On burning and dodging.

Flickr blog: Camera Collections

Full program on PBS: The President's Photographer.

Some great shots by Gordon Parks in the early 1940s.

Creative challenge

Looking for something to shoot this week? Here is an idea.. find random letters or objects that look like letters and shoot the alphabet -- or, just your name or a word. It can be a bit of a challenge.
Then make them into one image with Photoshop! Example.

Make your own mini studio!

Wedding photography doesn't get much better than this guy..

I was talking about Lightroom Presets in class.. you can find a bunch of free ones here.

A nice roundup of RAW vs. JPEG.

This is kind of funny.. a guy posts a famous photo for people to critique on Flickr, and....

Mounting

Hey folks, if you want to practice mounting the last week of class (July 26 & 28), here is what you'll need:

• One or two 8x10 prints
• 11x14" foam core (3/16th inch thick)

• Optional: 11x14" (8x10" window) matte.

You can find the foam core at Hobby Lobby, a two pack of the "ghost line" is something like $6.
I might recommend Hy-Vee for your prints, although I did a Walgreens print and it worked fine.

Mounting Handout.

Top 10 Photography cliches... what do you think?

Examples, fixed

Motion Speed Time Examples:

One

Two


Three (I don't remember how she did this one! Some kind of light?)

Update

Hi all,

Tonight we did this in-class panorama practice. Here is Sara's!

If you want to do your own in the next week July 19 (besides the practice shot tonight) you can get up to 10 points E.C.

Other than that we just edited some photos tonight and talked about how to do a quick vintage look in Camera Raw. We also looked at some examples of the "lines" assignment. Here is some inspiration.

Thursday I'll do a quick review on composition. Then we can shoot some portraits of our classmates for our books. You'll just need a photo of yourself for the inside page -- it can be serious, fun, dramatic -- we'll have some fun in the studio. (You can have someone take a photo of you with your own camera so we don't have to worry about getting the photos off another person's memory card).

We can also have time to catch up on Photoshop work AND make sure you have 20 or so photos picked out that you want to use for the book. We can get started on any re-editing that needs to be done, in addition to resizing and sharpening/brightening for print.

Andy

Tomorrow...

Hey folks.. tomorrow if the weather holds out let's go outside and shoot some panoramas.

I'll have a handout, but here is a website that describes the process if you want to practice. We'll do a practice in class and then you can do one on your own for extra credit and the book.

You'll also have some time to edit your "Seven Thirteen" and Seven Deadly Sins assignments if needed.

THURSDAY, we'll start picking out photos for the book, which must be ordered by 7/12 -- we'll have some time that day in class to work on it as well.

Challenge!

Challenge for over the weekend: Fireworks!

You'll need a tripod, and set your camera to manual.

Shutter speed: about 1 second, more or less. You'll have to experiment quickly as the fireworks go off. If you leave the shutter open for too long, you'll have too many fireworks going off and it won't look good. The above shot had a shutter of just .8 seconds.
Timing is tricky so just keep shooting.
Aperture: f/4, f/5.6 or something relatively open.
ISO: 200 or 400
Focus: Set to manual. You'll probably set it to "infinity" -- for Canon users, it's a little tricky because infinity is usually not quite all the way when you turn the focus. Look through the lens and you can try to eyeball it. Zoom in, focus, and zoom out if needed.

If you want to shoot the fireworks in Des Moines, a good spot is atop the parking garage here, just north/across the street of the Iowa Historical Building. Bring a small radio and tune into 90.1 fm to listen to the orchestra!