TAPPA Tribune - July, 2014

July, 2014

Salon Winners Jane Connor-Ziser Photoshop Tips Upcoming Events

The TAPPA Tribune Tampa Area Professional Photographers Association

Contents Upcoming Events

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Print of the Month Rules

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Salon - Commercial and Best of Show

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Salon - Portrait

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Salon - Electronic Imaging

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Salon - Social Function

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Salon - Unclassified

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An Open Apology To New Photographers

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How we kill creativity

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Photoshop Tips

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Visit TAPPA on FaceBook

On the cover: Best of Show Golden Stairway by Randy Van Duinen

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Photo: Pedro Carillo

PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE

Ever been on a “Photo Walkabout?”

Not too hard. Pick up your camera, and take a walk. Start slow, no need to rush into things. Just go around the block. My block is slightly over a quarter mile round trip. Limit yourself to only taking ten shots... flowers, mailboxes, pets, trees, birds... they all make great subjects. But look deeper... cracks in the sidewalk, a lone weed, the staples in a telephone pole, a manhole cover... again, limit the number of shots you take. Be wary of shooting towards houses though, no need to piss off your neighbors.

Go home, look at the files and find your favorite. If you don’t like what you see, try again, but widen your circle. I’ve found that taking a photo walkabout in downtown Tampa, or Ybor City, early on a Sunday morning can be a great exercise in finding your art. Think outside the box and give yourself an assignment - “I’m only going to photography street signs.” “I’m only going to photograph reflections in windows.” I’m only going to photograph the homeless” (I always ask permission first, then give them a few bucks afterwards).

These little exercises take me away from the mundane, day to day exercises of running a photography business, but they reawaken and rekindle my reasons for loving what I do. They keep that creative spirit alive that is essential to remaining relevant in the industry. And the funny part is, most of the time, no one besides myself ever sees any of those images. They’re just for me. They’re my little secret.

See you Tuesday!

Kevin E. Newsome TAPPA President

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THIS MONTH’S PROGRAM

Jane Connor-Ziser Image Processing For Fine Art Photography

Most photographers consider image adjustments and retouching to be necessary evils, something to batch and get out of the way as quickly as possible. Jane considers them to be powerful tools for affecting the quality, mood and perceived value of artistic photographic images. Why do what everyone else is doing when you have the expertise and imagination to lift your imagery to a level that is visually distinctive and beautiful beyond the capabilities of cameras to capture the people and world around us?

In this presentation Jane will show you her processes for using ACR (or Lightroom) to create artistic choices for image adjustments and enhancements, plus how to incorporate Smart technology into your photo retouching process. You will learn how to sculpt and paint with light, control backgrounds and use retouching tools to create mood and expression. Everyone knows Photoshop; it’s what you do with it that’s important. In addition to the formal presentation material, Jane will have open question and answer time so bring your imaging challenges to share.

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Meeting Details Tuesday, July 8, 2014 Social 6:00 Dinner 6:30 Program 7:00 Member with PayPal RSVP

by Noon July 1: $25 After the 4th: $35 Register online at TAPPA.org Doubletree Hotel 4500 W. Cypress St., Tampa

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NEXT MONTH’S PROGRAM

Randy Van Duinen

Light Painting the Night Up! A night of Hands On Light Painting with Randy Van Duinen!

Randy will start out by explaining how to light paint through a slide presentation showing you the equipment used, examples of both small table top set-ups and large scale shoots, along with techniques to get your creative juices flowing. He will then do a live presentation where you will actually see him light painting a couple different setups using different techniques.

The last part of the presentation, and best part, is that it is hands-on!

You will be able to make your own light paintings using the setups that Randy has laid out with the lights he has brought with him. So remember to bring your CF card so you will be able to make your own light painting photograph and get advice as you shoot.

Meeting Details Tuesday, August 12, 2014 Social 6:00 Dinner 6:30 Program 7:00 Member with PayPal RSVP

by Noon August 5: $25 After the 5th: $35 Register online at TAPPA.org Doubletree Hotel 4500 W. Cypress St., Tampa

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Upcoming Events

Print of the Month Rules - Prints are to be mounted.

Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Jane Conner-Ziser Thursday, July 10, 2014

Ed and Betty Preparing for Competition Mini Seminar 7-10pm

Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Randy Van Duinen Light Painting

Tuesday, September 9, 2014

Parrish Kohanan

Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Matt Kloskowski

From the National Association of Photoshop Professionals

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Lissa Hatcher

- Size: 8x10.

