Adobe program upgrade, new feature or comical video with the Photoshop Guys. We got the hat trick this year! Adobe released an upgrade to Light-room4 in a free beta mode, hinted at a new feature to assist with blur caused by camera movement from longer than ad-vised shutter speeds on hand-held images and finally, a video paying homage to Top Gun with the NAPP Photoshop Guys, Kelby, Kloskowski, Concepcion, Barker

and Collins. They launched Photoshop terms from their F-16s with full onslaught. Now the schooling begins.

I made my first class ‘The Creative Com-posite’ with Adobe evangelist Julieanne Kost. Composite imagery is a big part of my workflow (outside the newspaper of course) with the work Wendy and I do with Gorilla Magic Creative Marketing. As much as I think I know about it I am never in denial that I will come out of an advanced, intermediate or even begin-ner’s class with something new or just something I forgot I knew and used previ-ously.

Julieanne scored with a few great images and some tweaks I was not aware of to keep the workflow quick and accurate.

See Photoshop page 3

Scott Kelby, president of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP) kicks off the opening day of Photoshop World in Orlando last month

Does a point and shoot camera still make sense to own? For me, the answer is a definite yes. With the popularity of cell phone cameras and their superior quality compared to similar models only a few years early they have turn non-shutter-bugs into shutterbugs…but there are limitations. In order for a point-n-shoot camera to be a bridge between your cellphone and your DSLR it needs to offer something not found in either of those.

I found this bridge in the Olympus Tough TG-1 (which has since been re-placed with the TG-2, but more on that in a bit). I can be a little rough on my

equipment so maybe I was swayed by the

clever marketing the word ‘Tough’ emblazoned on

the front of the camera. I should have the word ‘Tougher’ emblazoned on me as I have

already broken the camera twice since

owning it. Each time it was re-placed or repaired by Olympus with the identical statement “I have NEVER seen that happen

See OLYMPUS page 3

What better way to spend high-noon than with Scott Kelby giving away all his trade secrets in how he uses type on his images (because many of us have been doing it obnoxiously wrong lately – no names men-tioned here though). The expo floor belonged to the paid attendees today. Tomorrow and Friday any-

body can attend and if you are in the locale I suggest you stop over. Its Disneyland for photo enthusiasts. My time here was brief, but I did replace a camera strap that I was in need of and ran into an old friend at the Adorama booth from when I worked there in the early 1990’s when they were just 40 employees. The night class finished with Janine Warner’s ‘Designing Killer Social Media Profiles’.

I had seen Janine present before and got a great lesson on SEOs, but since Wendy and I manage and maintain about 12-15 social media sites I figured this would be a great, non-Photoshop class that can help boost our clients up too. I can guarantee that one or more of our clients may be featured in an upcoming presentation of Janine’s because I am already so amped up to hit that creativity track for our people.

PSW DAY 1 from page 2

before’. The ‘tough’ feature was just a bonus anyway. I need my camera to be sharp and have something my other cameras don’t. When I need a close-up image this is the camera I pull out of my bag first. There are three macro modes. One regular macro mode, the other super-macro and one with a flash. The first time I used it out of the box I took a photo of the top of a salt shaker and when I zoomed in on the image I noticed grains of

salt on top that I didn’t even see with the naked eye. In the case of the TG-1 the waterproof feature was on top of that bridge list. Living in Florida I am always concerned about water and humidity getting on the contacts. It has been a great novelty for underwater images with my grand-kids, nieces and more, but not just for photos, it makes excellent HD video too. There are a lot of what I would call ‘kitschy’ features that I haven’t found myself using in the year I have owned the camera, but I know they appeal to the masses after what I see posted on Instagram and such. The filters included are Pop Art, Pin Hole, Drawing, Fisheye, Soft Focus, Punk, Sparkle, Watercolor, Miniature, Reflection, Dramatic and Fragmented. The camera also has a built in GPS that records the location data to each frame (if you decide to turn it on).It’s great that while looking back at your images years later you can see that you were rafting on the Nantahala River in North Carolina. I won’t mention every feature here but the final one is the burst shot. Have you ever taken a photo on a point-n-shoot and because of the delay you miss the shot of your kid swinging a bat or some other action oriented activity? The TG-1 has a burst that will take 60 shots (SIXTY!) in one second. BOOM! In the time you read that sentence that is sixty images. The new TG-2 kicked up the digital zoom a bit and adding some more whimsy to the filters but didn’t take away anything including its toughness and waterproof features.

