The folks over at Nik Software have just released Color Efex Pro 4, so I thought it might be a good idea to do a video on some of the new features. I can already tell you that if you’re a Color Efex Pro 3 user, there’s one new feature that’s by itself worth the upgrade price: the ability to stack effects on top of each other! And if you’re new to Color Efex Pro, the video will give you an idea as to what it can do.
I’ve been playing around a lot with FourSquare, recently. And no, I don’t mean that silly Facebook App that tells people where you are all of the time and that allows you to become the mayor of Whateverville. No, I’m talking about THE Foursquare.
English readers: I’ll soon start an English newsletter. If you want to sign-up for that, follow this link and choose English as your language.
Vorige week ging de eerste ‘échte’ MoreThanWords nieuwsbrief de virtuele deur uit. Je vindt er nieuws over workshops, interessante kortingen en links en telkens ook een Lightroom of andere fotografie-gerelateerde-tip. Wil je weten wat er in de eerste editie stond, klik dan op deze link.
Wil je je inschrijven, klik dan hier. Vul het formulier in en kies de gewenste taal. Je ontvangt dan een bevestigingsmail waarop je nog eens moet klikken om definitief ingeschreven te zijn! Uitschrijven kan bij elke mail door op de unsubscribe-knop onderaan te klikken.
Workshops worden ook altijd op Twitter aangekondigd: @mtwpiet.
Tot de volgende?
I’m very proud to announce the release of my second eBook through Craft & Vision. After ‘The Power of Black & White in Adobe Lightroom & Beyond’, which was all about postprocessing images, this one is about photography itself.
‘Making Light. An introduction to off camera flash’ is the first in a two-part series about the wonderful world of opportunities that using a hotshoe flash off camera will open up for you.
The book offers an introduction into the key concepts, techniques and gear that’s needed to get you started right away. Below is the Table of Contents.
Ilona, one of the students of the Swedish workshop goes into ‘grand écart’ mode. Not your typical ballerina shoes, but then again, Sweden’s highest mountain isn’t your typical ballet environment. Using a small aperture (high f-number) turned the sun into this starburst.
One of the other students acted as a Voice Activated Lightstand, holding a bare flash this time. Triggering was again done with cheap Cactus V4 triggers. After all, like I said in the previous blog post, the best triggers are the one you have with you!
But what to do if you forgot even those cheap triggers? Or you have a Nikon Flash or triggers and everybody on the workshop for some mysterious reason is using Canon cameras? That’ll be up next.
I.s.m. de Leuvense Fotoclub Gamma organiseer ik een intensieve 2-daagse Lightroom cursus op zaterdagen 8 en 22 oktober. 5 van de 10 plaatsen zijn toegankelijk voor niet-leden van de club.
Deelnameprijs is 249 € incl. BTW voor de 2 dagen. In deze flyer lees je er meer over en vind je ook een link naar het inschrijvingsformulier.
Had a great time teaching at a one-week photograpy workshop in Scandinavia (Swedish Lapland, to be more precise). It was a fun mix of landscape photography, environmental portraiture and teaching postprocessing techniques.
Our guide navigates us and the adopted 10 week old Lisa through the waters near Överkalix. Water, forests, a reindeer and a guy named Carl. It doesn’t get much more Swedish than this.
I couldn’t resist the urge to whip out the old flash and make this environmental portrait. I used a Lumiquest SBIII softbox to slightly soften the harsh cast shadows an undiffused flash would make. I find the Lumiquest to be a great, highly portable little light modifier. It’s handholdable and ideal for those guerilla-style ‘the-photographer-is-also-the-lighstand’ kind of shots that I always wind up doing. Best of all, it folds flat and fits just perfectly in my ThinkTank Speedracer bag.
