JOYCE TENNESON IN DENTON!

This is an amazing opportunity. If you don't know who she is, she is an internationally renowned photographer with books including Transformations, Wise Women, Illuminations and Light Warriors. Her work has appeared in countless publications including Time, Premiere, and Fortune. Catch her tomorrow night at Texas woman's University.

Class Meeting Two

The second ever meeting of the UNT digital photography class seemed to bring great strides in progress for instructor and students alike. Topics included a review of the previous class meeing's highlights and general outline, followed by a demonstration of the image capture, downloading images off cards and workflow that leads to a satisfactory image to begin the Photoshop processes.
Capture included:
- flash versus ambient light
- Camera auto white balance versus manual white balance
- shooting with flash on manual white balance
- shooting wtih ambient light on auto white balance
Downloading included:
- using a firewire card reader
- controlling files on desktop
- archiving raw files immediately


Manipilation & Correction included:
- opening images with camera raw software
- camera raw color correction
- camera raw exposure correction
- conversion from raw to jpeg
- discussion of raw / jpeg / tiff benefits of each

Manipulation & Correction of converted images:
- Adobe Photoshop CS used in class demonstration
- sizing images for different uses
- cropping
- using curves to add or reduce emphasis
- black & white conversion methods
- Quadtone conversion
- using distort > diffuse glow

Assignment to be completed on following week was for each student to size down and e mail the instructor jpeg image.

Say Goodbye to Big Labs Too

Professionals in the Dallas Fort Worth area recently received a letter from BWC lab, a mainstay for years in the professional and demanding amateur processing and printing market. I always open lab letters first because I am almost 100-percent assured it is not a bill, and I am curious as to whether it is another announcement of going out of business or going up in pricing.

BWC generated a nice letter saying they had not increased prices on certain areas of their processing in ten years and in the current market of increasing expense, they were going up on some processing prices. My economics immediately kicked in and made me wonder, with decreasing demand do you really want to RAISE prices? My curiosity got the best of me, so I flipped the page over to see the new price grid, and what was the shocking news - a blank sheet of paper! OK, am I the only one who thinks a company has a problem when it is sending out blank sheets of paper? And why had they not increased prices for ten years? That seems a little strange.

BWC does have a great service that converts digital files to slides and that is what my studio will be offering for doing student art portfolios. It is impossible to beat having one exact exposure, with perfect lighting and at a higher quality than 35-mm film, but that is the future. One set of slides and digital files is impossible to beat. So, I called BWC to see what pricing is for this service, and once they quoted it to me, I asked them if their "good customers" had a better rate. He looked me up and informed me, after looking at my account history, that I had done 122-dollars in 2004 and 26-dollars thus far this year. After a big laugh, the full weight of what he said began to sink in. In two short years, I have gone from thousands of dollars at BWC to dozens. Frightening for them.

We can only hope BWC is around for a long time to come. It is easy to imagine a Mad-Max-Road-Warrior scenario in the future: We finally get our hands on a roll of film, shoot it, and now have to find a lab to process it. We hear about some guy hidden away somewhere who just might - might - have the machine, and a few precious drops of the chemistry that makes it all GO. We finally find him in a run down old strip mall ... sleeves rolled up, unshaven and unbathed ... he dusts off the machine with a blow from his nicotine addled lungs ... "Yep, I can do it - it'll cost you one thousand dollars, or ten gallons of petrol."

FEEL FREE TO THINK

FIRST CLASS - UNT Continuing Education

Class One (9/15)
Class began with a disclaimer: The description I turned in for the class is nothing like what is written in the UNT Continuing Education:

SECRETS OF DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY
Take better photographs and have more fun doing it with the fascinating technology that is catapulting the photographic world into the 21st. century. We'll discuss the basics common to all digital photography; equipment, software, printing, internet and e mail use. You'll also explore strategies for taking excellent photos in all types of situations, including portraiture, landscape, macro and still life using your own digital camera.
Wow. That's a pretty big order, especially compared to what I actually wrote in the original description. It reminds me of Elaine's job in Seinfeld; "... and it looks just as lovely on the Serengetti as on the streets of Manhattan."

OK, so we will take everyone and anyone into the promised land of digital imaging. Come along.

I was pleased to find three repeat students from my now defunct 35-mm class once offered in the dark ages of film photography. Three students also professed desires to be professional photographers - God help them and me!

I managed to come up with a coherent 3 phase approach and broad outline for the 5 session class just before the dry erase marker touched the board. The three phases are:
1) Digital capture / storage
2) Correction of images and manipulation
3) Image output

Tonight's topics included -
methods for importing images into computer
digital workflow begins -
archive images immediately
File types: RAW - TIFF - JPEG - DNG the new universal raw conversion from Adobe
The pros and cons (there are none) of upgrading to Adobe Photoshop CS2

We managed to convince one student to rent equipment from either Dallas Camera Exchange or Competitve Cameras instead of rushing out to buy without trying out different options.

It seemed to become clear by the end of the first session that this is not a class for beginners who do not understand exposure and the elements of f.stops and shutter speeds.

Future qustions yet to be answered:
How to look at images made by students
Students upgrading computer systems
Upgrading of software

Now begins the process of building this blog by you the students, the surfers and whoever has a nugget of knowledge to add to the mix.

Feel free to think -sd

Mom and Pops are Dead - Small Operators Falling by the Wayside

If your region is anything like North Texas, you are experiencing a contraction in the number of small photo stores and Mom & Pop labs that were, in many cases, the places where information and knowledge flowed to the novice photographer and the humble professional alike. Now, in the new world of photography, the Mom & Pops are trying to find their way or in some cases going away. Locally, the old stand by lab - The Photo Place - closed last July 15. Inside are still sitting several machines for processing film including a FUJI FRONTIER which was probably a 250-thousand dollar machine new, and now according to another lab owner may, may be worth 30-thousand. This is a state-of-the-art machine and looks new!

A photo supply store manager nearby may have hit on something "Did you see the show on PBS the other night? Wal-Mart just opened its one-hundredth store in the Dallas Fort Worth area! What does that tell you? We're surrounded by a bunch of cheap a$$es! There aren't even a hundred stores in the entire State of California!"

Not many people realize what the margins are in the photography. For the most part, the area of supplies (film / paper /chemicals) and camera sales, margins are less than ten percent. So, when I was cornered yesterday by a dissatisfied customer of the previously mentioned "local photo supply store", an idea I had been considering once again boiled to the surface: open an online supply sales site aimed specifically at University students. However, a quick call to owner of one of the largest stores n Dallas brought me back to earth quite quickly - "There's no profit in it! People don't care anymore! You can't make any money anymore!" OK, case closed - I hung up the phone and the cyber dollar signs disappeared from my eyes once again.