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!

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.

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!

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.

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!