ON-LINE PHOTO INSTRUCTION-- with detailed critiques of your work
My new 4-week and 8-week courses begin again at Betterphoto.com on Wednesday, May 9, 2012.
To improve your compositional skills, for example, click HERE to check out the outline of the Developing Your Creative Artistic Vision course to see if you feel this subject matter is exactly what you need.
I have a new photoshop course called Photoshop: Thinking Outside the Box.
You can click HERE to see the outline of this unique course that will introduce some intriguing techniques that you've probably not tried before -- like 3D, making a sketch, and more. It is very different from my other Photoshop courses, and it's a lot of fun.
Do you want to make money in photography? Want to feel more confident in using natural light outdoors? Interested in learning more about Photoshop (like putting fireworks in the sky or removing lens flare). Are you insecure about your exposure skills?
The way the courses work is this. Every Wednesday you receive a lesson that consists of text and photos, explaining various principles in photography, marketing your work, digital manipulation, or whatever subject you are studying. At the end of each lesson there is an assignment, and you have plenty of time to take pictures and upload them for my critique. You can use photos you did specifically for the assignment or images that you have taken previously.
On-line photo courses are like virtual classrooms but not in real time. Other students can see your pictures, read my critiques, and comment on your work. Similarly, you can comment on the pictures of other students. It is a unique and wonderful learning experience.
One of the great things about these on-line courses is that students participate from all over the world. In a single lesson's uploads, you may see pictures from Bryce Canyon or Brazil, or from Singapore or South Carolina. It's a very stimulating environment, and it will help you become the photographer or digital artist that you would like to be.
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Tips for shooting action I just concluded two back-to-back photo workshops where participants photographed the magnificent white horses of the Camargue in Provence, France. There is something very special about horses in motion, and each group had six sessions with the horses. Except for one afternoon where we photographed mothers and foals, the photographic strategy was basically the same in capturing the horses running through the marshes, stallions rearing, and the beach shoot where horses ran over the dunes and in the surf. The bottom line is that you want to freeze the action so the remarkable detail that we can't freeze-frame in our minds can be revealed in our pictures. We also did some slow shutter speed panning shots of the horses running, but the most exciting images were the ones where a fast shutter speed froze the action.
Here are the camera settings I suggested to my group for the best results: 1. ISO 400. I usually use 200 ISO for outdoor shooting, but even in the fairly bright light, I wanted to guarantee fast enough shutter speeds to freeze the flying manes, the splashes of water, and the facial expressions of the horses. 2. Exposure mode on Program or Aperture priority. Manual mode would be much too slow - we would have lost the best action sequences while fumbling with the camera settings. For those who opted to use aperture priority, I suggested the largest aperture available on the lens because that would force the shutter to be as fast as possible, given the ISO and the ambient light. Depth of field was not a luxury we could afford here since it was the all-important speed of the shutter that produced sharp images. Alternatively, Program mode is designed to give you the fastest shutter speed minus 1/3 f/stop, so Av and P would produce virtually identical exposure data (they would be 1/3 f/stop apart). In either case, the goal was to not have to think about the camera settings once the action started. We had enough to do to keep the horses in focus. 
3. Daylight white balance. I use daylight WB for all of my outdoor shooting, even in overcast conditions. If the images are slightly bluish (which I usually don't mind at all) and I want a warmer look, I can correct that in post-processing. Auto white balance (AWB) would definitely be a mistake because it would 'correct' the golden tones of the sunrise and sunset lighting to be white, thus removing the golden color we love so much about low angled sunlight. 4. RAW mode. Jpegs lose too much detail in the highlights, and RAW is the first line of defense in protecting the vulnerable highlights from becoming overexposed and losing texture and detail. With white horses, there would be a danger of blowing the highlights if jpeg mode was used. 5. Drive function on multi. I told the group to switch from single shot to multiple shots to take advantage of the camera's ability to fire off many frames per second. Fast moving subjects like horses don't allow us to see and compose a picture after studying the composition in our viewfinder. Things change every millisecond, and therefore this is the time when you want to shoot many frames, hoping for a few outstanding images. 6. AF function on AI Servo. The autofocus mechanism isn't foolproof when shooting fast moving subjects coming directly at the camera. Even with auto focus tracking (AI servo), the camera may not keep up with the subjects, especially when you fill most of the frame with the subjects using a long lens like a 400mm or 500mm lens. Nevertheless, I suggested AI servo because it's the best chance we had to keep the horses in focus. I focused and then refocused several times as the horses approached, trying to assist the AF mechanism as best I could to keep the horses sharp. 
