Outpatients and outages, but we have a new tutorial!

It’s been a few days since making a post, as there have been a few issues that have come up, not the least of which was an outage or two from my provider. As a result, I was not able to get online for more than a few minutes at a clip for Monday and Tuesday as a result.

Additionally, I had an outpatient procedure done yesterday at the Doctor’s Office so I needed a little time to recuperate after that. Things are slowly working their way back to normal though, and I have the first in a two part series of tutorials designed to give some insight to my work flow and the use of the LAB workspace for both lightness and curves adjustments. Check them out via the link at the end of this post. In the meantime, happy shooting, and I’ll be back in a day or two with the remainder of the LAB work space tutorial…

Curves Adjustments in LAB

Weekend Wrap-up

Quite a few newsworthy things happened between Friday and today.  The legendary Scott Kelby gives us his top ten (actually 11) blogs to visit – among them those of fellow gurus, Matt Kloskowski and  Dave Cross.  Others that made the list include Moose Peterson, John Nack, and David Ziser.  While it’s always fun to see what others, the best part is that he invites others to post their favorites in his comments section.  Given the visibility of Scot’s blog on the internet, many are obviously taking obvious advantage of the opportunity to shamelessly plug their own sites.  So…it’s become quite an extensive list of blogs, and CB shall take advantage of the opportunity itself here before the day is over.   I’d highly recommend stopping over to see what fun stuff is there for useful info.

In other news, there’s a great tip on Strobist for implementing a ring light in a pinch.

Since this is the Canon Blogger, I should probably give a nod to DPReview on their informative analysis of two new Canon printers, the Selphy ES2 and the ES20 with pretty fair results.  May be worth checking out depending on your printing needs.  Canon’s press release on the products are also available in their newsroom here:  Canon Newsroom

Finally, for the 3 or 4 people that read this besides myself, the weekend trip to Baltimore was a lot of fun.  It was good to see the family, and I got a few neat shots from Camden Yards where the New York Yankees squeaked out a win over Baltimore.

Terrible Tuesday Stwess!!

Well, terrible Tuesday’s post is about the length of my latest video podcast severely biting me in the you-know-what.   As it turns out, Flash has this limitation of 160,000 frames, so to circumvent that, there seems to be only two options:  record in shorter segments and splice them together in Flash with Action scripts (I don’t have Flash…using another software solution right now, still in trial form…), or encode as a FLV file (the shorter flash videos have been encoded with the more common SWF format.  SWF gives higher resolution, loads faster, and is also more common…so I didn’t even know much about FLV prior to tonight and my history with swf/flv players in WordPress.  Well, since I don’t own flash, my only real option was to encode as an FLV file.  This is taking forever!  I am now looking into how to do Action scripts and purchasing Flash as it seems this might be a more viable long term solution for me…but, it does delay the Camera Raw tutorial another day.  It did give me some time to sit down re-tune the blog to allow for embedding flash video files locally, without needing to hang a video podcast out there hanging in the wind where it can’t get picked up by the all-important blogger feeds of the masses (iTunes included). So, I think I shall call it a night early, and make sure things are picture perfect tomorrow after work. For today, I guess the “masses” that tune in will just have to wait along with me in agony!

No news for Monday

Well, that may not be entirely true, as Tips from The Top Floor has a few updates both in audio and video format, so stop over there for some weekyl news and info about Chris’ trip to the great ole U.S. of A. He’s going from CO on to California, and then some other place before finishing up in St. Lucie FL, so if you get a chance between now and Oct. 18th to listen/view – you may wanna do so as now I am even thinking of making my way down there for a few days.

Please also say a prayer for Scott Sherman and Michael Stein from The Digital Photography Show. Before this week I did not know that their affiliation began because both their children are affected by Cerebral Palsy.   Scott’s had to have a surgical procedure this last week, and yet he still managed to find some time to produce the show. Suffice to saw, I would have been long gone and Canon Blogger would not have even been on my radar – so thanks to Scott and Michael and my prayers go out to both of you as you walk this noble path – esp. to Scott given the recency of its impact on his life personally.

Finally, Strobist had a couple cool posts recently, first one about Flickr where you can see your “ranking” on there – serious submitters only though as if it’s less than that, you probably won’t show up many times. Another cool post is about using small off-camera lights to help illuminate landscapes. A neat example is there too, so go check that out.

