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December 7th, 2011 by: Pete-V
My father is an incredible photographer. I remember being very young, smelling the chemicals from his improvised dark room – a staple of just about every weekend in my house. He has an unimpressive Pentax (maybe Nikon) SLR from the 60′s that he used to capture some vibrant and sobering imagery from the Vietnam War, particularly of children playing or talking to soldiers.
The Sunrise in New Orleans, by Pete Vigeant
I grew up with this level as the standard of photography and I can’t remember not having a camera of my own. Unfortunately, for years I was never able to get the same level of detail or focus in my photos. I was given an endless array of basic film cameras that (at first) had no focus at all or handled everything automatically. And these were film cameras, meaning that every photo cost money and was taken with a large dose of mystery. I remember sitting underneath a race track trying to get a single photo of a Hot Wheels car flying through the air… I never saw that picture, which likely means that by the time I got the film developed, I was stuck with a couple of ceiling shots that made no sense.
I met several photographers in college. They had similar cameras to my father and spent endless hours taking photo after photo, nervous that the exact shot they need wasn’t going to make it to film. As an outgoing dynamic performer, I was the subject of many long and tedious shoots – solidifying my concession that I would never be a male model (yes, that was my decision and I’m sticking to it!)
The Riverboat, by Pete Vigeant
Near the end of my college career, I took an Adobe Photoshop class. I had already used Photoshop a million times, but on a very shallow level. The professor had taught photography for over a decade and completely quit film in the early 2000′s, much to her peer’s dismay.
“A revolution is coming,” she told us, “The revolution of digital.”
I marveled at the power of Photoshop and I believed her that digital was the future, although my photography friends argued otherwise.
Eventually, I was given a digital SLR from my wife. It’s the greatest camera I’ve ever had – and I’ve always had a camera. Finally I was able to take the photos that I saw in my head. I can review the pictures instantly and still have advanced control over my scene – although I’m still (after years) fuzzy on all of the functionality. Truth be told, if I could take the class at iD, I would!
New Zealand - Mount Tongariro, by Pete Vigeant
I can experiment in ways I never could with film and bring my pictures to a new place using tools like Photoshop. In general, though, I don’t even need to get that far – I have the ability to take stunning memories and capture them the way I remember (like a pensive!)
Anita on a Pumpkin, by Pete Vigeant
I don’t think it’s likely that I will ever out-photograph my father, but because I am committed to documenting my world, my family and friends will remember the world from my point of view – and I will be able to share that point of view exactly as I want.
December 7th, 2011 | Tags: adobe photoshop, digital photography, photography, Photoshop, summer camp, summer photography class
Posted in: iD Tech Bloggers, Summer Camps
April 23rd, 2010 by: Josh
Hey guys!
I was just shown some awesome pictures taken by the campers at our spring break beta camp and I wanted to share! When I first saw the email, I assumed that these were taken by one of our in-house pros (lookin’ at you Marta) but I was stoked to find out that they were, in fact, the products of campers in our photography course!
I can’t wait to see the photography that comes out of this summer! With such a variety of settings, from our West Coast Washington Summer Camps all the way to our East Coast Baltimore summer camps, I’m expecting to see some awesome photography from our kids camps nationally! In fact, I should say internationally as we’ve expanded in to Canada with our Vancouver Summer Camps and others!
Next week I’ll be heading up to our headquarters in San Jose for Pete’s famous Paella Night. Long time readers know that means my next blog will likely include the documentation of some epic pranks… at Pete’s expense!
April 23rd, 2010 | Tags: cameras, photography
Posted in: iD Tech Bloggers
October 27th, 2009 by: Justin
This is a large format camera:
Unlike your digital camera (which most likely doesn’t even need you to focus), or an old-school SLR film camera (which only needs focus, shutter speed, and aperture), a large format camera has a lot of controls. Check out how each piece moves in 3 dimensions in the picture below:
2 of the adjustments you can make are called tilt and shift. Without getting TOO technical, what you’re doing is moving different focus planes to interact with each other in a way that you can’t really do with other cameras, thus selecting a certain region of the film to be in focus. There are modern tools that can do this on modern cameras (even digital!) – for example, lensbaby.com offers a lens that can make those adjustments. What will this do for you? You may remember this picture from a previous blog entry:
So, if you don’t have an extra $350 to spend on a lens (ok, let’s face it, you’re going to use it to buy video games and Mt. Dew), you can still acheive this same effect with a Gaussian Blur. It’s a great effect. You take a picture of normal sized people and magically they become miniatures!
