Wow another year almost gone. It was great having so many of you be a part of it. Not a ton of PPS episodes, but from your feedback I gather they were some of the best yet. I’ve been crazy busy and while I can’t say I made every goal for PPS this year, we came along nicely. The last show of the year is posting just after this and I think it’s gonna be a whiz bang.
Anyways on to the goods. Merry Christmas to all of you. This years freebie pack has some good stuff and I hope you’ll enjoy it. For the 3rd year running, Pro Photo Show and Seim Effects have teamed up to bring you the freebie pack. It’s got goodies for Lightroom and Aperture (you read right). And even an album template for InDesign.
To go along with all this, there’s also the PPS 2010 Christmas giveaway where you can pick up some of the $2000+ in prizes.
You can download the freebie pack and get all the details directly from the Seim Effects site where it’s hosted. Download 2010 Christmas Pack.
Enjoy. Have a Merry Christmas and a happy New Year. Here’s to 2011… Gav
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 tools are the big news in CS5. It works when lassoing and deleting sections of an image, using the healing brush and more. Neat tool, but not perfect. More on that below.
New “Mixer Brushes” blend color like paint, similar to something like Painter (but less powerful).
Crop has a rule of thirds overlay now (finally).
Remastered HDR tools and Pseudo HDR with HDR toning. Better, but not perfect.
Remastered Refine Edge. Will find more detailed edges for better masking and has automatic edge decontamination.
Puppet Warp allows you to modify in a new ways. Move limbs, horizon lines and more by defining control points.
New process versions and improved camera RAW.
Mini bridge right within PS.
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.
Bright lights of Monte Carlo. ISO 400, 2.5 sec. @ f4
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.
Today’s Host... Gavin Seim. This week Gavin gets in depth about his month and a half photo trip spanning various areas of the USA. He looks at things he saw and learned and ways to improve it all going forward.
Sunsets hidden falls. Gavin's favorite from an evening Yosemite. Did some experimenting with blacks on this. Image links to f164 post. More info in that post soon.
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