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P H O T O I N S I G H T S Jim Zuckerman’s

• Replacing backgrounds• Hummingbird photography• Busy backgrounds• Birds in flight• New online course• Student showcase

August 2013

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T a b l e o f C o n t e n t s

4. Replacing backgrounds11. Photographing hummingbirds16. Busy backgrounds22. What’s wrong with this picture?24. Short and sweet26. Ask Jim28. The Photo Challenge34. Back issues

That got me thinking, so I did some research online. It turns out that with a powerful portable flash like the Canon 600EX or the Nikon SB900, one picture taken with flash when the strobe is eight feet away from the piece of art equals about one second of ambient light in a typical museum. In other words, the ambient lighting is also producing ultraviolent radiation. If one flash at eight feet equals one second of ambient light, then assuming a museum is open eight hours, that equals 28,800 flashes from from a flash-to-subject distance of just eight feet! (8 hours x 60 minutes x 60 seconds).

Point-and-shoot cameras that have built-in flashes are weaker, and when they are fired it is equal to only 1/8th of a second of the ambient museum lighting. So eight times 28,800 (i.e. 230,400) is the number of flashes from point-and-shoot cameras that equal the continuous ambient light output in a typical museum for eight hours.

Remember that this is when the flash is used eight feet from the subject. What if you backed up to 16 feet? Then the light is four times reduced due to the Inverse Square Law! If you were shooting a ceiling that was, say, 68 feet high like the Sistine Chapel, there is absolutely no way that flash would have any effect on the colors in Michaelangelo’s masterpiece. The windows at the top of the chapel produce far more UV than millions of flash units at that distance.

Therefore, if the museum closed a few minutes early every day, the reduction in the amount of con-stant light on the valuable artwork would allow photographers to shoot with flash, and the net effect would be no change at all regarding the danger of degrading the art.

We all know that policies of museums won’t change, but I wanted to offer you some food for thought.

photos@jimzuckerman.comwww.jimzuckerman.com

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If you are a serious photographer -- and if you are reading this magazine you are definitely serious about taking pictures -- the prohibition of using a flash in a museum and other places that display fine art is annoying to say the least. Nev-ertheless, we know that protecting paintings, tapestries, and other historic and valuable forms of artwork from fading is very important. So, we temper our annoyance knowing that there is a good reason for the prohibition.

But . . .when you think about it, a typical flash duration (i.e. the actual length of time the flash tube is illuminated when you take a picture) is roughly 1/1000th of a second. So, it would take one thousand flashes to equal one second of light. Ten thousand flashes would only equal 10 seconds of light.

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REPLACING BACKGROUNDS Putting classic backgrounds behind classic cars

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All of the cars I take pictures of with the in-tention of replacing the background are on display at car shows known as a Concourse d’Elegance. These shows are held all over the U.S., from Pebble Beach in California to Amelia Island in Florida, and from Plymouth, Michigan to Lexington, Kentucky. You can find dates and locations of the various Con-courses online.

I go to these particular shows for two reasons. The best cars in the world on represented, and the cars are usually parked on grass. That means that I don’t have to recreate shadows in Photoshop, and it also means that making the wheels look like they are actually on the ground isn’t an issue. That makes this proce-dure much, much easier.

There are several steps in the procedure, but it is Step 1 that is the most important. Once you

It is hard not to be enthralled by clas-sic cars. They are like works of art on wheels. At car shows, it’s next to im-

possible to take ideal pictures of them because the backgrounds are so bad. Dozens of people, vendors, temporary tents, other cars, and vari-ous buildings are all distracting and unattract-ive. Photographers usually settle for the details on the cars -- which make nice pictures for sure, like the spare tire on a 1932 Packard, below -- but ultimately this isn’t really what we want.

I am currently working on a coffee table book of classic cars, and it wouldn’t make sense to spend the time and money to contact owners of classic cars and arrange a private shoot in some beau-tiful location. Therefore, I’m using Photoshop to replace the original backgrounds with images from my files, and that makes all the difference in the world. I thought you would like to know how I do this in a step by step explanation.

complete this first part of the technique, the rest is easy.

