Pico Projector Story in July Pop Photo

If you happen to be at the newsstand this week, check out the July issue of Pop Photo--I have a short article on "Pico" projectors on page 16. Pico projectors, in case you've never heard of them, are teensy (the largest is the size of a Big Mac box, others are much smaller) battery-operated go-anywhere digital projectors. You can hook them up to anything from your iPod to a dvd player or your laptop and project images anywhere you can find a flat white surface. Models like the BenQ Joybee GP1 (pictured here) let you project images up to 80-inches (diagonally). How cool is that? The projectors are quite literally small enough to fit into a jacket pocket (and some, including the Benq, have built-in speakers)  and yet you can show feature films big enough to fill up a wall. How about showing a film on the front of your garage door and inviting the neighborhood over on a hot summer night for a free flick! I'll write more about a few specific projectors in upcoming posts, but in the meantime, if you see Pop on the stands, give page 16 a quick peek.

Magically Change Colors in Seconds!

Have you ever photographed a red barn and wondered how it would look blue? Or purple? Or green? Here's a really simple and fun way to find out using the hue/saturation tool! In fact, this is one of my favorite Photoshop tricks and it's incredibly easy to do--just a few quick keystrokes. By using this technique you can change any color to virtually any other color. And the really cool thing is that it only changes the color you want to change and leaves all the rest of the colors untouched!

Here's how it's done:

1. Open a photo in Photoshop (or Elements) that has a boldy-colored object you'd like to change to another color. Crop the image first so that you're only working with the composition you're going to keep--no sense getting distracted by image areas you're going to toss later anyway.
2. Open the layers palette (you should always work with the layers palette open). Now, open the hue/saturation tool in the layers palette so that it opens a new layer (just click on the half-black circle at the bottom of the layers palette if this is new to you--and you will see the hue/saturation tool in the list of options).
3. At the top of the hue/saturation dialog box, you'll see a pull-down menu labled "Master." Click on that box and a list of the main colors will drop down. Choose the existing color of the object you want to change. In this case, because the portion of the floats that I wanted to change was orange, I chose red because that was the closest color option.
4.  Now look down to the bottom of the dialog box and you'll see three eye-dropper icons. Click once on the left-most block to tell Photoshop that you'll be sampling a color. Now move your cursor over the color you want to change (again, for me it was the orange area) and click once. If you want to gather more variations of the color, click on the "plus" eyedropper icon (the middle one) and then click as many more times as you want. Each time you click you are broadening the color that Photoshop is going to alter--but you should only click on related areas of the subject. In other words, if you're working on a blue dress, you might see various different shades of blue (because of lighting or shadows, etc) and if you want them all to shift to another color, you have to sample them all.
5.  Now slide the hue slider and watch what happens! Only the objects that were the color(s) that you sampled will change--but you can alter the hue as much as you like. I could have easily turned these floats blue or purple or green just by sliding the hue adjustment. Wild! 

Finally, you may notice that some parts of the scene other than your intended subject are also changing (look at the buckets in the background in this shot and you'll see some changes in their color, and in the decking, as well), so if you want to do this very precisely, you should select just the parts of the image you want to change using any of the selection tools before you begin changing the colors. In other words, I could have carefully selected just the floats and my hue changes would not have affected the buckets in any way.

Is this a cool trick? Try it! Again, for your first experiments, try something that is obviously one color--like a your yellow car. If you want to see how it would look blue or green or pink--it's just a few keystrokes away. Have fun!

Exposure Book #1 Bestseller on Amazon Kindle

I was happy to learn this week that my book Exposure Photo Workshop: Develop Your Digital Photography Talent was the #1 bestselling photo reference book for the Amazon Kindle. It had been flirting with the top position for several weeks, but about midweek it reached the number one spot. I'm pretty excited that it has reach such a landmark on Kindle because I think that, as much as I love "old fashioned" books (I have a house full of them) and as much as I think some of us will always want to read traditional books, I also think that e-books are fun, convenient and here to stay. By the way, even if you don't have a Kindle yet (I don't!), you can also read the book on your iPad or almost any other e-reading device. My friend Walter showed me how the exposure book looked on his iPad and I was just thrilled to see how great it looked--the color photos reproduced beautifully, even better than in the print book (and you can click them up to full-screen instantly). A great graduation gift! Of course, if you still like flipping through paper pages, you can also get the paperback version of Exposure Photo Workshop: Develop Your Digital Photography Talent. The book has 20 five-star reviews on Amazon--also very gratifying.

Go Catch Yourself a Full Moon!

Seeing the full moon rise above the treetops as I worked in my garden yesterday evening reminded me of this shot I took last summer at Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge in Virginia, so I went and dug it out to share. Photographing the full moon is actually pretty easy: just use the longest lens you have (I used a 70-300mm Nikkor which is the equivalent of a 450mm when it's fully zoomed on my Nikon D90 body) and put your camera on a sturdy tripod. You must use some kind of a land reference (here just a snippet of dunes at the far side of a small bay) in order to provide some sense of scale for the moon--otherwise it's just lost in the sky and you can't tell how big it looks. As far as exposure goes, I trusted my D90's matrix metering for this shot, but I did shoot in RAW so that I could adjust the exposure and white balance after the fact. I did tweak both, but only a small amount (I made the sky a bit bluer and I brightened the shot about one stop). The great thing about shooting a full moon is that you get a few days where it's pretty full each month--and you get a new chance each month!

