Photography Workshop

I have been taking as many wildflower pictures as I can since our photography workshop in Phoenix. I also posted a number of pictures taken during the workshop online. One of the things about the workshop was the wide range of cameras the people had. Many had SLR’s and several lens but there were still many that had only a very basic point and shoot.
For an untrained person like myself I really didn’t see that much difference in the pictures that were taken. Yes the people with the long telephoto lens got some great shots. One person, a birder, had a 60 power spotting scope that he used to put in front of his camera to take pictures.
The picture I placed at the first of blog was a picture I took with my Canon 550 and just by luck it turned out great without the need for a lot of work in Photoshop. It just goes to show that the fancy camera is not all it takes. I had been wondering about going SLR and the cost but I also saw the amount of heavy bags many of the people were carrying to take pictures. With all my traveling I don’t think I want to have one more LARGE bag of rocks to carry. OK I did buy the adapter for my S5 so I could put on filters and got the 1.5X telextender but I am still lighter than many of the people.
I will be out shooting and not becoming the hunch-back of Corvallis. I will say that the Photoshop hints and demonstrations he did were great. He didn’t do much and most of it I had done but it was great to see how he used it and made the pictures POP. Each of use got to submit 6 pictures and he would discuss them using Photoshop and do some modification on them. It has changed what I do in some cases but not on all pictures.

Photoshop CS3

My big adventure this summer has been learning Photoshop CS3 and how to use it to improve or modify my photographs. Oh yes, there is the basic how to change exposure or highlights or even put two photographs together, but now I am working with a big step up from the old Photoshop 6 and gaining a little understanding of what happens and when is it best to use a function.
I will admit that working through the lessons that came with the program and the book I bought gets confusing and sometime a little boring. Yet the lessons do show me how the different functions that change the photo but I am sometimes not sure just what function would do the best job on a given photo. All of the basics are great and now I can merge several pictures together without using the stitch function in my camera. This gives a little more freedom of shooting several shots and merging as long as you keep the camera in about the same place for all the shots.
I have been looking at many of the pictures on Flickr and getting some ideas of things to do. Two functions that I am really excited about are the merging of two or three pictures with different exposures to produce a picture with a wider range of light values. I have yet to get much for pictures that will work but basic experimentation has been interesting. The second is OOB (Out Of Bounds) that produces a photo with some 3-D effect. A search of Flickr gives 6,600+ examples of this procedure and is my biggest work right now. I have used this on a number of pictures and look at the examples to try to get new ideas. The tutorial on OOB provides some basic steps in the process but looking at the pictures you can see that it is only the beginning. You also need to look at the picture in a different way to see how to make it OOB. You see a couple of my examples in this blog and more on Flickr.