Step 1. In order to separate the car from its background, you have to use the pen tool. No other Photoshop tool can do this as precisely, and no other tool will give you a result that is as believable.

The pen is very simple to use. Don’t let it in-timidate you. The red arrow in the screen cap-ture below points to the pen tool icon. With

the pen tool selected, you lay down a series of anchor points along the edge of the car. I work at 300% to make sure the points are placed per-fectly. I started at the bumper or some point on the fender on one side of the car and place anchor points around the hood, the roof, and then down the other side to a place approxi-mately level with the first point.

When this is complete, I place five more points. Assuming I went from the left side of the car to the right, I then place an anchor point on the right edge of the frame level with the last point on the car, then another one in the upper right corner, then one in the upper left corner, then down the left side level with the first point, and finally I touch the first anchor point with the pen tool. This completes the circuit.

As soon as the circuit is complete, the points disappear and they turn into a solid line. This

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is a path. It is not a selection . . . yet.

Step 2. In Photoshop, you should always have the layers/channels/paths palette open. If the paths palette isn’t showing, open it with: Win-dow > paths.

In the paths pal-ette, you will see the icon of the work path at the upper left. In the upper right corner of the palette (green arrow) there is a little icon. Click on this and you

will see a pull-down submenu. Choose make selection, and in the dialog box that opens select a one pixel feather. Instantly, the path becomes a selection of ‘marching ants’. What

you see now is the entire background selected.

Step 3. Choose Select > modify > expand. In the new dialog box, choose a one pixel feather. Do-ing this expands the selection by one pixel, and this eliminates telltale color along the edge of the car from the original background.

Step 4. Choose Select > save selection, then File > save. This permanently saves the selection so

UPCOMING PHOTO WORKSHOPS

Winter Wildlife WorkshopHinckley, MinnesotaJan. 31 - Feb. 2, 2014

Baby WildlifeWorkshopHinckley, MinnesotaJune 13 - 15, 2014

Frog & Reptile WorkshopSt. Louis, Missouri

Changed to Jan. 25-26, 2014

Two back-to-back Carnival Workshops, Venice, Italy

Feb. 21 - 27 - 23, 2014Feb. 27 - March 5, 2014

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you never have to make it again, and you can quickly load the selection at any point in the future.

Step 5. You now have to select the windows. Use the pen tool again, this time laying down anchor points around the periphery of each window, one by one. After you finish each win-dow, go to the paths palette and turn the path into a selection. Repeat steps 2, 3 and 4 for each window in the vehicle.

Step 6. You will end up with a few different saved selections, and to combine them all into one selection, open the channels pallette where you will see all of them. Hold down the com-mand key (for Mac users) or the alt key (for PC users) plus the shift key, and click on each of the saved selections you see. If you didn’t name the selections when saving them, they will be labeled alpha 1, alpha 2, etc. By holding

down the shift plus the command or alt keys and clicking each of the channels, they will all be activated and you’ll see the marching ants. Choose Select > save selection. Now you’ll have one large selection that encompasses the entire background including the windows.

Step 7. Choose a background image from your files. Make sure the lighting matches. If the car was photographed with diffused light from an overcast sky, the background image must have the same light. If you shot the car with direct sunlight late in the afternoon with the sun at your back, the landscape (or cityscape) should have the same type of golden light.

The background picture should be close to, or identical with, the resolution of the car photo. For example, don’t combine a picture of a car that you took using an iPhone with a landscape taken with a Canon 5D Mark III.

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Step 8. With the background photo active, choose Select > all, and then Edit > copy. This places the background shot into the clipboard, Photoshop’s temporary holding place. Here the image waits to be pasted into another im-age.

Step 9. Click on the car image, make sure the selection is active with marching ants, and then choose Edit > paste special > paste into. The background has now been inserted into the se-lection. With the move tool, you can move the background as you wish.

