Month: June 2008

What is this?

Jason4 Comments

What is this?

Welcome to the Wednesday walk around the web. Before throwing the web gems for this week at you, I figured it might be fun to bring in a new feature for Wednesdays: “What is this?” I’ll take a shot of something at an unusual angle, perhaps zoomed in super close, or intentionally blurred. See if you can guess what it is (use the comments). If you’re right, guess what you win? That’s right! Fame, fortune, and glory! Well, not really – but you do win the “What is this?” for the week so you can brag to all your photo peers that you won the CB “What is this” photo game. I’ll make the first one easy and give a hint – this was taken in my home office. Now, with that in mind, look at the picture above, and see if you can guess what it is! Good luck to all – and now for the Wednesday web gems.

  • This Week in Photography (TWIP) – Scott does regular photo-related posts, just like the rest of us, but he does bring a unique approach to the table. Another cool thing: he has contests, with actual prizes! Cool blog and ltos of useful info.
  • Frederick Johnson – Learned about this guy in the NAPP forums. He’s the Senior Marketing Manager for Professional Photography at Adobe – and while the title and company are impressive enough – check out his Flickr stream, and he has a blog too! Very cool stuff.
  • Jason D. Moore – His weekly P&P listing is up – everything there is of at least a first and second glance!
  • John Nack – Well known Adobe guy, and on my daily hit list. Always good info there. Actually thanks to John, I should qualify the statements that I made a few days ago about Adobe using the GPU for the next version of PS – his clarification on the subject was that it might be coming…but not sure when and as he said he “can neither confirm nor deny” it – he was just sharing possible developments.
  • Okay, it’s a bit of self-promotion, but I’ve not heard much feedback on the Advanced Online Photography Test (a.k.a. TOP Test) since migrating it. So, stop over to the TOP TEST to take your photography skills to the next level!

That should be enough for your morning surf time, now either get back to work or get out and shoot some pictures! Don’t forget to guess on the picture above, and throw a vote in on the poll. Happy shooting, watch those apertures, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!

Custom Brushes

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Custom Brush

For this weeks tutorial, I thought to take a look at custom brushes and brush sets. It can be a pretty handy thing to have some custom brushes of things you do often, or looks and styles that you apply often to your photos (such as a signature, copyright, or some other such logo). The idea came from someone in one of the photo forums (NAPP forums if I recall correctly), asking if there was a brush set out there that had a set of hash marks (like for the days of the week). We talked back and forth on a few alternatives when it dawned on me – we could make a brush to do that! You really can make brushes to do whatever you want, it’s just a matter of doing it once and then saving it, much like an action.

So, here’s a tutorial that examines how to create, save, and load custom brushes inside of Photoshop. We’ll see you back here tomorrow! Until then, Happy Shooting and watch those apertures!

Creating Custom Brushes

More coffee Monday

Jason2 Comments

Judging from my soreness even today after a weekend of home improvement projects, I would imagine that tomorrow morning will be even more of the same – I will definitely be partaking of more than a few cups of joe to get me on my feet and functional.

I did take some time to do some cleanup work of the weekend on the photo gallery side of things for my website and the project side of things for the blog too though. The lucky readers (lucky possibly being a subjective term in this case) will get a sneak preview of my latest gallery addition as I ran out of time and do not have a link on the site to this yet (or the thumbnail for that matter).

On the blog maintenance, I’ve changed the notice for comments – apparently the spam flag was set a little too severely as people were making comments and it was taking up to a month in some cases before those got discovered and re-tagged. So, your comments should become visible much more quickly now. With that in mind, I thought I’d also share the latest photo gallery that I am putting up on my website with those of you who are tuning in, so now you can comment more easily! Last but not least, I had mentioned an article that was forthcoming both in the video tutorial last week, and in another one of the posts. Well, after going through several re-writes and different takes on it, I’ve decided not to publish that, as it’s just to dense of a topic for a short listen or read. If anyone is interested in it though, the subject is creative development.

I looked at an essay that came out in the most recent issue of Shutterbug Magazine, where Jack Hollingsworth looks at how photographers develop their in the essay The Ladder: In Defense of Imitation . He defines 3 stages or phases of development: imaginative, adaptive, and innovative. While both interesting and logical, it raises more questions than it answers. I found myself in similar shoes when trying to address just a few of those questions ir raised in my mind – more questions, practically all of which were subjective in nature. So, the article will likely not see the light of day here at CB. If anyone is interested in a heavy read, let me know via email and I’ll be happy to forward a copy of that article to whomever requests it directly.

That said, the blog was not a good place for it, so I discarded the idea for CB and went with the photo montage. A sneak peak was done a few weeks ago, and it’s now complete. Visit my photo site for the full gallery here

Hope everyone’s weekends were good ones. Here’s to a new week – happy shooting, and watch that ISO!