Vegas Baby, Vegas!

"Trust"

From a recent studio mini-course with a local client

Off this week to Las Vegas for the Photoshop World convention. The trade show is put on by the Scott Kelby and his team at NAPP (The National Association of Photoshop Professionals.) Every conference is a tremendous experience as the industry leaders, movers, and shakers are all in one spot.

Similar to last year, we will have a large booth on the tradeshow floor featuring demos, tutorials, and talks from our staff as well as our instructors. If you are heading to the show, stop by and say hello.

We will also publish our 2009 schedule at the conference and will push it online as soon as we return. Some good stuff next year from the best bird photographer in the US to masters of wedding photography.

Take care and hope to see or hear from you soon.

Canvas

Hal finished up our second Canvas Printing and Finishing Techniques course about an hour ago. Everyone did well as we printed and finished over eight canvas gallery wraps. As always the class produced some incredible work and learned a huge amount. Even Reagan got into the mix with her little 11 x 16 canvas.

From canvas selection to print optimization to coating to stretching, we did it all (by hand.) With that said, Hal did demonstrate the canvas stretching machine to show some speedy stretching.

We'll do another canvas course next weekend after we finish up with Fay Sirkis' Corel Painter class.

Cheers!

Thanks Charlie and See You Next August!

Friday saw the end of Charlie Cramer's Digital Printing for the Fine Art Photographer. We spent the first three days learning to optimize our images. The class became very familiar with every use of the Curves adjustment layer. In addition, there was a daily critique of student work led by Charlie himself.

Thursday and Friday were all about optimization of the students' images and printing, of course. We fired up the Canon 5100s and 8100 printing 8.5 x 11, 13 x 19, 16 x 20, and larger. All in all there were some tremendous images and impressive prints.

We just booked Charlie again for next year so we will do it again relatively soon.

Digital Printing Party

Just another Thursday night wine and cheese party at the Lepp Insitute. Rough living here in Los Osos, optimizing images and printing all day with a little relaxation in the evening.

Charles Cramer has shared his expertise with the class for the last four days and we are seeing some great prints as a result. Tomorrow we will fire up the Canon ipf 8100 for some larger prints. Looking forward to what we get.

As you may or may not know we tend to print quite a bit at the school. We are fortunate enough to have Canon sponsor us with equipment, ink, and media so our clients can learn to print properly here before wasting any of their time or assets at home.

We'll finish up tomorrow and kick off again Saturday morning with another Canvas Printing and Finishing Techniques course, nothing like working with canvas.

Take care and hope to see or hear from you soon.

Hal

LR Class Photo

Friday finished a great Lightroom 2.0 class. We were very fortunate to hold the class immediately after the release of the latest version. It was a long week with multiple photo shoots and plenty of time in front of the program but well worth it.

Charles Cramer is here now teaching Digital Printing for the Fine Art Photographer, always a fun class.

I'll put a new post up later detailing our huge wine in the 10th Annual Paso Robles Winemaker Cookoff!

Interesting LR 2.0 Work

After 2 Graduated Filter adjustments in LR 2.0

Before any processing/straight from the Canon 40D

We were out this morning shooting the sunrise from my new favorite location just south of San Luis Obispo. It was absolutely beautiful. We even had Reagan out to see her first sunrise!

The two shots above are an after and before comparison of one of the images I shot this morning. The intent of the shot was to use it as a demonstration in our current Lightroom 2.0 class. There is a new tool called the Graduated Filter and it may be used for local adjustments to an image (vice the global adjustments LR has.)

The change in the images is the result of applying the Graduated Filter twice; once to darken the sky and again to add a tint of gold to the foreground. Not a perfect shot but it served the purpose of showing how powerful the very simple Graduated Filter tool can be.

The class is becoming much more familiar and comfortable with LR 2.0. We're even finding certain little bugs that seem to stop the program (will send to Adobe soonest.)

I am a little biased but I am very happy to have the release timing work where we at the Lepp Institute run the first LR 2.0 week-long training workshop anywhere!

Cheers!
Hal

Lightroom 2.0

Well Lightroom 2.0 was officially released last week and we are already into a week long Lightroom workshop. The class yesterday spent some (ok, a lot of time) with the new Library module and will do the same today with the Develop module and new local adjustment toools.

Fortunately, we are out in the field this afternoon for some slow shutter speed and panorama work (Lightroom allows pics >10,000 pixels on any dimension now so it will display panos!)

More later.