2 nieuwe workshops ‘Flitsfotografie op locatie’

English readers: this announces two new workshops on off camera flash

Samen met Jürgen Doom organiseer ik twee nieuwe workshops rond flitsfotografie op locatie: werken met reportageflitsers los van de camera.

De eerste workshop is gericht op beginners en gaat door op zaterdag 6 augustus. We leren je stap voor stap de voordelen van off-camera flash en hoe je dat zelf op je Nikon of Canon kan instellen. We leren je manueel werken en tonen hoe je met eenvoudige en goedkope accessoires sterke resultaten kan bekomen.

De tweede workshop gaat door op 8 augustus en is bedoeld voor mensen die al een basiskennis van ‘off camera flash’ hebben. Deze workshop gaat dieper in op zaken zoals high-speed sync, werken met de nieuwe generatie PocketWizards, werken met meerdere flitsen, werken bij felle zon en gaat ook dieper in op de keuze van light modifiers.

Beide cursussen omvatten een theoretisch gedeelte en een praktisch gedeelte, waarin je onder onze begeleiding (fotografisch) aan de slag gaat met een model.

Als bonus eindigen we de sessies telkens met het importeren van de beelden in Lightroom, waarbij we nog een korte demo geven van de nabewerkingsmogelijkheden. In tegenstelling tot de vorige workshop ‘Speedlight to Lightroom’ ligt de klemtoon bij deze twee workshops veel meer op het (flits-)fotografische gedeelte!

De prijs voor beide ééndaagse workshops is telkens 225 €. De workshops zullen doorgaan te Leuven of Gent (exacte plaats wordt pas later bepaald). Inschrijven kan vanaf nu. Het aantal deelnemers is beperkt tot 8 per sessie.

Meer info en inlichtingen op flitsworkshop-at-morethanwords-dot-be of flitsworkshop-at-jurgendoom-dot-be.

 

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Join me Saturday for a RetouchPro webinar ‘Dramatic Black & White’

I’m very happy to be the next presenter on RetouchPro’s next webinar: Dramatic Black & White.
RetouchPro webinars are two hours, live webinars that are hosted by Doug Nelson. You have the ability to ask questions throughout the show as well as afterwards.

My webinar will be on the techniques I use to create dramatic Black & White images. I strongly believe that if you want to have strong black and whites, automatic is not the way to go: on the animation to the left, you see a number of color originals with their auto black & white conversion and then the advanced, ‘dramatic’ black & white.

During the webinar, I’ll be using Lightroom, Adobe Camera Raw, Photoshop and plugins. I’ll be showing ACR/Lightroom-only techniques as well as more a more complex workflows. I’ll give a lot of attention to the noble art of dodging and burning, or localised adjustments, as they are the best way to bring any picture and especially a black and white one to life. I’ll also demo a custom Dodging & Burning Photoshop Panel I’ve created and… there might even be a special discount code for that :-)

RetouchPro webinars are known for their high value and I only hope I can live up to that reputation. If you’re interested, check me out on Saturday, June 11th at 12.00 hrs CDT, that’s 19.00 hrs Brussels time. Cost of attendance is only $10. You can register here.

 

 

 

 

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A new C&V release: (micro)Stock: everything you always wanted to know about stock photography but were afraid to ask

One of the things I like most about Craft & Vision, the publishers of my ebook on Digital Black & White, is the sheer diversity of the books they offer. For those of you who are new to C&V: C&V is the brainchild of Canadian photographer and author David duChemin. After having written his print book ‘Within the Frame’ (a highly recommended read, by the way), David started writing a couple of ebooks. Each e-book only cost (and still only costs) $5. That’s less than what you pay for a photography magazine, and the ebooks come without adverts. Well, I’d be lying. At the end of each ebook is an advert… for Craft  & Vision :-)

After a while, other photographers joined in and started writing ebooks on their areas of expertise. And that’s what makes C&V so interesting and unique…

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Nieuwe workshop: hands-on eigen foto’s bewerken met Lightroom

English readers: this blogpost announces a new Dutch workshop on hands-on image-editing in Lightroom.
All my Dutch workshops can be held in English, upon request.

Graag stel ik jullie een nieuwe halfdaagse workshop voor:

‘Hands-on eigen foto’s bewerken met Lightroom, Photoshop & Plugins’: zaterdag 18 juni van 14 tot 18 u in Gent

Uniek aan deze workshop is dat we uitgaan van de eigen beelden van de deelnemers! Geen flitsende demo’s op basis van zorgvuldig uitgekozen beelden waarbij de techniek in kwestie altijd wonderwel lukt, maar real-life techniques for real-life photos.

