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Winning Image - False

I am an avid wildlife photographer myself and have on occasion shot at a wildlife park (none of which are published on my website (www.bolinphoto.com) I would never think of portraying an image taken in a park as that from the wild.

The photographer is spanish José Luis Rodríguez.  His behavior in this matter disgusts me as there are many hard working photographers that don’t deserve to be tainted in any way by his behavior.  There were 43,000 entrants in the competition and to think he had the nerve to accept the award knowing his behavior was deceitful.  Shame on you!

Welcome to Red Pixel Media!

If you have not read anything about Adobe Kuler, visit Kulor Part 1.

Todays article is a quick follow up on a great add-on for mac computers that will be able to utilize the power of Adobe Kuler in native applications such as Pages, Keynotes, Numbers, Photoshop, Illustrator, ect…

Simply download plugin Mondrianum 2 from here, and install it as you would any other program.

Now you will notice that it works in most programs but not Photoshop… so here’s what you need to do:

Open up Photoshop General Preferences and change the colour palette from Adobe to Apple.

Photoshop Day One

- From The Beginning

I have been interested in Photoshop for years and have never found one single book that taught me all the beginner skills under one cover. Instead I searched Google and found private blogs all around the world trying to cover Photoshop in bits and pieces – so in short, it took me a lot longer to learn Photoshop than it will take you. My goal in writing Photoshop Day’s Series is to provide my readers with the confidence to use the Photoshop workspace, and to be able to go online and follow the pro’s and know exactly how they did it.

This free version is the entire first chapter that I have finally completed. It currently contains info on every tool found in the toolbar with tips and notes that even I look back on! Much more is to follow, along with premium brush and shape downloads!

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Please feel free to comment and suggest additional chapters!

It’s been a lot of work writing what I have up to this point, and only your comments and help will make this a remarkable series. I truly hope it will further your Photoshop skills! Enjoy! ~Brandon

Download –> Photoshop Day One (397) - 1.8 MB

Every now and then we all experience the unfortunate event of failing camera equipment.  On a recent trip to Churchill, Manitoba to do a Polar Bear shoot I had my Canon 500mm f/4 L IS lens fail on me.  I picked up the camera and ready to do a shoot, activated the auto focus only to discover the lens would “hunt” for an accurate focus.   The lens would almost lock onto an accurate focus and then back off to something of a shorter focus distance.  This continual “hunting” for accurate focus would continue and never lock on.

Canon 1D Mark III, 500mm f/4 IS, 1/320 second @ f/8

So what does one do?  While we all take for granted auto-focus lenses there was a time that we all had to manually focus.  To make this task easier after every shoot I would set my camera back to the same settings so I knew exactly what my camera was set at as soon as I picked it up again.  For me, I use aperture priority at f/8 and ISO at 200.  On this trip I would set the ISO higher to 400 to ensure I was getting faster shutter speeds and also due to the lower light conditions that  I would shoot in during the day.

Normally, I don’t have a routine for my lenses as they are full automatic.  However, because I had no auto-focus on my 500mm lens I developed a routine and process for it.  I would always set the focus to ~infinity.  By doing this, when I picked up the lens and was ready to focus I only had to turn the focus ring in one direction to get an accurate focus.  By setting the lens on infinity I knew I had to “push” the focus ring to the right which worked well when wearing gloves in the cold weather.  Pulling the focus ring wasn’t as easy as pushing so I made certain the lens was set at infinity for that reason.

Canon 1D Mark III, 500mm f/4 IS, 1/800 second @ f/5.6

As mentioned in our previous article, a user always needs to read the terms of use and the copyright policy of a website and make sure you are not giving exclusive rights of your photo’s away. Photoshop Online had this written in their copyright policy (not sure if it has since changed), and also the social network giant Facebook. You may be a huge FB user like I am and it may have occurred to you that it may be the best place for your many friends to view your latest and greatest images, however, the fine print is a major turn off. The FB copyright may feel like a radiant bottle of butterflies in comparison to some of Facebook’s application’s copyright policies (yes, they have their own!). Many have full access to personal information including your precious images!

Due to blindfolds in the Facebook policies, Flickr (from Yahoo) has become widely popular for photographers, as is Deviant Art. Both hold no rights on user’s uploaded images.

However, we all know the safest thing is to host your own website and upload images to your own server. Now comes the challenge that almost every website has… the copy-paste thieves! With a few simple steps however, this can be avoided.

1. You could use some sort of HTML encoder, however this can just make thing’s complicated and messy when trying to work on your website.

2. Paste some no copy, or no right click html code! Quick and easy solution that will work for most situations!

3. Images online shouldn’t be any larger than 600px x 600px with 72 dpi

Lastly, make sure you watermark your images! Make something easily recognizable by yourself but hard to photoshop out. Of course there’s a fine line between a useful watermark and a watermark that just takes over the image…

Watermark | 600px x 600px | 72dpi | Image

That’s it for tonight! Always feel free to contact us for questions and make sure you comment!

In the mean time we invite you to sip some coffee and enjoy a small portion of my portfolio.

P.S. Hope everyone had an awesome holiday!

Create

Now in my above comments I mention stealing other effect/designs but what about stealing pieces from other industries like music, videos, or images! Google Images are not royalty free! Go to istockphoto.com and spend $5.00 on some brochure images if you really need some! Lime Wire has not signed contracts with every music artist on earth to sell their work for free! Go on iTunes and buy $1.00 song. How hard is it? Even forgetting about the lawsuits around the globe dealing with pirated music, doesn’t it just feel good to personally own your entire music library? I think it does! We don’t like people copying our work, but why do we turn around and steal other people’s work?

In a client’s eyes we need to be creative, thoughtful and trusting. Therefore we as designers need to hold our reputation on creating – not stealing.

Please spread the word to create, not steal. It’s affecting all our jobs, all our lives, and should be stopped.

1. Journal

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2. Estrya’s Handwriting

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3. Dear Joe

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4. Sketch Rockwell

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5. Monika

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