If you can see part of the background through glass as opposed to an open window, one way to lower the contrast and suggest that the glass is really there (because you had to cut out the window with the pen tool) is to fill the window with about 10% or 15% opacity of the color white. You can do that with this pull down

menu command: Edit > fill.

Step 10. With the clone tool and/or the healing brush tools, blend the edge of the grass with the background. It is very important that you do this well. The way I do this is to choose a lowered opacity for the clone tool, such as 40%, and I will then blend the grass up into the background a tiny amount and/or blend some of the back-ground down into the edge of the grass. That helps blend the two images together very well.

The key to this technique is choosing the right background. The lighting on the landscape or cityscape must match the lighting on the car, the perspective has to match, where you place the horizon must make sense given your shooting angle and the lens you used, and of course the background should compliment the vehicle and not detract from it.§

H u m m i n g b i r d p h o t o g r a p h y

I wrote about photographing hum-mingbirds three years ago in this publication, but I thought I would

revisit the technique because I have many new subscribers, because summer is a great time to shoot hummers, and because if you do it right, the images are fantastic.

Hummingbirds only live in the Western Hemi-sphere. They can’t survive cold weather, so the species that populate the temperature regions of North America must migrate south for the winter. There are over 300 species of hum-mingbirds in the world, and less than two doz-en are seen in the U.S. and Canada. The reason I bring my hummingbird photo tour to Costa Rica is because there are so many species of stunning tropical hummers that live there.

The wings of some species of hummers flap 80

times per second, which makes it impossible to freeze the wings with normal shutter speeds (sure, you can use shutter speeds like 1/4000th or 1/8000th of a second, but that would give you no depth of field and the ISO would have to be extremely high -- something no photog-rapher wants). Anyone can photograph a hum-mer and blur the wings, but to see and appreci-ate the exquisite detail in these little gems, they have to be captured in flight with tack sharp clarity.

So, how do you do that?

Here is an outline of the technique:

1. You must use 3 or 4 flash units placed off-camera..

2. The power of the flashes must be turned

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down to 1/16th power on manual mode.

3. A photo print of out of focus foliage is placed behind the setup, i.e. the flower.

4. The exposure is determined by the distance of the flash units to the hummingbird in con-junction with the f/stop.

5. You must attract the birds to a flower with a nectar solution.

Now, the details

The reason flash must be used is because the flash duration can be reduced. For example, if you reduce the power output to 1/16th power, the flash duration becomes approxi-mately 15,000th of a second. This will freeze the wings. The brief burst of light replaces the

shutter speed as the determining factor regard-ing whether or not the wings of the birds are frozen.

The problem, though, with doing this is that the light is reduced a great deal. To compensate for this, the flash units must be placed very close to the flower where the hummers will drink the nectar. The flash-to-subject distance should be about 15 inches. Surprisingly, the birds don’t mind this close proximity at all.

The physical setup

On the next page I show a diagram of the ar-rangement of the various elements that I use to photograph hummingbirds during my Costa Rica photo tour. The flower is about 8 feet from the camera, and the print of out of focus foliage is about 4 feet behind the flower.

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I use the out of focus foliage print to prevent the background from becoming black. Hum-mingbirds are diurnal, not nocturnal. A black background would look unnatural, and we never see this with our eyes. Therefore, I took several shots of out of focus foliage, made 20 x 30 inch prints, and I simply clip them to the back of a chair, a piece of foam core, or what-ever is handy.

The two flash units in front are approximately 15 inches from the flower, and the flash that serves as a backlight is also about 15 inches from the flower. The backlight isn’t crucial, but the other three lights are.

All of the flashes should be the same model. For example, all of the flash units could be Canon 430EX or Nikon SB600. You wouldn’t want to use three 430EX flashes plus one that is 580EX. Ghosting will likely occur if you do.

