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.
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.
All of us have that friend – the computer wizard. Even among the so-called power users, some people still shine as outstanding. What’s their secret? One secret to super-speed is to know the shortcuts for the programs you’re using. We all hunt through menus to find what we’re looking for, but that’s for newbs. Once you start getting expert, sorting through menus just takes time that could be better spent tweaking details in your images.
Enter the keyboard shortcut. This is how those speedy users get so fast. One key combo, and they’ve zoomed in, or saved, or switched from one image to another. Try it yourself! Here (thanks to Trevor Morris) is an awesome resource; all of the keyboard shortcuts for CS4 – both Mac and PC versions!
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.
Expertise: Photoshop, Illustrator & Graphic Design, Prairie Dogs, Corn, Driving Tractors, Moonwalking, and Guessing the Quantity of Random Objects in A Jar
