Snap, Click, Curse, Repeat
This past weekend, I attended the Rocky Mountain School of Photography’s Digital Weekend Workshop, held in my now hometown of beautiful, sunny Austin, TX. Before I forget and start to talk about the price of tea in China, the horses in Chicopee, or whatever else happens into my feeble mind this morning, I thought it would be a good idea to recap the weekend events.
The first day of the workshop could best be summed up by saying, “shoot in RAW format! shoot in RAW format!” After learning what I did about exposure, and the fun you can have manipulating a RAW format image, I’ve decided that I will probably never shoot in JPEG again.
Also, I am now convinced I need a full-blown copy of Adobe Photoshop. It just does that much with so little that I might have half a chance of getting something nice out of it, if I bracket, shoot carefully, and get all creative and stuff.
I’ve come out of the weekend complete with a shopping list of items I need to purchase, so I’ll frantically be hitting the web over the next few weeks, in an attempt at getting my digital darkroom setup before my self-imposed deadline of March. It’s going to be close, but it’s still within reach at this point. Some of my shopping items are software-related, so I’ll be sure to talk about this again, at a later point.
Don’t you go looking at that LCD on the back of the digital camera. They told us this was bad. We still need to compose by looking through the peephole. Only use the LCD for checking COMPOSITION (not exposure, see note about RAW format above.) That, and, it does wonders at making you seasick if you twirl around the room with it.
We still need tripods. The instructor made a funny joke about this. He got up in front of the class and was like, “maybe you’ve seen them? They’re these funny-looking things with like 3 legs and stuff?!?”
Did you know that there’s a guy named Rob Galbraith who has entirely way too much time on his hands? I know this because they told us about his website, where he actually rates, for speed and other factors, each of the various formats of CompactFlash and other memory available for digital cameras. Rob, thanks for you hard work and dedication, now go get a life.
I now know what a “Master Photoshop File” is and what to do with it. My images won’t look any better but, hey, now my life is complete, right?
Did you know that, if you want to sharpen an image, you can actually use something called “The Unsharp Mask?”
Oh, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I see it all now. How did I miss so much obvious stuff before? Ah, vision. Insight is so overrated these days.
Until next time…
