December 8, 2010
Ok folks. The 2nd PPS Christmas giveaway is here and we over two thousand dollars in prizes up from grabs from 5 great sponsors.
No strings here. It’s simple and you can win some great prizes. Go here for all the details and to enter using the simple form…
Merry Christmas… Gav
December 3, 2010
by Gavin Seim: I’ll keep this brief because Photoshop CS5 has been out for months now and reviews have been floating all over. Rather than get redundant with an ultra in depth review, I’ll just talk a little about what I think. I’ll be frank and you can make your own decision from there.
Photoshop CS5. Full = $699 – $999.
My overall rating 6.5/10.
New features worth noting…
Content aware fill. This feels more like a beta feature. It got hyped a lot prior to release. Probably over hyped. Once we got the product in our hands, reality set in. Content Aware was not the magical tool that Adobe made it out to be in demo videos and they took some flack for it. I think the problem was that they showed it as being so perfected. Erasing entire areas of photos, cleaning out power lines with a single stoke. It looked wonderful in theory.
November 28, 2010
Photo Couch is the companion podcast of Gavin’s f164 project and made for photographers. Nothing fancy here. Just short musings, tips and thoughts on photography. You can listen below, or subscribe for free and get all the latest episodes.
Here’s another episode of Photo Couch. Today I’ll talk briefly about maintaining image and file quality when prepping for a large print. It’s something I’ve been working with a lot lately. As always you can find it in the feed as well (link above). Hope you get something useful from it. I plan to go more in depth on a future Pro Photo Show episode… Gav
November 28, 2010
Photo Couch is the companion podcast of Gavin’s f164 project, made for photographers. Nothing fancy here. Just short musings, tips and thoughts on photography from Gavin. You can listen below, or subscribe for free to get all the latest episodes.
Since f164 is the new official home of the Photo Couch podcast, I though I make a post with all the back episodes so I have them safely archived away. You can find 01-18 below. You can download the mp3 files, or play the directly using the play button to the left of each link..
October 30, 2010
by Lawrence Sawyer. First, let me thank Gavin Seim for the invitation to write a piece on my recent experience shooting stock photography in the Mediterranean. This was a dual-purpose trip: anniversary cruise, and a test of my theory that with the right choice, one could actually shoot salable stock with a point-and-shoot pocket camera. Now, a little background…
I’ve been shooting stock photography since my college days in the early 1980’s, and make a living doing it. I have several thousand images on file at four U.S. agencies and dozens of sub-agents worldwide. I have a new book out, entitled  See It, Shoot It, Sell It! -How to Earn a Great Second Income Taking and Shooting Photographs of Virtually Anything. That title embodies the way I work: I shoot “found images” more than anything else. I have learned over the years that there are countless opportunities to shoot highly marketable images all around us, every day… if we just learn to see them.
So when I’m shooting stock, here are the five main criteria I use in evaluating a scene:
1. Is there a message here? There needs to be either a solid piece of information in this shot, or a pure-magic artistic element to something mundane, like beautiful light on a cityscape.
2. Can I pull it off technically? An elk in a shaft of sunlight is killer if it’s 50 yards away and I have 300 f2.8 with me, but pointless if it’s 500 yards out.
3. Does it have enough appeal that it will sell to a broad audience? I worry about this one less and less, because all images are available now to the whole internet-connected world, and somewhere, there is a buyer for darn near anything.
4. Can I shoot it better than it’s likely already been done? If it’s a scenic shot, I’m careful not to be enamored by the place just because it’s my first visit. But if the light is phenomenal, I’ll roll the dice and shoot first, then ask questions later. The more famous the place, the more skeptical I am of my ability to make great stock on my first visit. I try to research how much a place has been shot before I go in with guns a-blazing.
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