Finally, another podcast is ready for viewing! I did run out of time for production tonight though, so will have to wait until tomorrow to finish it, but promise a rather lengthy one (about 30 minutes) is forthcoming and discusses quite a few details about working in Camera Raw for your post processing. Stay tuned and it should be online in less than 24 hours! Until tomorrow then…Happy Shooting!

Non-photo post again today

Hate to do this two days in a row, but I am just swamped at work, and got home quite late.  Suffice to say, I am still very low on the learning curve for the MBP and may have to resort to a Windows box for the next post with any meaningful content.  Although I will say I am a little confused about the available tracks for Garage Band.  I would think that these tracks would be included when shipped if it’s as easy as a download away.  WHy force us through a 2 gig downoad?  Plus, if Garage Band tracks are independent of the Software Update service, then why make us go through SUS first before downloading the latest patch files and tracks for the software that was supposed to be “full featured” on arrival…the first nit on the MBP – Garage Band goes through SUS – why?  Seriously…Cupertino, are you listening?  I could have made another podcast on Windows by now and GB still hasn’t downloaded/installed the tracks needed to mix something together.

No post today..

Following the trend of the more visible photoshop guys (a.k.a. Scott Kelby), there will be no post today beyond this:

My MacBook Pro arrived today, so I am anxiously crawling up the learning curve (Garage Band is nt the most intuitive of applications for a Windows user to adjust to..on top of the button placements, I’ve never even used the app before.  But it is getting easier here and there).  I’ll be back in a few days with hopefully a few tutorials and some of my thoughts on the new acquisition!  Hello Macworld – here I come! 🙂

New video tutorial is available!

What with all the work I’ve been putting in to my new dedicated photography site, and keeping up with web activities, I’ve not had a chance to look into the issue of embedding flash in the blog yet, so links to the videos will have to suffice for the time being. As I get more vids put together, I may generate a static page where all of them can be viewed in a myriad flash/html format, depending on how much feedback I get. For the time being here is my first video attempt, attached as a flash file:

Clearly, this week I was re-visiting the horizon leveling subject, but in a more intermediate role. Last week, this subject was one of a few tips were touched on in a light fashion, so this week, largely in response to feedback from fellow photogs, I am re-visiting this one to address some questions that arose. Primarily, how should you level on multiple axes? It was something of a learning experience for me, as my initial thought would have been the warp tool under Free Transform. As it turns out, in the image supplied, perspective transform worked a lot better. I suppose there are multiple ways to skin a cat, but here I look at both the ruler and the transform tools for leveling purposes, depending on the number of axes, and effects you are going for. Check it out in the link at the end of the post.

I also wanted to take a moment to give shout outs to Scott Sherman and Michael Stein of The Digital Photography Show. Scott had a series of snafu’s last weekend that reminded me of some useful advice I learned a year or so ago in similar fashion. Basically, he reminded me that if you are serious about photography and your pictures, the planning begins long before tripping the shutter. After my episode, I devised a checklist of “to dos” both in packing for a shoot, and in wrapping up. This ensures you have all the gear you need going in, it all works, and you leave with all your gear as well. The post came from the photo clubs’ blog, last year, so forgive the outdated link, but it still has use and is relevant today. Anyway, the story can be seen at the link at the end of this post.

Thanks all for tuning in again, and I see the poll count has jumped another couple notches so keep the votes coming – I don’t want to say the goal for fear of jinxing it, but the more the merrier in voting for content! 🙂

Oh, and I almost forgot, shout outs to Dave from Fred Miranda for supplying the image for this weeks tutorial!

Developing a checklist

Leveling multiple axes (horizons) in Photoshop

ETA: As I eventually figured out the flash problems, I have been able to go back to previous posts and incorporate the embedded flash videos. As this was the first video podcast (I wasn’t keeping count until I realized that I’d better, just to keep track of content and quality), so backdated shout outs for the first video podcast. I am also attaching a Quicktime version of the movie for downloading and iTunes purposes so, check for that at the top of this post.

Flash player plugins

Well , I was going to post a cool flash tutorial I put together on leveling horizons, but some temperamental coding issues have put that on hold. Suffice to say, if anyone can explain to me the difference between FLV and SWF players/readers, how to implement them and write posts embedding them, please post here or email me direct, because the documentation on WordPress and horribly written documentation thus far just really bites hard. Even with my fairly solid grasp of HTML, XHTML, CSS, XML, and JS understanding, the world of flash is leaving me just a little bit clueless…

So, for the time being, here’s a link to the video: Horizon Leveling Tutorial

ETA: Many thanks go out to Ryan Thomas from FredMiranda for letting me use his image in the tutorial…