Select a round (circular or oval-shaped) selection around the center, in focus, portion of your photo. Invert your selection and feather it by a lot. 100 pixels isn’t too many. Select Gaussian Blur from the filters section and experiment with settings. Can you make a photo look like these?
Email me *your* contributions at justin(at)internaldrive.com (@ symbol left out intentionally to prevent robotic spam crawling!) and I’ll post the best ones in a future entry.
October 27th, 2009 | Tags: iD Tech Camp, photography, Photoshop
Posted in: iD Tech Bloggers
February 24th, 2009 by: Justin
The temptation is great. Filters are awesome. Everyone has their own artistic vision, but after the shiny-newness of all those cool Alien Skin filters we all love to use wears off a bit, you may want to take your photos to the next level, and the way to do that is by subtle changes.
Here is a before-and-after. The original is a film photograph I took in my photo studio, and had printed by my high-end local photo shop. Because they have color chemistry, their black-and-white prints always come out as sepia. (CLick on image to see it larger.)
The modified photo has gone through the subtle set of changes that I feel makes for a stronger photo. In this case, the subject matter is neutral, and therefore could be considered a bit boring, but I chose it because there is nothing to take away your interest from the pure processing differences between the two images.
You want the nitty-gritty on the changes I made, don’t you! Well, I’ll give you the basics here, and stay tuned for the video version, with the walkthrough of the changes I’ve made.
First, I scanned the image with all presets off – no in-scanner-sharpening or anything like that. I cranked up the brightness in the brightness/contrast adjustment until the histogram shows the brightest part of the photo nearly at the right edge. Contrast is also increased to give more drama. Adjustments/Black and White is next, bringing it back from sepia to true greyscale. Some people prefer sepia, but I’m showing you what I personally chose, so there you are. A little bit of vignetting is added through the filter/distort/lens correction selection, and there you have it. I didn’t do anything drastic. Practice with these few adjustments and see how much better your own photos start to look!
February 24th, 2009 | Tags: contrast, filters, id tech, photo, photographs, photography, Photoshop CS4, tutorial
Posted in: iD Tech Bloggers
January 18th, 2009 by: Justin
It’s me again. If you’re like me, you really aren’t into reading directions. Particularly when it comes to computer applications (and games), I prefer to dive in head-first and just start working, clicking through menus and exploring the various options and what they do. Therefore, I don’t always go as deep into applications as I would had I taken a seminar or class, or read a book. With Photoshop CS4, however, I have found some really cool features! One of my favorites is the action manager: you can use it to manage repetitive tasks. For instance, I scan a lot of photos, and when all of the photos are the same initial size, I end up doing the same thing, over and over. I cut my scanning time in half by using the actions manager (which you can get to by making sure that windows/actions is checked) to record an entire action that you often repeat. I use it to connect to the scanner, scan a set sized photo, and save it, all with one keystroke. All I have to do is swap photos, hit that key, and I’m ready to go again – no more mousing around in menus.
CS4 has been very, very good to me.
January 18th, 2009 | Tags: computer camp, CS4, macro, photography, Photoshop, recording, time saving
Posted in: iD Tech Bloggers
January 15th, 2009 by: Justin
Hi, I’m Justin. Some of you may know me already — maybe we met at a camp fair, or at one of the iD Tech Camps locations that I run, or maybe it was at one of our training sessions. For those of you who I haven’t yet gotten an opportunity to meet, I’m one of the Regional Managers here at iD. I am responsible for camps which are mostly located in the southeastern part of the country.
I’ll be writing some blog entries here on the internalDrive website, so if there is a topic you’d like to hear about, let me know! My interests include video games and gaming (especially RPGs!), playing guitar (and Guitar Hero III), soccer, web design, photography, and filmmaking, to name a few. I’m also going to be creating some tutorials on some of the basics of file usage and importing and exporting with different software.
I’m always asking myself questions, and for those who have met me at camp, I tend to ask a lot of questions there, too. I think that is one way to keep improving. “How can this be better? What sort of things do people find the most interesting?” These are a couple of questions that I tend to ask of our iD Tech Camps summer campers when I get the chance to check out their projects.
I can’t wait for summer!
January 15th, 2009 | Tags: camps, iD Tech Camps, introduction, Justin, Manager, photography
Posted in: iD Tech Bloggers