I had left my PocketWizards FlexTT5 & MiniTT1 at home so I used simple Cactus Triggers to trigger my flash. I could have used Nikon’s own CLS, but in bright ambient sunlight conditions such as during this trip, the triggering isn’t always reliable. When working with these triggers, you loose the ability to go beyond the sync speed of 1/200th. You also lose the ability to work in TTL and remotely control the power of your flash. When working outside, I find this to be not so much of a problem as most of the time, you need full power anyway to tame the ambient sunlight, especially when you make that sun a part of your composition, as I’ll explain in the next blog post.
English readers: this blogpost announces my Dutch workshop on Digital Black & White conversion, ‘From Megapixel to Mono Print’.
Op maandag 3 oktober van 9u30 tot 17u30 organiseer ik voor de zevende keer de Masterclass rond digitale zwartwit-conversie ‘From Megapixel to Mono Print’.
De workshop werd nog een pak praktischer gemaakt en bevat nu twee delen: in de voormiddag theorie rond zwartwit-conversie, in de namiddag passen we de technieken toe op eigen beelden van de deelnemers. We eindigen met het afdrukken van de beste foto’s op digitaal bariet en fine art papier, ter beschikking gesteld door Hahnemühle FineArt.
Het aantal deelnemers is beperkt tot 8. Meer info en inschrijvingen via deze link.
The guys over at Craft & Vision keep releasing titles at a rate that’s faster than I can read them, let alone review them.
Still, I was pleased to see another C&V eBook by Corwin Hiebert, the manager of David Duchemin, Mr. Craft & Vision himself. It’s called ‘Your Creative Mix’.
The ebook is about the problems and opportunities you face as a creative or artistic entrepreneur when trying to market yourself. As Corwin manages only creative people, he’s more than well-placed to give advice in that matter.
Without giving away the whole content of the eBook, there are a couple of great do’s (do work together with other creatives in other disciplines) and don’ts (don’t shamelessly plug your person, but elicit curiosity about your work) that by themselves are invaluable advice. But there’s more than that. The book gives a solid insight to creative entrepreneurship. And as with each and any C&V title, it’s only $5, or less, if you read on:
Special Offer on PDFs
Until tomorrow evening only, if you use the promotional code MIX4 when you checkout, you can have the PDF version of Your Creative Mix for only $4 OR use the code MIX20 to get 20% off when you buy 5 or more PDF ebooks from the Craft & Vision collection. These codes expire at 11:59pm PST July 23rd, 2011.
To me, there are three fundamental things that help you make better pictures. The first is knowing and understanding light. The second is trying to convey a sense of time and motion into this fraction of reality a photograph is. And the third is getting more depth in your pictures. And that last point is what Craft & Vision, the educational eBook project of photographer & author David duChemin has just released a new title about.
It’s aptly called ‘A Deeper Frame’ and it’s David’s first eBook in about half a year and also the first since his fall of a wall in Italy. Luckily, the fall only hurt his body, because after reading the eBook it seems his mind is still as lucid as ever. In ‘A Deeper Frame’, David lists a number of ways to add depth into your pictures. He discusses use of optics, focus perspective and lots more and includes exercises for you to try out.
It’s a highly recommended read for anyone that wants to make more compelling pictures, that better translate the threedimensional reality into a two dimensional photograph.
To accompany the launch of this book, there are the usual discounts plus an unusual one:
For the next three days only you can have A DEEPER FRAME for $4 (discount code DEEP4). Or you can buy 5 eBooks for the price of 4 (discount codeDEEP20). That’s the usual Craft & Vision deal. But this being David’s 12th eBook he wrote himself, on a total of over 20 C&V titles, C&V are offering their deepest discount yet. 12 eBooks (either David’s or other C&V authors’) for $40.That’s about 34% off the already ridiculous price. That’s $3.33/eBook! Use discount code DEEPER12 when you Visit Craft&Vision, fill your shopping cart and check out. These codes expires at 11:59pm PST July 2, 2011.
As usual, this deal only works for the PDF versions of the eBooks. If you have an iPad, you can also get the iPad versions but they don’t have the discounts. Personally, I just read the PDF’s on my iPad through GoodReader. This is a great PDF reader for iPad and it even lets you make annotations to your PDF’s!
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