- Electronic Imaging size can be two 8x10 taped together on the back and spread open for viewing.

- Three entries per member each month.

- There must be at least three entries in a category for that category to be included in the monthly competition.

- All entries MUST have your name and the category you wish to enter on the back of the print.

- Prints must be turned in before 6:25 pm.

Prints received after 6:25 will not be accepted!

Winners: - Please send your winning files to POM@TAPPA.org for the newsletter as soon as Possible. Deadline for publication is one week after the meeting.

- Name your files by your last name-place-category. For example Smith-1st-Portrait.jpg - Any resolution 1000 pixels on the longest side or greater is acceptable. JPEG format is preferrable.

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First Place, Commercial and Best of Show Randy Van Duinen

Second Place, Commercial Randy Van Duinen

Third Place, Commercial Wil Stark

First Place, Portrait Bill Cadzow

Second Place: Deanna Phillips - not shown

Second Place, Portrait Max Hunt

Third Place, Portrait Bill Cadzow

First Place, Electronic Imaging Michael Landes

Second Place, Electronic Imaging Michael Landes

First Place, Social Function Pedro Carillo

First Place, Unclassified Bill Cadzow

Second Place, Unclassified Max Hunt

Third Place, Unclassified Steven Blandin

An Open Apology To New Photographers

By Lauren Lim

Dear New Photographer, How’s your day going? I hope it’s going well. Take any cool photos lately? Good to hear it!

Anyway, the reason I’m writing you is because I want to say I’m sorry. Sorry for how you’re so often treated by “the industry”. Other photographers.

The “pros”.

I know you love photography, and are excited to start making your photo dreams come true. You may have worked up the courage to email your favourite shooters asking for advice. Or maybe you posted your questions online. And you might have been met with a cold shoulder. Possibly even dismissed and mocked. Or criticized. Called a “newbie”. Blamed for “ruining the industry” and making it hard for others to make a living.

And that sucks. It really does. No one deserves to have their dreams dashed. No one.

I hope you know that it’s not personal. I mean, they don’t even know you. They don’t know how long you’ve planned this, how much you care about this, how hard you plan to work, or how happy it makes you. They don’t remember how scary it was to jump in. To make that decision to go for it.

If they did, maybe they wouldn’t be so quick with the mockery. Maybe they’d actually see themselves in you.

But it’s all too easy to forget that stuff.

For one thing, these photographers are busy. Really, really busy. To run a successful business takes a LOT of work, and they’ve sacrificed countless evenings with friends, weekends off, and general relaxing-fun-time in order to make their dreams happen. Going for years without summer weekends is enough to make anyone a bit cranky. Trust me.

And if they’ve been in business for a while, they’ve probably started getting emails on a weekly (or daily!) basis from new photographers, asking for answers to questions, or to shadow them while they shoot.

Maybe at first they were flattered. Someone thought they were good enough to want their opinion! But trust me, that wears off quickly when you find yourself spending hours answering the same questions over and over while your client work keeps piling up.

So don’t feel bad if they can’t answer your questions, or let you tag along. Like I said, it has nothing to do with you. They’re just crazy busy, and their clients have to come first. (That’s a key to a successful business, by the way. Write that one down.)

Oh, and if they do answer some questions for you, please make sure you thank them profusely. Send them a gift card for a cup of coffee or something.

Show them how much you value their time. Because soon, when you’re neck deep in client work, you’ll realize just how important time is.

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Now, regarding the name calling, and the finger pointing for “ruining the industry”. Y’know, I think on some level the pros are quite jealous of you. No seriously. Let me explain.

Photography has changed dramatically in recent years. Photographers used to have to invest thousands and thousands of dollars to get the basic equipment. I mean, memory cards alone used to be a couple hundred dollars a pop! Now you can stroll into BestBuy and for under $1K you can walk out with a decent setup. Add in a free WordPress theme, and you’re ready to roll. It’s a LOT easier (and cheaper) to start up a photography business these days, and they are a bit miffed by that. They struggled a lot more to get running, and now you have all these luxuries they wish they had when they got going.

Of course that’s no excuse for being rude. But realize that you have a lot of advantages these days that didn’t used to exist.

Which brings me to something important that I think the pros wish you knew. And that’s that a nice camera, a spiffy logo and a website do not make a business.

See, they know this deep in their bones. They’ve been through the trenches. They’ve come to realize that it takes a megaton of hard work, a lot of business savvy, and countless hours spent doing boring tasks like bookkeeping to make a photography business run. They see you all caught up in the honeymoon phase of freshly printed business cards, and they wish you knew that it takes so much more to make it really happen in the long run. It takes so much to support your family with photography.