OLYMPUS from page 2

The camera was nearly touching the dollar bill in order to get so close as to see the fiber pattern of the paper.

A quick setting in the menu and a push of the button and your images can be turned into mosaics right in the camera.

Make your own twins with the mirror image setting on Olym-pus TG series of cameras.

Day 2 at Photoshop World So, explain this to me as if I was in 4th grade. In order to get free tickets to Midnight Mad-ness at Photoshop World we have to wake up earlier than anybody and be at the con-vention center by 7:00am so we can attend an event that will end after midnight? Yes, that’s how it went down, but it was and it was so worthwhile, but that is 14 hours later. Let me fill you in with a proper chronology. If you are online anywhere at Photoshop World you are either making new friends or catching up with old ones. Today started off no differently online for Midnight Madness tickets. The crowd wasn’t lethargic, but Robert Vanelli made sure to amp it up so many more notches that even Emeril would be impressed. After a successful score of MM tickets, I was at ease and could attend the day’s classes with minimal anxieties about how I would have to crash that party through the air conditioning vent as homage to Jack Bauer. I am a proud Adobe Creative Cloud mem-ber, advocate and evangelist. It makes total sense. However, I have never really delved into Adobe Illustrator because of the ex-pense of adding another program, but now that I have the Creative Cloud I already have Illustrator. This logic just screamed to me to take Co-rey Barker’s ‘Illustrator Tips & Tricks’ class so I can take a proper cloud plunge. No regrets. There are definitely some instances with vector graphics that I need to round out my abilities and Corey steered me like a ship through a minefield without setting one off. I like to think I know Photoshop pretty darn well … until you put me in a room with Ben Willmore for his “Hidden and Hard to Find Tweaks’ class. It is amazing as to what doesn’t make it into the mainstream workflow…or Adobe’s instruction books.The Opt/Alt key is my new best friend … just sayin’! Next, I am off to see Julieanne Kost so I will learn to ‘Master the Secrets of Lightroom’s Develop Module’ There are secrets? Can she get in trouble for telling a room of 400 people? Heck with it, I am going anyway. Julieanne is an enigma to me. If you pass her in the hallway you would think she was just introverted enough that she can tell you the shoes everyone is wearing because she would be looking down most of the time … but that’s not accurate. Put her on stage to talk about her Adobe

passions and she is funny (in a way that Jim Gaffigan is funny with multiple personalities and voices leaking through). I learn best when I can remember what made me laugh. It stays with me and she knows how to speak my learning love lan-guage. (Shhh … She was talking right to me. It was almost like 399 other people weren’t even there.) I am always looking for new ways to make selections of items in Photoshop and when I saw Dave Cross had some secrets (more secrets!) I was on my way to his class of ‘Selection Secrets’ (aptly named…must be a Canadian thing) Finally, lunch. I am famished. I won’t bore you with the deli sandwich on an amazing Pretzel roll across the street at the Rosen Center, but I will let you know it is there and you should all go have one next time. A few tours around the expo floor and a purchase or two until the one class I had been waiting all day for. Jay Maisel had a back-to-back class of ‘Light, Gesture and Color’. I know about Light. Color I am good with. As a journalist often seek expression of some type. I like his word ‘gesture’ because it expands upon the expression I seek in my images … Oh, and I will be stealing it for this next chapter of my life with full credit thrown to Jay every time I receive a com-pliment on the captured ‘gestures’ in my images. The over/under on Jay saying dirty words was 82. I took the over and won. Jay has been doing this for a long time and has earned his place as one of the best pho-tographers of people and their gestures. After Jay I am exploding. People are my favorite image topic by far. Good thing the

