Since I just recently finished
changing my website to APhotoFolio X design, I thought I’d make a blog
entry. It’s been months since I’ve done
so, and now seems as good as time as any.
And rather that waste words on why I haven’t made any entries in ages I’ll
just use my time and energy writing on a recent event. I will however write that writing isn’t easy
for me, and unless I am very inspired to express something it’s difficult for
me to put fingers to keys. I suppose the
same applies with taking photographs.
And like taking photographs sometimes you just have to do it when you’re
not feeling it, and hopefully the inspiration will follow.
I want to begin with discussing the
John Paul Caponigro and R. Mac Holbert Photoshop workshop I attended last month at Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara. It was five days of intensive lectures and
application of Photoshop workflow. The
amount of material they submitted overwhelmed me. At the end of each day I needed to take a
couple of aspirin and a glass of Pinot Grigio to relieve my headaches.
Before the workshop began they
asked us what we thought our level of Photoshop was- beginner, intermediate,
and advanced. I put down
intermediate. I knew well enough that I
was far from advanced, but since I’ve been dabbling in Photoshop for nearly 15
years I couldn’t consider myself a beginner.
After a week with JP and Mac I now consider myself an advanced
beginner. JP kindly placed me in the
middle of the workshop attendees that he has encountered.
A reason I’m not better with
Photoshop than perhaps I ought to be is for the longest time I resisted and
refused to embrace digital technology. Yet
now if you wish to compete in the editorial market, unless you’re famous it’s
impossible to abstain from shooting digital.
For personal work, I still shoot film, so in a sense I still resist
it. But the reason I shoot film has more
to do with the camera than digital technology.
I do not like making images with a 35 mm camera, and the cost of a
medium format digital camera remains beyond my price range. Thus, I’m still hanging out in the analog
world. Yet every decent image I expose ultimately ends up becoming a digital file.
After making
portfolios for reviews and having friends and colleagues critique my work I
learned the necessity of making better prints.
I’ve made a great deal of improvement, yet I've known that my printed images were far from perfection. A couple of
colleagues whose work I greatly admire have taken this workshop, and they had nothing but rave reviews for
what they learned from it. Have a look at
Svjetlana Tepavcevic's work. Her prints
are exquisite, and her work went to another level after attending JP and Mac’s
workshop. She continues to return to her
workshop notes and John Paul Caponigro blogs for different techniques to enhance
her images. As she likes to say she’ll
work on a technique until she owns it, i.e. it becomes a part of her Photoshop tool
kit.
After a month I’m still trying to gather
all the information they presented and processing all that I learned. I was warned to be prepared, which meant that
the more you know going into this workshop the more you’ll gain. Photoshop, like any other craft, art, or
skill is something one must practice consistently and regularly, and the
broader one’s base of knowledge is going into the workshop the more one will
gain from the workshop.
I will not go into all the
techniques I learned during the week, but I will write that I’ve added the
gradient tool and the Selective Color Adjustment Layer to my toolbox. For my work it’s not about compositing, HDR,
or making someone’s skin perfect, it’s about having the controls to make my
work look like I envisioned it and enhancing the qualities, e.g. contrast and
color, of the image to make it appear its best.
I recommend the class for anyone
who wants to improve their Photoshop skills and learn the proper way to use the
application. I do not suggest the class
for beginners. In fact I wouldn’t
recommend it for anyone who hasn’t been using Photoshop for at least 5 years.
Both Mac and John Paul have
websites that have a ton of free information.
In fact you might see me there. I
highly recommend bookmarking Mac’s basic image workflow pdf. I follow it on every image I work on. Finally, not only are Mac and John Paul
Photoshop masters and prodigiously smart, they are nice guys and incredibly
helpful and patient.