The best way to attract hummingbirds to the

photo location is to set up several feeders be-forehand. Let the birds get used to taking nec-tar from them over a period of weeks. When you are ready to shoot, and all the flash units are in place (on light stands or clamped to the back of a chair), remove all the feeders and in-sert some nectar into a single brightly colored flower that is positioned exactly where you want it. I suggest putting it in the shade. The birds will instantly start nectaring from the flower.

I suggest a tripod so you don’t have to hold the camera and worry about focus. Prefocus on the flower and then turn the autofocus off. Sit down, sip some iced tea, and wait for the birds. In Costa Rica, it’s a constant parade of exotic and colorful birds.

The exposure

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Even before the hummingbirds start nectaring, take a test exposure or two on the flower and the background. If either the foreground or blurred foliage print are too light or too dark, vary the exposure by moving the flash units closer to or farther away.

I suggest an f/stop of f/14 or f/16. This gives you enough depth of field so the entire flower and bird will be sharp.

The shutter speed should be 1/200th or 1/250th. These speeds are the maximum sync speeds on most cameras. The f/stop - shutter speed com-bination will eliminate the ambient light, which is what you want, so the only illumination comes from the flash.

Recycle time

Usually when we use flash, we must consider the recycle time, i.e. the time it takes for the ca-

pacitor in the flash to charge after having been depleted because you just took a picture. If you use the flash with a small f/stop or on manual mode so the flash puts out maximum light, or if the batteries are low, the recycle time will become fairly long. This is always frustrating because you can’t shoot until the flash is ready.

When you shoot with the flash reduced to 1/16th power, however, the recycle time is al-most instantaneous. As a hummingbird hov-ers over the flower, you can shoot as fast as your finger can push the shutter button repeatedly. I don’t use motor drive; instead I manually push the shutter button and the flash always fires providing the batteries are fresh.

Since it’s impossible to see the position of the wings as you shoot, take as many as you can while each hummer hovers above the flower. Many of the images will be discarded, but you’ll get many winners, too.§

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E-books to help you take better pictures

Click on any ebook to see inside

busy backgrounds: A r e t h e y a l w a y s b a d?

Many photo instructors, including myself, teach that messy, distracting backgrounds draw attention away from the subject, and a big mess behind the subject is unattract-ive and unappealing.

There are three photos on this page. All of them have a lot going on in the back-ground, but two of them don’t work at all while one of them is successful. Which one of these three pictures do you think works?

Let me tell you my thoughts about these busy backgrounds, and then you will see if we agree or not.

The picture of the mother and baby baboon is very cute, but the root of the tree and the other elements in the background are terri-bly distracting. The background has a lot of detail, and the fact that it is slightly out of focus adds to the problem in my opinion. In addition, the animals seem to blend in to the mess behind them.

I worked hard to get the shot of the African jacana, the bird in the marshy environment, because I was hand holding a 500mm tele-photo and a 1.4X teleconverter from a boat. The reeds and grasses sticking up all over the place, though, are so graphic and so prominent that they detract from the bird.

The two women of the Ndebele tribe of

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South Africa are sitting in front of a very busy background, but in this case the photo works in my opinion. The reason is that there are two subjects here: the women and the unique graphic design on the architecture. Yes, our eyes wander, but they go from one subject to another.

Usually, graphic elements in the background that are not part of the subject take attention away from it. That’s why they are distracting. But if the graphic lines are either part of the subject or they can be considered a second sub-ject, then the composition works.

The same is true of the image below from my Carnival in Venice workshop. There are two subjects, the model and the colorful houses on Burano Island. The background is definitely busy, but it works.

In the shot of the gerenuk, right, the back-

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ground would be distracting if it were sharp or slightly blurred so we could see definition in the distant foliage. Because it is blurred and completely undefined, the background works. Blurring a messy background is one way to deal with the problem, but only if the elements are so blurred that there is virtually no definition in them at all.

