PhotoWalkPro

Here’s a few things I came across that you might find interesting and maybe inspiring -

Bigger is Better -

How many pixels were in your last image? If you are a select group of Hungarians, the answer just might be 70 billion. With sponsorshop from Epson, Sony, and Microsoft, a group of hungarians have created the largest 360° panorama in the world. I’ve always been fascinated by gigapixel images and this one really takes the cake. You can see the image in all it’s detailed glory here.

Long Distance Dedication -

If there’s one thing I like more than gigapixel images, it’s time-lapse videos. I just find the process of compressing time into a smaller space to be incredibly cool. I’ve been known to make a few time-lapse videos in my time but nothing compares to this incredible walk across America.

Now, if you thought that was cool, check out this “making of” video to see the incredible story of how this amazing project came to be.

Color in Motion -

You might know Julianne Kost as the Adobe Photoshop Evangelist but did you know that she is an incredibly talented photographer and artist? A couple of years ago she released a book called Window Seat, which featured landscape images made from her years of accumulating frequent flyer miles. Some of her recent work though is just downright fascinating. Her series is called Motion Color and after looking at the images, it’s hard not to believe that she didn’t fashion them in Photoshop. The reality is that all of these shots are straight from the camera (except for maybe a little color and exposure tweaking). You can spend a few quality minutes checking out all of her shots by clicking here.

Free Lightroom Learning for Photowalkers -

Did you participate in one of the 1100 photowalks this past weekend? If so then you should have received a personal invite to join Scott Kelby and his cohorts for a little live Lightroom session today. Just click on the link in your email and then log in with the username and password that you created when you registered for the photowalk. The session kicks off at 10:00 AM Eastern time and lasts for about an hour. When you get there, you will get to see Scott and the guys process their photowalk images using Adobe Lightroom. It should be a lot of fun.

That’s it for the day, now go do something inspiring!

Now that the World Wide Photowalk has been officially announced it’s time to get yourself a little inspiration and do I have just the thing for you.  If you have any interest in street photography, you absolutely have to check out the latest class on Kelby Training Online.  The class is called A Day With Jay Maisel and I have been waiting for this one since Scott first told me about it several months ago. The concept is simple, get a video crew, a legendary photographer, and then turn them loose in the streets of New York and then let the wisdom flow.

Scott Kelby does a great job of asking all those great leading questions that lead Jay into dispensing nugget after nugget of techinques, philosophy, and common sense shooting.  If you have never heard Jay speak, you absolutely have to watch this video. Jay has a way of cutting through the crap and putting things into perspective in only a way that he can.  For those of you that have seen Jay speak before, you know that he is pure New Yorker and he has no audio filter, but that’s part of his charm.  He tells you what he thinks and those that listen are better photographers for it.

I first had the pleasure of hearing Jay speak at a conference about 5 years ago. He was still toting around slide trays at the time but since then he has completely embraced digital technology but his message is still the same.  It’s all about Light, Gesture, and Color. Those three words have become Jay’s mantra, which has been instrumental in shaping the photographic vision of almost every photographer he meets.

If I wasn’t already a subscriber to Kelby Training, I think this class alone would make it worth my while to join.  You can find this class and all the other great online training classes at Kelby Training.

I stole borrowed today’s title from a post I read over at Dave Cross’ blog. Recently there has been a lot of discussion/tweeting about a new online training webinar series and I thought it interesting how people were getting so excited over the prospect of “Free” training.  Some were actually claiming that it was a revolutionary development in the world of training and that this is what it should all be about.

So why did I find this so humorous? Probably due to the fact that there is nothing revolutionary about it.  There is a ton of training out there that is available 24/7/365 and it’s free.  This is where Dave’s blog post comes into play.  Dave, who is an instructor for Kelby Training, points out that the Kelby TV website has somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 hours of online video training available, covering subjects ranging from photography to graphics, and all of it is free.

I know, some of you are probably reading this and calling me a “homer” who has drunk the Kelby Koolaid and I won’t necessarily dispute that fact but when the Koolaid is this good, can you blame me for not taking a big old swig?  But it’s not just Kelby TV that is offering up the freebies.  Adobe has AdobeTV, which offers up a ton of training on pretty much every Adobe product out there.  Some of the videos cover specific tools or features and others get much more in-depth. Speaking of Adobe, Terry White has a fantastic video podcast site with a ton of in-depth training on the Adobe Creative Suite.

And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the largest pool of miscellaneous training on the Internet, YouTube.  Want to learn how to use a graduated filter, just type it into the search field and up pops about 60 videos to choose from. If you can think of the subject, someone has probably made a how-to video for it, myself included.

The point is that there is a ton of photography and photo processing training available on the Internet in many different forms and a lot of it is 100% free. So when you find you have some free time on your hands, make sure you check out a few of the resources I have listed and get your learn on.

Last week at Photoshop World I was sitting in the keynote watching all of the fun stuff going on and having a really good time.  But it’s not all fun and games.  There is some serious stuff that happens in the keynote as well including the Guru Awards, The Vincent Versace Award for Photographic Excellence, and the presentation of the Dean Collins Scholarship Award, which is presented to an outstanding Educator.  This award was created to honor the memory of the late, great Dean Collins.  If you aren’t sure who Dean Collins is, that means you probably weren’t into studio lighting in the late 80’s and early 90’s.  Dean was the guru of lighting but beyond that, he was a fantastic educator.

He was also a pioneer in digital imaging and education, aligning with companies like Adobe in the 90’s to help merge the art of photography and lighting with the newly emerging digital image processing market.  Viewed in this video from a 1998 video magazine, Dean discusses the future of digital and its impact on photography and the market.  It’s actually pretty scary how intuitive he was in predicting the current climate of digital imaging, wedding photography, and stock photography.

The other reason I bring up Dean Collins is that yesterday I had an opportunity to revisit a couple of his training videos from the series called “The Best of Dean Collins on Lighting”.  Even though it was readily apparent that the video was made in the late 80’s, the lighting techniques that he was demonstrating were still viable even in today’s world of digital cameras and speed lights.  Dean was a master at simplifying his lighting setups to achieve beautiful images with the bare minimum of equipment.  One shoot involved a location portrait of a female TV newscaster and her horse.  He shot the whole thing with natural light using big diffusion panels. It was very reminiscent of techniques that you might catch Joe McNally teaching at one of his present day seminars.  I think it just goes to show that a knowledge of photography and lighting is something that is timeless and if you have an understanding of these principles, it doesn’t matter so much what gear you are using because the techniques themselves are still pretty much the same.  If you want to see more from Dean Collins you can find a few videos on YouTube (just do a search on his name and you’ll find a bunch of content).  You can also still purchase his Best of series, re-mastered on DVD from Software Cinema (the company he helped create).

As photographers, we are always concerned with color.  Back in olden times, all you had to do was shoot your film and then send it off to someone else whose job it was to make things look good.  Now, it all rests in our hands and that means there’s oh so much to worry about.  Is my monitor calibrated correctly?  Will my prints match what I see on screen?  Do I need to do anything to the color if I want to display my work online?  So many questions. Read the rest of this entry »