planet has so many of them. Another bite to eat and it’s off to Midnight Madness. It used to start at midnight several years ago, but someone got smart and de-cided to make it end at midnight. Give that person a prize! Before it even started, there was an hour of fun and games in the hallway. These games involved hula hoops, Oreo cookies, more hula hoops and some great team building exercises. I have a 6-minute video for you to see here when you’re done reading and watch it in 1080P. (Vanelli is so much better in HD) CLICK HERE. The last time I was at PSW I won an Apple-TV at Midnight Madness. Fun event, but that makes it better. This time I was chosen to play Photoshop Charades. I know my terms pretty well. I speak and hear English like a native. I will be taking my ACE test soon. This should be cake. Our team of four had a 14-year old girl, a young lady in her 20’s and a gentlemen who was excited enough, but we found out by the second word he didn’t have a great knack for the English language. Somehow we pulled it off. (Our 14-year old was a champ!) I am glad for her the prize wasn’t liquor. Instead, we were awarded a one year, or one year extension, to Adobe Creative Cloud. Running about $50 per month that makes for a team prize package value at $2,400. THANKS Adobe! I am toast. Tomorrow is the last day which also means checking out of the hotel before going to the first class. Wait until you read what happened there next!

Julieanne Kost, Adobe evangelist and guru drew large crowd for her training ses-sion on the expo floor on the seond day of Photoshop World.

I want to hear from you!Send me a question.

Send me a tip.Send me a photo asking

why it came out a certain way.

mitch@mitchpix.com

I look forward to yourinput!

Q- I love taking pictures of my kids at the beach but no matter what I do to get their picture at sunrise the kids and their faces are always too dark. -Sandy L, Palm City

A- I’ll keep it simple. If your pictures are too dark then add light! Now the answer is simple but now I can help you with the processes and different ways to make it pop. First, I always have a flash (or two) with me. Usually one that can be used off camera. In camera flash just makes the image look flat and steals the depth and creativity from your image. First, with your camera in the program mode, meter the beautiful scene behind your subjects. Lets say it came to 1/200 at f/8 at 400 ISO. Now switch to manual mode and set the camera to those values but hurry, the sun is rising

I wish I was still in touch with my sixth grade teacher to re-spond to her “Get your damn head out of the clouds” command. I have been a fan and member of Adobe’s Creative Cloud since the near beginning which wasn’t that long ago. It made sense. It makes sense. There are some misconceptions about it that I will address later, but let me start with the conceptions before the miscon-

ceptions. Let me crunch some numbers to start. Adobe Photoshop would run nearly $600 as a round number. What if you want Lightroom, Illustrator, Dreamweaver Acrobat Writer? Each program would run you a chunk of change like that. Two years later they made the program better. There is an up-grade. We want the upgrade. Heck, one of those upgraded ideas may be one ours that we fired off in an email asking why there was a missing feature. Now an upgrade may be half that price….EACH! I have watched companies fall because they couldn’t keep up with software upgrades and keep themselves relevant to their client base. Now comes Adobe’s Creative Cloud with all its hope and prom-ise, but it’s a hard pill to swallow because people are getting their info from erroneous sources and bloggers that have no ac-countability. The myths are funny. We’ll get to those. First, more truths. Cloud membership for nearly EVERY Adobe program is $49.95 a month. That comes to $600 a year for a huge package of soft-ware. But wait, you get two licenses with that. Share it with a friend… BAM $300 per year! But wait, there’s more.

and the light is changing. Fire the camera with the flash. If the subjects are still too dark then increase the flash power (see your instruction manual as all flashes differ). If you don’t have a flash you can get an inexpensive reflec-tor or posterboard and have an assistant or family member hold it to reflect the sun from behind the subject to light the front or side your your subject. The would need to stand pretty close to the subject but just out of range of the camera’s lens. Try both of these and send me your results to the email on the top of this page. I look forward to seeing your work.