The photo of the giraffe, below, is an exam-ple where the background isn’t out of focus enough. The tree right behind the animal is distracting because it’s too graphic, too defined, and the sunny hotspot on it is also a negative. The shot at right, on the other hand, has two subjects -- the giraffe and the landscape. Therefore, they should both be sharp. The distant background, though, isn’t sharp enough. This was taken with a me-dium format film camera in the 90s, and the depth of field wasn’t sufficient.§

Costa Rica Photo Tour Nov. 30 - Dec. 6, 2013

Hummingbird shoots Reptile shoot Mt. Arenal Waterfalls

The ability to ‘see photographically’, to re-ally grasp how your camera and lenses cap-ture a subject or scene (which is different than how we see with our eyes) underlies successful picture taking. It is the bottom line that you’ve been looking for to take that quantum leap forward in your pho-tography.

When you register for the course, you are given download links to eight easy-to-un-derstand lessons that look like beautiful mini ebooks. At your convenience, you can study the material and then upload your photos for a professional critique by Jim. Included in the course is a phone call once a week to discuss your submissions or any other aspect of photography you want -- what new equipment to buy, advice about airline travel, problems with flash, or any-thing else.

This course can be purchased directly from Jim’s website by clicking here.

The great thing about online courses is that they can fit into any schedule. Life gets in the way at times, and Jim puts no limit on the time you can submit your work for his critiques.

New OnLine Course: LEARNING TO SEE by Jim Zuckerman

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LEARNING TO SEE online courseThe 8 lessons that comprise this course are: Graphic design, Backgrounds, Depth of field, Patterns, Natural light, Color, Composition, and Motion. These lessons are beautifully illustrated and full of concrete steps to dramatically improve your photography.

What’s wrong with this picture?

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I took this picture during my winter wildlife workshop in Minnesota, and I like the image a lot except for one thing. The tree is not sharp and it needs to be. I made a mistake when I

shot this. I was using a 300mm lens, and my shutter speed was 1/2000th of a second. This forced the lens aperture to be too large --f/4.5 -- and as a result, the depth of field was much too shallow. The shutter speed was overkill. Had I been using a speed of 1/300, that is a 2 2/3 f/stop change. My lens aperture would have been f/11, and that would have given me the depth of field I needed to take a successful picture. I wouldn’t exactly call this a failure, but I don’t like it as I took it.

To have such a prominent foreground element out of focus is almost always a mistake. It’s distract-ing, visually annoying, and it degrades the image significantly. Our eyes never see this. The out of focus background is fine because that helps direct all the attention on the wolf, but the foreground tree being soft like that is bad.

Might this picture sell? Yes, it could. But that still doesn’t mean it’s good.

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So, how can a situation like this be rectified? After I shot the wolf with the 300mm lens, I quickly realized that the tree was out of focus. My attention had been on the animal, and once I got the shot, my eye looked over the rest of the composition and I noticed the problem. Therefore, with-out changing the shooting position or any of the camera settings, I focused on the tree trunk and took a sharp picture.

When I got home, I used the pen tool to create a path, then a selection, of the sharp tree trunk image just as I explained in the article about replacing backgrounds behind classic cars. Then, I copied it to the clipboard and pasted the sharp tree over the blurred trunk, and with the image magnified to 200% I eliminated any tell-tail edges of the underlying blurred tree.

For those of you who may feel this is cheating when it comes to nature photography, all I’m doing is making the image just like I saw it with my eyes. The laws of optics have limitations, and now we can use post-processing techniques to make our images look more realistic (i.e. as our eye/brain combination perceives the scene).

SHORT AND SWEET

1. Look closely at this portrait of a wild dog in Na-mibia and you’ll see that the nose isn’t sharp. This isn’t good. I should have raised the ISO or lowered the shutter speed, or both, so I could have closed the lens down more. This shot requires f/11 or f/16.

3. Try toning your black and white images, or your color images converted to B & W, with a bluish tone. It adds a nice mood. You can do this easily once the image has been converted to b & w using: Image > adjustments > color balance. Move the blue and the cyan sliders until you like what you see.