7. All autofocus points selected. On most cameras, you can choose the array of autofocus points. I usually use just the center point for most of my shooting, but in this case I suggested to the group that they use the entire array. I felt this was the most accurate way to focus on a phalanx of horses or on two stallions doing combat. All of the pictures you see here were taken with these settings. My shutter speeds ranged from 1/640 to 1/2000th of a second depending on the light.
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PHOTO TOUR PHILOSOPHY
During my Spain/Portugal photo tour that preceded the horse workshops, I had a discussion with the group about my philosophy in designing an itinerary. This came up because between a few of our destinations, long drives were necessary (about 4 hours). I told them that one of the most important ingredients in great photography is to shoot great subjects. Mediocre subjects photographed well are still mediocre, i.e. uninspiring or, worse, boring. Great subjects, on the other hand, inspire awe. That's why I spend time, energy, and money to seek out great subjects.
For example, in Spain I included the city of Bilbao, and this was admittedly a long drive from where we started in Lisbon. However, it happens to have one of the great architectural structures in the world, the Guggenheim Museum. At twilight, it's really something to behold as you can see below. Once the people in my group saw it, especially in dramatic lighting, they agreed it was worth the effort to get there.
Similarly, in Porto, Portugal, there is another architectural wonder that would have been worth any effort to get there. A bookstore in this city has one of the most beautiful staircases I've ever seen. The Lello Bookstore allows photography from 9 to 10 am every day except Sunday, and then when the bookstore opens at 10am, they ask people not to shoot so their normal business is not interrupted. The picture you see below was taken with a 14mm wide angle lens, and you can see why I included this in the itinerary. The classic curves, the red color, and the artistic design of the stairs were worth the effort to bring the group here. Personally I think this is one of the best subjects in Europe. 
It takes a lot of determination to put up with long drives, bad weather, rough roads, lack of sleep, carrying heavy gear, airline regulations, and dealing with 'no photos' and 'no tripods' in so many places just to get great pictures. I am willing to do that, though, and so are the people who travel with me on my photo tours. In the end, you forget about the energy, the time, and the frustration you've expended. You only remember the great experience of being there and the great photos you've taken. The photos last a lifetime. The other stuff is quickly forgotten.
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Symmetry 
When photographing symmetrical subjects, you have two choices. You can stand exactly dead center in front of the subject, or the camera position can be decidedly off-center. The photo above and the two pictures below of the National Carriage Museum in Lisbon, Portugal are examples.
What you should not do is stand slightly off-center. I see this all the time in the work students submit to me for critiques in my online courses, and I also see tour participants doing the same thing on my photo tours. Doors, windows, and other architectural subjects are usually symmetrical, and that means that if you stand even a few inches off-center, i.e. not exactly on the line perpendicular to the face of the architecture, the horizontal and vertical lines will be skewed. I don't think this looks good.
To make my point, look at the photo of a window I shot a few days ago in the beautiful medieval town, Les Baux, France. This really exaggerates the point I'm making because I was more than slightly off-center (in this case, there was another building positioned such that I couldn't shoot this from a central position; in addition, this window was on the second story and my only option was to shoot up at it), but you can see how the lines in this image are not parallel with the top and bottom of the frame. This is what you'll get if you shoot a symmetrical subject off-center.
Can you correct this kind of distortion after-the-fact? Yes, you can, with a couple of steps in Photoshop. Look at the image below.