New CS5 Training DVD from Software Cinema

If you're thinking of upgrading to Adobe Photoshop CS5, which was just released this month, or if you're thinking of buying the full version of Photoshop for the first time, there's one accessory I highly recommend: Colin Smith's new instructional DVD Photoshop CS5 Secrets for Digital Photographers from Software Cinema.

Using a new full version of Photoshop, even if you're an experienced user, is like learning a new language and, if you're a first-time user, it's like learning about a whole new universe--it's just staggering how much is crammed into this program. To try to learn all of the new features by just sitting in front of a monitor and experimenting is interesting, but it's also slow and very inefficient. The Software Cinema DVDs are the best of the best and they're incredibly easy to follow. Short of having a one-on-one instructor sitting beside you, it's simply the best way there is to learn Photoshop. Best of all you can pop in the DVD whenever you have a few minutes or watch it over and over again as often as you need, or when a new question pops up.

This DVD contains more than seven hours of personal instruction and the advanced interface allows you to instantly jump to any of the 64 lessons with complete control over the playback. I've been using Software Cinema DVDs for years and each one is better than the last--and if you've been reading this blog for the past two years, you know that I rarely, if ever, talk about specific products. But I answer so many questions about Photoshop each week that I know how frustrating it can be to try to learn such a massive program on your own. You'll learn more from this training DVD in 10 minutes than you would on your own in 10 hours. The disc sells for just $99 and there is currently a 15% discount being offered (I think it's through the month of May). Take a few minutes to check out the other Cinema Software training DVDs while you're on the site.

Take a Giant Step Closer...maybe

One of the keys to creating a strong composition is, naturally enough, letting your audience know exactly what your intention was when you were taking the picture. If someone has to ask what it is you were trying to show, dude, you've missed the boat somewhere. One of the simplest ways to give your photos more impact is, interestingly enough, to make them simpler. And, of course, one way to simplify any picture is to get closer to it. The question is: What is close enough? Ahh, that's where concepts turn into judgments calls: it's up to you to decide just how close you want to be (or not be).

When I spotted this photo idea at the very nice Caramoor Museum and Gardens in Katonah, New York, I knew almost immediately that I wanted to shoot this big urn. And I knew that I wanted that beautiful and ornate gold and black gate in the background to be a part of the shot. So I composed a shot (using my tripod, naturally) to include the entire urn and most of the gate. Nice shot. It looked nice on the LCD and I still like it. But then I thought that putting those geraniums in the foreground might be creating too much of a distraction and diminishing the impact of the gate. So, poof, I zoomed in a touch and got rid of the flowers. What the heck, as long as I had the original shot I wanted captured, I might as well shoot a bunch of variations.

As it turns out, it's a good thing I did. I'm using the middle shot above in the revision of my book The Joy of Digital Photography (Lark Photography Book) and while we tried to use the top shot first, the reds and greens were giving the printer trouble (too much saturation, partly, but also just very strong contrasting colors) and so rather than just try to tweak that file, we chose the middle shot. With the reds and greens gone from the foreground the shot will almost certainly reproduce better.

The third shot was just a variation that I thought might be useful in a lesson (like this one) to show that even when you think you are close, you can still take a giant step closer--and still come up with a nice shot. I call it the Giant Step Theory (well, actually, I just thought of that name, but you get the point). While the gate is completely gone and there is no real foreground, it's still a neat shot and in some ways I like it the best. One small step for you, one giant step for your photographs.

Is any one of these shots better than the other? It really depends on the use and what you like (or what you like at the moment--my preference on this keeps changing). But since digital is free and since you only have to move a few feet (or zoom a bit more) to give your self a variety of options, go ahead, shoot the wide shot and then take a giant step or two forward....as long as you're not shooting from the end of a dock.

Use Textures to Give Photos a "Touch" Factor

Because photographs only exist in two dimensions (height and width) and have no depth (the third dimension), it's important to emphasize textures to give photos a "touch" factor. There are all kinds of textures that can be brought out in a photo, from the slippery smooth surface of wet seaweed to the rough surface of a gravel parking lot. Bringing out the texture is largely a matter of getting close enough to it so that it shows clearly and then using lighting to exaggerate it. Light that comes from the side or the rear of your subject works best because that kind of oblique lighting creates lots of tiny shadows and highlights and it's that contrast that draws out the surface quality of subjects. Sometimes top lighting will also draw out textures, as long as the angle is steep enough. For example, I shot this old peeling carving of a Chinaman with the light coming from almost directly overhead and the lighting created a lot of shadows running down on the face--under the eyebrows, nose, lips, etc. And by filling the frame with just the face, the eye is drawn naturally to the textures. If you're bored someday while shooting, forget about subjects and go look for a texture--you might find that the texture alone is a good enough subject.