See CLOUD page 6

Photoshop World is not just a rigorous workout for the mind, it serves the body as well. Do you know how much ground you cover walking the expo floor, the stair-ways, and the paths from class to class? I do. I have been a Fitbit user for a few months to help me drop a few (bunch) pounds. What’s a Fitbit? It’s a great tracking device you wear on waistband to monitor you calories burned, steps taken, stairs climbed, and miles walked. On Thursday I took about 12,000 steps, climbed 42 flights of stairs, burned 3,289 calories and walked about six miles. Al-most all of them in the convention center. Friday those numbers would basically repeat. My point is that PSW is also some great fitness (but you should still walk the es-calator and not ride it like an attraction at Disney) Enough of that. Let me share the inspira-tions of the final day of Photoshop world. I didn’t have to wait long for that to hap-pen. I chose Dave Black’s ‘Light Painting ‘class. At my last PSW-East a few years ago I came in on the middle of an Expo class by Dave on Light Painting. I got the concept, but didn’t see it from start to finish. I liked what I saw, but never followed through to watch a video or learn more about it. I was glad to sit next to my already

seated friend, Chris Arnold because that got me to meet Abi Bell who sat on my opposite side. While waiting for the class to start she showed me a few images of an airplane on her iPhone that she created after

learning from Dave Black previously. They were stunning! It’s one thing for an instructor to show some great images because we expect

Are you teacher or a student? You are eligible for $29.95 a month. Still, two licenses. $15 a month is $190 a year for EVERYTHING! (I get so excited about this) Oh, on a side note if you don’t want the entire suite Adobe Photoshop is available for $19.95 a month as a standalone cloud program. Let’s go back in time to when we were buying the ‘Box’ software. When Adobe made a significant upgrade you would wait for the next version and pay your $300. The new world order has you getting the upgrades fast and often with a simple download. There have been a good amount of upgrades that only Creative

Cloud users have benefitted by in this cur-rent CS6 version. Adobe had their big reveal on May 6 at AdobeMax in California. When asked about the cloud setup the most common question/statement is “I don’t want to always have to be connect-ed to the internet to work on my images and files.” You’ll be happy to know that the pro-grams live on your computer so if you would like to work at a coffee house not securely wifi enabled you absolutely can. You will have to open the program while connected to wifi to validate your account however. The Creative Cloud is also it’s own form of file sharing in a sense like Dropbox except you get 20GB of space that you can populate with images and files that you can share with people whether or not

they are part of Adobe’s Creative Cloud program. I will cover more features (as there are MANY) in the future but if you can’t wait visit the Adobe Website at this link---ADOBE CC.We have an additional bonus we are an-nouncing here. Gorilla Magic will be hosting its first Creative Cloud instructional workshop to introduce the new Creative Cloud to this community and help you decide which package will be worth your while. We are just in the beginning stages, but are pretty certain it will take place near the end of June in St. Lucie County and will offer a choice of friday or Saturday for a one day workshop. Please email us at info@gorillamagic.biz to get more information and to be on the email list for updates and information.

CLOUD from page 5

Photoshop World -Day 3, the finale

F. J. Westcott company once again had the high traffic booth with models each day posing in a pilot setting to match the Top Gun theme of this year’s Photoshop World.

See PSW3 page 7

that from them. It is something different, better and awesome to see it came from a student that felt the inspiration to go out and try it on her own and nail the shot. Dave created a great image of someone who came from the back of the class who just so happened to have a resemblance to Capt Jack Sparrow complete with out-fit, compass, hair and swagger. I am inspired by Dave to go create, but seeing Abi’s work had me dial up a personal model friend to do a personal project shoot with me next weekend. Yesterday was full of secrets and tweaks I decided to challenge myself with a class by Katrin Eismann of ‘Advanced Lightroom Techniques’. There were no moments of Ooohs and Aaaahs because some visual magic ap-peared before our eyes, but the magic was there regardless. Lens profiles, camera calibration and more are so necessary before moving on to the creating the parts of your image that invoke ooohs and aaahs.