To correct this, I used Photoshop and the following commands Select > all and then Edit > transform > distort. A box forms around the photograph and then you can grab any of the corners and drag them until the vertical lines are perfectly parallel with the top and bottom edges of the frame. Click return or enter when you are finished to keep the change. The handles on the box that forms around the image are tiny, but you can see them in the corners of the image if you look closely. If you want to get out of what you just did because you've made a mess and want to start over, click escape. That will remove the box around the picture. It is always best to make a perfect picture to begin with, but sometimes you are shooting fast and aren't paying careful attention to what you're doing, and sometimes it's just not possible to stand in the center to get a perfect image. In these cases, Photoshop is the perfect solution. |
| Cutting and Pasting
Photoshop's ability to alter and transform photographs is endless. There are many, many things you can do, from simple color and contrast changes to creating fantasy images. The backbone of my own digital darkroom work is cutting and pasting images together because the creative potential is truly incredible.
I thought it would be helpful to you if I outlined the step-by-step process I use for putting pictures together. An image may have specific challenges (such as dealing with hair), but this is the procedure I use over and over again for most of my composites.
1. Choose the images for the composite. For me, this usually consists of a background image, such as a sunset, storm clouds, an abstract, a night cityscape, a landscape, etc., and a main subject. In the photo of the horse above, you can see that I've chosen the stormy sky as the background (the sky was significantly dramatized by using the Tonal Contrast filter in Nik Software's Color Efex Pro 4) and the horse as the subject. In this particular case, I used the plug-in Flood (made by flamingpear.com) to make it look like the horse was standing in water. Actually, my photo tour group and I photographed this horse in an indoor arena.
I set this up specifically so the background would be black when we used flash. This made it easier to use in composite work.
2. Carefully select the subject. The selection has to be perfect or else the final composite won't be believable. Therefore I usually use the pen tool in Photoshop to do this. This is the most precise way to cut out any subject, and if you have a particularly complex subject against a busy background (such as the carriage below where the original background was the carriage museum), the pen tool is the only way to separate it from the stuff behind it. If you don't know to use the pen tool, a past newsletter of mine explains it. Click HERE to read about this invaluable tool.
3. Copy the selected image to the clipboard. The 'clipboard' is what Adobe calls Photoshop's temporary (and invisible) holding place that can contain one photo or one part of one photo at a time. This is done with Command or Control C; the pull down menu command is Edit > copy.
4. Paste the subject image from the clipboard into the background. This is done with Edit > paste or Command/Ctrl V. This creates a new layer. If you want to paste the clipboard image into a selected area of another photo (such as inside a window as I did in the photo of a puppy, below), then you use Edit > paste special > paste into in CS5 and CS6.
5. Alter the subject as you wish. At this point, the layer image can be resized (Command/Ctrl T), flipped horizontally (Edit > transform > flip horizontal), blended with the background using the opacity slider in the layers palette, or altered in terms of color, contrast, and so on using an adjustment layer (Layer > new adjustment layer ...)
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| eBOOKS
Click HERE to read about the contents of each ebook and to see sample pages.
eBooks are great because they are much less expensive than conventional books, and you can carry them with you on an iPad, iPhone, or laptop. In addition, trees don't have to be cut down to make the paper for the books. The colors in the images are dazzling, too -- much more so than in a conventional print book because the photographs seen on a computer or an iPad are illuminated from behind. What a great time it is to be a photographer!
The ebook on composition is my newest -- I just finished it last month. The toughest subject in photography to teach and to learn is composition simply because the world is what I call a compositional mess. It's hard to make artistic and visual sense out of all the elements we must deal with in taking great pictures. I think this ebook will help you sort that out. I give you concrete things you can look for to significantly improve your photographic compositions. The ebook is generously illustrated with lots of pictures that will inspire you to be a better photographer.
I'm proud of my other ebooks, too. I've had tons of wonderful compliments on them regarding the images, the clarity of the instruction, and how much people appreciate learning important creative concepts in the ebook format.
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PHOTOSHOP WORKSHOP in my
HOME Sat. & Sun., Sept. 8 -9, 2012.
Photoshop is a photographer's best friend, and the creative possibilities are absolutely endless. In a personal and 'homey' environment (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 cool techniques that you won't believe what you'll be able to do.
Photoshop instructors approach teaching this program from different 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.
A lot of people, once they learn what the tools and commands do, still need help in deciding what images to work with, what composites look good, and how to be artistic within Photoshop. This is one of the main things I address in this workshop.
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 it 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).
I will do my best to inspire you with all the great things Photoshop can do. All you need is a laptop. If you don't have one, I have two laptops (they are Macs) I can loan out.
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