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A Visit to Ansel Adams' House

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What an awesome Sunday.

I was invited down to the Ansel Adams’ house, along with Robert Scoble and Marc Sibler for a late morning visit with Michael Adams, son of Ansel Adams. Michael gave us an amazing tour of the house, the darkroom, and the gallery. What an amazing house it is, and what a permeated feeling of art that place has. You can almost feel “photography” in the wood.

Michael is amazing. Turns out we were both in the Air Force! Though he was a General, and I was an enlisted man. It was hard to fight the impulse to call him “sir”, but it’s nice to know that there was that common ground. Veterans can talk for hours about stuff. Not to mention that when I was active duty, I NEVER had the opportunity to shoot the breeze about photography with a General!

It was also great to finally meet Robert Scoble… aka the Scobelizer! Robert showed up and immediately began streaming his visit live to Qik.com, twittering, and more. He’s a social media machine! He said he’d get a blog post up later about it. It was great to get tips on blogging from one of the pioneers. He streamed the below interview LIVE to his legions of Scobelites! Wow.

The surreal thing about this visit was that as we were departing, General (ret) Michael Adams asked me if I might consider coming back down to help him learn Lightroom and Photoshop! Imagine that… the son of one of the most important names in photography asked little ‘ol me to help introduce him to the world of digital photography.

I’m going to have to just consider that a direct order

**check out the Flickr videos I snapped here.

Filed Under: Featured, Photography Tagged With: , , , , ,

Lightroom 2 and Photoshop CS3: Stitching a Panorama

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The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 beta is out in the wild, and some of the more powerful features in this application lie within the tight integration with its 300-pound older sibling, Photoshop CS3.

And the brilliance of this integration lie within the fact that Lightroom is able to leverage the power of Photoshop CS3 to do some of the more complex and niche “heavy-lifting” imaging tasks, while still providing seamless access to the powerful organizational features in Lightroom 2.

To demonstrate this, on my way back to San Jose from Sausalito, CA today I pulled over to snap a few photos of the Golden Gate Bridge. I only had my G9 “point-n-shoot” with me, and the lens wasn’t wide enough to capture the scene like I wanted … so I captured it in several chunks.

This tutorial demonstrates how to use Lightroom 2 and Photoshop CS3 to merge those chunks into one seamless image. Check out a higher resolution of the image here.

UPDATE: You’ll need to be running Photoshop 10.0.1 (or later) for the Lightroom 2 integration to work.

Golden Gate Bridge Panorama

Filed Under: Featured, Photography Tagged With: , , , ,

Photoshop Tutorial: Removing Crowds

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I think it was one of the very first episodes of the TWiP podcast (This Week in Photography) that I sort of bragged to my co-hosts about some of my secret Photoshop kung-fu skills. Basically I was saying that I knew of a technique for easily removing crowds from, say, a busy street scene.

So, after much taunting (practically every show), here’s the promised screencast! In it I reveal the secret and mysterious technique to all. Seriously though, It’s actually pretty cool that you can have Photoshop do the heavy lifting in a retouch job that previously might have taken hours.

I’ve also created a video page that will host all of the videos I post (gotta love WordPress). Oh, and by the way, all of the photos and video for this screencast were taken with my Canon G9!

I originally found out about this technique from Martin Evening. Be sure to check out his blog on Photoshop Lightroom. He’s also written a “bible-sized” book called “Photoshop CS3 for Professional Photographers“. It’s a must read, and an excellent reference guide. And finally, be sure to check out his work.

Filed Under: Featured, Photography Tagged With: , , , , , ,

The Golden Gate

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The weekend before last, took a random drive up to San Francisco, on a mission to photograph the Golden Gate Bridge. It was a text-book Californian day and I had my Nikon D3 and Bogen tripod tow – I was ready for action. But a funny thing happened when I arrived at the bridge. Of course there were scads of tourists doing their point-and-look thing, but aside from that, suddenly I had the overwhelming feeling that there probably was no way to take a photo of this beautiful bridge… that hadn’t been done before. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Featured, Photography

F-Stop Beyond Interview

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fstop beyondLast week I had the opportunity to be interviewed by Ron Dawson, owner of Cinematic Studios and the voice behind the F-Stop Beyond podcast. He just finished up a podcast series focusing on African-American (Black) photographers, and asked if I’d be interested in bearing my soul. I was, I did. It was fun. Check it out!

 

Filed Under: Featured, Photography Tagged With: ,

Awesome Digital Photography White Papers

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Head over to the Adobe website and download some amazingly well-written (and free) digital photography PDF white papers. I just finished reading Peter Kroghs “Non-Destructive Imaging: An Evolution of Rendering Technology” and found it very enlightening. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Adobe, Lightroom, Photography

SlideShowPro for Lightroom Released!

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The universe of add-ons for Lightroom continues to expand. One that I’m particularly fond of is SlideShowPro for Lightroom. I already use SlideShowPro and its server-side Director to manage the gallery section of this blog, now I can pump images up to my gallery directly from Lightroom…. ahhh, easy is good.

Lightroom UI with SlideShowPro

Filed Under: Adobe, Lightroom, Photography

Red Rock Canyon, Nevada

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Red Rock Canyon, Nevada

While hanging with my Dad over the Thanksgiving holiday, we took a quick field trip up to Red Rock Canyon – a perfect opportunity to snap a series of photos of the awe inspiring Red Rock Canyon. This photo was stitched together in Photoshop from 11 individual photos, using the Photomerge feature.Click the image to see it larger.

Filed Under: Adobe, Photography

New Lightroom Plug-ins!

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Ace developer Jeffrey Friedl is among the first to develop some kick-ass plug-ins for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. If you’re a photographer using Lightroom (and you should be), and you’ve got a Flickr, Zenfolio, or SmugMug account. Then you absolutely HAVE to grab (and install) these plug-ins.

I’ve been using the SmugMug plug in for a week or so, and wow… uh WOW.

Follow this link to plug-in goodness….

Filed Under: Adobe, Lightroom, Photography

Female Wedding Photographers: A peek inside.

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Adobe Pro Photography Evangelist, George Jardine, has posted a podcast containing a fascinating round-table style discussion with a group of top female wedding photographers. It’s a un-edited conversation — and a rare look into how some (not all) women think about the industry, their brides, male photographers, and more. It’s a must listen. 

Filed Under: Adobe, Photography
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