The March 2012 gallery has been uploaded.
Archive for April, 2012
Photoshop CS6
So the big news this week is the release of Photoshop CS6 and it looks like one of their biggest upgrades! You can check all the specs and what’s new on the Adobe Website. There are also loads of resources and videos around already. Check out these 20 videos of the latest features in CS6.
Remember that if you a student or teacher, you qualify for up to an 80% discount on Adobe products from places like Learning Curve. You can check the conditions and what you need to do to qualify from here.
So will you go out and get this upgrade?
Great news!
For our Tuesday workshop on the 8th May 2012, Emanuel Maria will be giving a talk and demonstration on flash photography. Followed by a hands-on session with WCC member participation.
Please note: As always, that workshops and outings are reserved for current, paid-up members of the WCC.
It is going to be a great evening under the expert guidance of Emanuel, starting with the basics of your camera’s pop-up flash and progressing onto dedicated flash. This session will not cover studio strobes and lighting.
Requirements for the evening:
1. Be there on Tuesday 8th May 2012 at 19:00.
2. Your camera with freshly charged batteries and memory card(s) – Always take a test shot before you leave the house, your camera will remind you if anything, like a memory card, is missing.
3. An external, dedicated flash if you have one, and (very important) fresh batteries as you will be popping strobes all night long.
Looking forward to seeing everyone there on Tuesday 8th May.
Click!
Chas
The image submission facility has been enabled for next month’s entries.
A new request starting from this month onwards; please do not use any punctuation in the “descriptive” name of your images. As an example: “What a shock !!!!!” and “More tea, M’am?” are invalid descriptions. The punctuation introduces file renaming problems, which reared it’s ugly head this evening.
Secondly. When you have successfully uploaded your images, you will receive an email from the web server. If you do not receive an email then your images have NOT been uploaded and one or two things went wrong:
1. One or more of your images did not fit the bill as far as the WCC / PSSA image requirements go. Image must not have a width which exceeds 1024 pixels. Image must not have a height which exceeds 768 pixels. DPI should be 72 not 240 or 300 (the latter are used for high quality printing resolution) and finally, image file size must not exceed 500Kb (be careful as a reported 500Kb image file size is really 512Kb on disk)
2. The email address you supplied is incorrect.
If it fails to successfully upload your images, send them through one at a time, until you determine which image is causing the problem and then try and rectify that image and re-upload.
As a reminder about the forthcoming Set Subject.
May 2012 – Selective Colour.
In Selective Colour, the image is primarily monochromatic. It may be black and white, duotone or sepia but you need to select one additional element or colour from the original to highlight in colour. This can be achieved in-camera (camera dependent) or edited in post-processing.
Limitations: Monochromatic with one coloured selection. Not limited to a single colour, but try to keep it to shades of the selected colour. Post processing allowed.
Click!
Chas.
Posing
If you like me, you will often find it difficult to think of good poses for people. Check out the following links to help you out with some posing ideas…
80 Pictures and poses for couples
Photography Lighting Lesson – Remember the Egg!
Try out this simple trick to understand and visualise lighting… Seems so simple but try it out yourself after watching the video….
For a more advanced lighting simulation, check out this free online simulator. This is really neat. You can spend hours playing around with lighting setups here… The simulator allows you to add lights around the subject and it lets you change their position and strength while you see how the light affects the subject. If you try it, leave a comment and let me know what you think…
Boy, do we have a niggling little problem and I am calling all wannabe detectives out there to help resolve this issue.
Members of the club who use SONY cameras will notice that the “hint” text which is displayed when you mouse-over a thumbnail in the galleries is a little faulty. Instead of displaying the image name e.g. Open-3-Joe Soap-Big Picture, it displays the text SONY DSC as depicted below.
How this comes about is that every SONY camera has the words SONY DSC stored in the EXIF metadata on the camera in two fields, namely CAPTION and TITLE. These are the fields which the gallery uses to automatically generate the image names. See the screen shot below of a SONY’s image metadata.
It is highly unlikely that your choice for your submitted image caption or title is SONY DSC
Right, so how do we fix this. SONY users, you need to determine how to erase this field in the SONY camera management / utility software and upload these modified settings back into your camera. At one point, Steve McCurrach was the only SONY user whose camera did not have this problem. Steve was also the only SONY user who had other info in his EXIF data like copyright info and his website address. So Steve may be the man to help you resolve your problem
Once one of the SONY users has figured out how to correct these settings, then we need to let all other SONY members know how to apply the same changes.
Thanks.
Click!
Horatio.
The gallery for February 2012 has been uploaded.
Click!
Chas.
The latest issue of SNAP has been uploaded to the website. I will not be emailing the SNAP PDF to all current members of the WCC this month, as the file is 1.7MB in size and this might present problems for email inboxes behind corporate firewalls where there are rules and limits on the size of incoming email.
I will however send out an email pointing all members to the website.
Regardless of whether you received SNAP via email or clicked on the link on the website, the same amount of data will travel down to your computer to view SNAP
Click here to view the March edition of SNAP.
Click!
Chas.
Great workshop last night. Well attended and thanks to Carl, who claimed he didn’t know much, but taught us a huge amount about composition and Pieter for the color selection presentation and Q&A session.
I am sure the WCC members’ images are going to be well composed, sharpened and noiseless from this point onwards, unless of course, they c*** it up. We are going to buy someone a soapy mouthwash. 
But more importantly, thanks for sharing and affording us the time.
Herewith a link to the Photoshop keyboard shortcuts which Pieter mentioned. Click on the image below for a PDF copy of the info.
You can either right-click and save as or once opened, save a local copy. Please note that printing this in A4 might consume an ocean of blue ink as the whole page is blue – perhaps print it in monochrome.
Click!
Chas.
Sorry this hasn’t quite been a “Weekly Roundup”. Been a busy start to the year… Will try step it up in the next couple of weeks. For this week, here’s some good videos I’ve come across lately. Enjoy…
Fantastic Wedding Photography Tips for all Shooters
Micro-Stock Multimillionaire: Yuri Arcus
Steel wool light painting explained...
Colour Management with Kevin Kubota