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Join me tonight (Thursday, may 19th) for a free webinar on B&W conversion: Dutch & English

Tonight, thursday 19th of May, I’ll be doing two free one hour webinar for Nik Software on Black & White conversion using Silver Efex Pro 2. I’ll be using the plugins from within Lightroom and Photoshop and will also be explaining the differences between the two host applications with regards to running the plugin.

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New ebook on Craft & Vision: Extreme Perspectives by Alexandre Buisse

As some of you may know, I travelled the better part of 2009 through Turkey, Iran, Indonesia and India on a bicycle, albeit one with a truckload of photography gear loaded onto it. That journey was enough for some people to qualify me as crazy. Those people (but not only those) should take a look at Craft & Vision’s latest release: ‘Extreme Perspectives’ by French photographer and mountaineer Alexandre Buisse.

Now that’s what I call crazy, but then again, I’m afraid of heights: I get vertigo from looking in an empty coffeecup. Which is probably why I drink so much coffee. But I digress…

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Business Cards in Lightroom: Bonus Tip 1

If you’ve worked your way through my 4-part tutorial (starting here) on how to turn your favorite pictures into business cards, and you’re still hungry for more, here’s a bonus tip on how you can speed things up even more.

Bonus Tip 1: Automating the Procedure

There’s a great way to automate the process even further by adding Smart Collections to the workflow.

If you have a large photo collection (and is there any Lightroom user who doesn’t?), that regularly gets updated with new pictures, you could ‘outsource’ the manual process of adding pictures to a collection by using Smart Collections. Say you want all your five star pictures to feature on your business cards. Or, if you’re a little pickier, you could keyword all your business-card worthy pictures with a keyword Business Card. You can create a smart collection by hitting the big ‘plus-’ sign in the Collections Panel and choosing ‘Create Smart Collection…’ You add rules to your collection by hitting the plus-icons inside the Smart Collection Dialog Box.

In that case, you could make a Smart Collection with the criterion set to Star Rating = 5 or Keyword Contains Business Card (as shown in the screenshot). You create a Smart Collection by tapping the +-key in the Collections Panel and choosing Create Smart Collection from the menu. You’ll be presented with a set of variables that you can turn into rules. The possibilities range from simple as in this case to highly complex rules you’d need a degree in logics to understand!

 

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Turning your favorite photos into business cards with Lightroom (and some Photoshop help): part 4

This is the last in a four part tutorial on how you can leverage the interaction between the different Lightroom modules to automatically turn your favorite pictures into business cards.

You can find part 1 here, part 2 here and part 3 here. I suggest starting there to get the most out of this tutorial.

Part 4. Making a Template for the Photo-side of the Business Card.

Once you’ve selected the pictures to feature on your business cards, it’s just a matter of putting them into a print template as well. This template will actually resemble the first one we made pretty well, so let’s take that as a starting point:

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Turning your favorite photos into business cards with Lightroom (and some Photoshop help): part 3

This is the third in a four part tutorial on how you can leverage the interaction between the different Lightroom modules to automatically turn your favorite pictures into business cards.

You can find part 1 here and part 2 here and I suggest starting there to get the most out of this tutorial.

Part 3. Selecting the photos

With the address side out of the way, it’s time to turn to the fun stuff: selecting the pictures to appear on the reverse side. We’ll start off by doing this manually, but later on we’ll provide a far easier and automated way of doing things, leveraging some of Lightroom’s top features.

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Turning your favorite photos into business cards with Lightroom (and some Photoshop help): part 2

Part 2. Making a Print Template for the Address Side.

Welcome to Part Two of this four part tutorial on how to turn your favorite images into business cards using Lightroom and some Photoshop. In part 1, we made the address side of our business card in Photoshop. But feel free to use Illustrator or Photoshop Elements. I just showed you how to do it in Photoshop, because it’s very widespread amongst photographers. That’s all the Photoshop that we’ll need. From now on, it’s strictly Lightroom! As mentioned, in Lightroom we’ll make a template to print a larger number of business cards on one sheet of paper. Depending on what your printer is capable of, the exact settings will vary a little, but the basic steps remain the same. Here, we’ll make template for printing 8 business cards on one sheet of A4 paper. For overseas readers: A4 is 21 x 29,7 cm, which is slightly larger than your Letter size paper. Just substitute your own paper measures and you’ll be good to go… Continue reading

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