2. Junker cars make fun subjects to shoot. Do a search online for junk yards in your area. Closeups of the rusting detail can yieild some very cool images. On my American Southwest photo tour, I’m including a stop at a place like this -- it’s truly captivating.

4. There are many ways of turning photos into what looks like paintings. Corel Painter is a progarm that lets you feel like an artist where you apply brush strokes of any kind and shape. In additon, when you paint a photo composite that isn’t perfect (such as when cutting around hair), the brush strokes eliminate the flaws. §

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c o m i n g s o o n c o m i n g s o o n

Photography Tours 2013 - 2015LONDON/PARIS (sold out)Sept. 2013

COSTA RICADecember, 2013

TIGERS, PANDAS, ICE FES-TIVAL in CHINA. Jan. 2014

Check out the itineraries and photo galleries from these and other tours: www.jimzuckerman.com.

CARNIVAL IN VENICEFebruary, 2014

BURMA (Myanmar)April, 2014

AM SOUTHWESTApril, 2014

GREENLANDJune, 2014

SOUTH INDIAMay, 2014

WHITE HORSESApril, 2014

KENYAAugust, 2014

JAPAN February, 2015

MOROCCOMarch, 2015

c o m i n g s o o n c o m i n g s o o n

c o m i n g s o o n

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ASK JIM Every month Jim will answer a question from his online students, from people who participate in his tours and workshops, or from subscribers to this magazine. If you have a question you’d like Jim to answer, please drop him a note at photos@jimzuckerman.com.

Q: I want to know why my dog is so dark in this picture. The sun was low in the sky in the late afternoon, and I thought this was a good time to take pictures.Donika Haddock, Poquoson, Virginia

A: The problem, Donika, is one of contrast. Digital sensors can’t reveal the range of detail in highlights and shadows that we can see with our eye/brain combination. For example, the side of your dog facing the camera didn’t look this dark when you stood there composing the picture. Most of the frame shows the bright sunlight on the grass, and that’s what the meter correctly exposed for. The shadow was two or three f/stops darker, and in essence it was ‘sacrificed’ for the good exposure on the grass. The dynamic range of sensors is limited -- meaning in contrasty situations like this, you can’t record detail in both the bright high-lights (i.e. the grass) and the dark shadows in a single picture.

The solution? You can do three things. (1). Bring the dog into the shade and use diffused light, (2) youcan use fill flash, or (3) you can wait until the sun is so low on the horizon that the contrast has beensignificantly reduced. With diminished contrast, you can take very nice pictures without worrying aboutshadows that are so dark.

Jim

© Donika Haddock 2013

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Carnival in Venice February, 2014

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THE PHOTO CHALLENGE

Photographing flying birds isn’t easy. I took the shot of a roseate spoonbill, above, in Tampa Bay, Florida from a

boat, and the movement of the boat plus the use-lessness of a tripod on a moving platform com-pounded the problem.

Here are the major challenges:

1. The distance from the bird to the camera chang-es constantly, thus focusing is very, very tough.

2. The telephoto lens you are using is heavy, and the longer the focal length, the heavier it is. It’s hard to hold the camera and lens steady.

3. Keeping the bird in the frame is difficult, es-pecially if you are trying for a frame-filling shot. This is especially hard if the bird flies fast.

4. Freezing the wings in low light environ-ments is a real challenge.

Here are the solutions:

1. Turn all of your autofocus points on. This helps the autofocus mechanism catch some part of the bird against the sky. In addition, use the autofocus mechanism that automati-cally tracks a moving subject. Some are bet-ter than others, but they are much faster than you can manually focus.

Another option is to prefocus on a spot ahead of the bird --if you can determine its flight path -- and use manual focus mode. When the bird flies into that point, shoot us-ing the fastest frame rate you’ve got. That’s exactly how I captured the harris hawk in

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flight below. I was at a Renaissance Faire, and a bird handler was flying raptors over the crowd. The hawk flew three times and I was able to pre-dict, approximately, where it was going to pass.