I want to make amazing 3D images. I re-ally do. Corey Barker, please make that happen. I sat in on his ‘3D in Photoshop’ sessions having already seen several training vid-eos on Kelby Training. It is nothing short of phenomenal to watch him work a small model plane into an object of depth, reflection and texture. You had me thinking I can do it, Corey. Holy crap! It’s time to go. It’s over? How’d that happen? The wrap up rally and giveaways came next. Several instructors came to speak of their experience like Jack Reznicki, Moose Peterson, PSW newbie and artistic genius Aaron Blaise and finally Glynn Dewis from across the pond. Before I get into that, Glynn came with Dave Clayton who I had connected with through Twitter and it was just a thrill to meet these two men. A few years ago Dave Black had the big-gest and baddest in the audience tear-ing up with his story (present company

included) and tonight the tear torch was passed on to Glynn. Besides tugging our heart strings in the humblest of ways, Glynn also had the fun-niest line. When following Moose, Glynn said something to the effect of ‘His pictures are great but, Man can he chose a soundtrack!’ when referring to the power-ful, epic music played behind his images. We all have our personal ups and downs, but sharing the specifics with a room of 2,000 plus adds an amazing amount of humanity to the relationship we all have with each other and our chosen common bond. I applaud you Glynn for bringing your-self to us and wearing your heart on your sleeve. I highly recommend Photoshop World to anybody that has an interest in photog-raphy, to anybody who craves inspiration or just to anyone who breathes just to witness the awe. I am already looking forward to the next one for Photoshop CC!

PSW3 from page 6

I love my iPhone for photogra-phy but sometimes it acts as my assistant. If you read the KwikTip sec-tion on the front page you saw that I was touting the concept of getting you out early or late to shoot in more dynamic light. Every day the sun rises and sets at different times. How do you keep up? I love my app called PhotoCalc. I got my $2.99 worth pretty quick by knowing when the best time to take a photo and not going out on a wild goose chase. (I am not a fan of chasing geese). Most of my use of this app is finding out when the sun will rise or set on any given day. If I need to plan ahead a week or two with a family for a sunset photo shoot I will know that the sun will set at, let’s say 7:30 so I will ask them to meet me at 6:15 so I can have a little over an hour with them. It will also tell you when twilight ends you will know just how much time after sunset you will have that diminishing light. Are you new to using flash? Enter in a few simple numbers and it will spew out the recipe for a well-lit image. Do you want to blur out the distracting background in a por-trait but not sure how? Enter your lens focal length, your aperture and how far the subject is from you and you will immediately know the range in the image that will be conveniently and artistically blurred out. Again, the app is worth the $2.99 to me. Let me know with an email to mitch@mitchpix.com hoe it worked for you.

Banyon tree canopys are an great subject if you dont’ get killed shooting them. I have driven under this canopy so many times but never had or took the time to stop and shoot them. On this day I had an entire hour (I know, right!) to pull over and grab the tripod and take some shots in the middle of the road and and along side. On this particuar image I looked to find a spot on the side where I can use one of the more mishapen trees as a fore-ground with the leading line following back to the end of the canopy. I set my aperature to f/16 and shutter speed to 1/13th of a second at 320 ISO to allow the foreground and background light to fill the frame. When shooting with a tripod use an electronic cable re-lease to avoid shaking the camera by pushing the button. If you don’t have one yet you can also set the camera on self timer and the shutter will open and close on its own with-out you jostling the camera during the exposure. To my luck a truck with a boat trailer came through at

the right time while the shutter was open and gave me this dynamic trail of motion that changed the entire look of the mage compared to the ones shot just before and after this image was made. If you have any questions about this image ot how to make one of your own please email me at mitch@mitchpix.com