2.Use a special gimbal ball head, like the Wimber-ly, to take all the weight off your arms and shoul-ders. It rotates in all directions freely, like a gun turret, and you can follow birds easily.

If you are on a boat, it can still be used simply because it supports the lens. The only time it is inhibiting is if the birds are flying directly above you. In that case, it’s easier to hand hold the lens.

3. Keeping the bird in the frame is simply a mat-ter of practice. The more you try, the more you’ll feel the rhythm of the birds’ movements.

4. To freeze the wings when in flight, use the fast-est shutter speed possible. Depth of field is not

a luxury you can have. I recommend shoot on aperture priority and choose the large aperture on the lens. If the shutter still isn’t fast enough, then the only other option is to raise the ISO until the speed of the shutter is what you want.

How fast should the shutter be? It depends on the species of bird. For egrets and herons whose wings flap relatively slowly, I would use 1/400th of a second or faster. For birds with very fast flap rates, I would use at least 1/1600th if possible.

You can see in the shot of the harris hawk that the wing tips aren’t tack sharp. I shot this at 1/640th of second at 200 ISO. That was a mistake. I should have taken this at 800 ISO and used a shutter speed of 1/2500th. Had I done that, the wings would have been sharp.§

Get professional critiques of your work with Jim’s online courses

Betterphoto.com

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Get professional critiques of your work with Jim’s online courses

betterphoto.com Learn composition, exposure, Photoshop, beginning fundamentals, techniques

in low light photography, flash, making money in photography, and moreat your convenience and on your schedule.

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Student ShowcaseEach month, Jim features one or more students who took beautiful and inspiring images on one of his pho-tography tours or workshops. It’s really fascinating how photographers see and compose such different images even though we may go to the same place. Everyone gets great images on my trips.

Dr. Bill Grisaitis, Orlando, FloridaTurkey photo tour, Indonesia photo tour, Carnival in Venice, Vermont photo tour,and Namibia this coming November.

31 © Dr. Bill Grisaitis

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Dr. Bill Grisaitis, Orlando, Florida

© Dr. Bill Grisaitis

Dr. Bill Grisaitis, Orlando, Florida

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© Dr. Bill Grisaitis

PHOTOSHOP WORKSHOP Sat. & Sun., Sept. 21, 22

Photoshop is a photographer’s best friend, and the creative possi-bilities are absolutely endless. In a personal and ‘homey’ environ-ment (I have a very cool classroom setup in my home), I start at the beginning -- assuming you know nothing -- but I quickly get into layers, cutting and pasting, plug-ins, using ‘grunge’ textures, modifying lighting, and a lot more. I promise to fill your head with so many great techniques that you won’t believe what you’ll be able to do. I go over each technique several times to make sure you understand it and can remember it.

Photoshop instructors approach teaching this program from dif-ferent points of view. My approach is to be as expansive in my thinking as possible in creating unique, artistic, and compelling images. In addition to showing you how to use the various tools, pull down menus, layers, and so on, I spend a lot of time giving you

creative ideas that will inspire you to produce amazing images with the pictures you’ve already taken.

I live in the Nashville, Tennessee area, and if you fly into the airport (BNA) I will pick you up. If you drive, I’ll give you my address and you can find my home on Mapquest. For the $450 fee, I include one dinner in my home (prepared by my wife who is an amazing cook and hostess) and two lunches, plus shuttling you back and forth from my home to your nearby hotel.

Contact me if you would like to participate in the workshop and I will tell you how to sign up (photos@jimzuckerman.com). All you need is a laptop and a lot of your pictures. If you don’t have a laptop, I have two Mac Book Pro laptops I can loan out for the duration of the workshop. §

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PHOTO INSIGHTS®published by Jim Zuckerman, all rights reserved

© Jim Zuckerman 2013 email: photos@jimzuckerman.com

physical address: P.O. Box 7, Arrington, TN 37014