I guess that’s why they get cranky. They’re trying to feed their kids with their art. That’s crazy hard to do. And that brings me to the biggest point of contention. Pricing. I swear I’ve literally seen steam come out of their ears when they see new shooters charging next to nothing. They foam at the mouth.

They grab the pitchforks. Things get ugly.

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Now, I’d wager that many of them started off charging way too little. It’s an easy mistake to make. But over the years they’ve come to realize that you can’t succeed by undercharging. It leads straight to failure in the long run. They figured that out the hard way — by spending way too many late nights trying to get caught up, and realizing they didn’t charge near enough for how much work it really takes. So they figured out how to charge appropriately, and upped their prices, and worked hard to show clients the real value in what they do.

Then they see you charging so little, and they get mad. They know it’s a bad path to go down. And they wish they could make you understand how critically important it is to price your work well. For the industry. And for yourself.

Look, I want you to know that you do have a real shot at this. So often the pros make it seem impossible, but it’s not. Of course it’s not. But it is hard.

You need to WORK. You need to LEARN. About pricing. And marketing. And taxes. And insurance.

And contracts. And social media. And client relations. And just straight up photography! In fact, you need to accept that you can never stop working and you can never stop learning if you want to make it. Things are changing fast, my friend. Every week there’s a new camera, a new product, a new app that makes the whole industry shift. And if you pause for a moment, you might get left behind.

The pros feel that pressure. They are at their desks every day working to keep up. To stay on top of things. It’s draining.

And when they see you, all fresh and full of energy, with your shiny new camera that they can’t afford because it’s not in their yearly gear budget, and your website that looks a million times better than their first website did, they lash out at you. It’s not fair. But they’re tired. And scared. And working like mad to keep their dreams alive while putting food on the table and a roof over their heads.

So don’t let it get you down when you see pros bad-mouthing beginners. Just get to work. And

understand how much heart and courage and sheer will it takes to make things happen. Soon enough they’ll see it. They’ll see that you’re just as passionate as they are, and they’ll welcome you with open arms.

Because in the end, we all just love photography and want to spend our days shooting. And it makes us so happy to see others get to live that dream alongside us.

How we kill creativity

by Spencer Lum

Lots of love, Lauren :) Lauren Lim Hey friend, I’m Lauren! I’m a photographer and head ninja here at Photography Concentrate. I’m downright obsessed with photography, and love sharing it with super cool folks like yourself. When I’m not shooting, or writing, you can find me cooking (and eating!), traveling, and hanging out with wonderful people.

The TAPPA Tribune is published monthly for the membership of the Tampa Area Professional Photographers Association. Its purpose is to share knowledge and insight with the photographic industry.

The deadline for submission of articles and ad changes is the 15th of the month.

Permission is hereby granted to reprint the contents of this newsletter, provided the authors and The TAPPA Tribune are recognized as the source.

The ideas and views expressed do not necessarily reflect the policies of the Tampa Area Professional Photographers Association; they are solely those of the author.

Editor: Chuck Vosburgh 300 62nd Street North St. Petersburg, FL 33710 Chuck@ChuckVosburgh.com 727.743.1740

Advertising: To advertise in the TAPPA Tribune, please contact the editor for rates and distribution information.

Meetings: TAPPA monthly meetings take place the second Tuesday of the month at: Doubletree Hotel 4500 W. Cypress Street Tampa, FL (one block east of Westshore Blvd).

Networking 6:00 pm Dinner 6:30 pm Meeting 7:30 pm Register online at TAPPA.org

Get over yourself. Seriously. Just let go.

You don’t know it, but that self is stopping you dead in your tracks. That self is the past. It can tell you what to do, but it can’t tell you where you need to go. In fact, when it counts the most, it’ll do the opposite, and it’s killing you.

It’s a little like this: You’re driving. You have your GPS all set and the coordinates locked in. But you have a change of heart, and you decide to take a detour. Your poor GPS doesn’t have a clue. It just keeps saying you’re off course. And the more it does, the more tense you feel. The more messages you hear, the more you worry, the more you doubt.

Maybe you even start to think you are going the wrong way. And there lies the problem.

We all have our inner-GPS. And it’s great most of the time. It’s the instinct we acquire from a lifetime of experience. It keeps us safe, and it keeps us on track. But it’s built by the past, and it will never know when there’s a new you. A you who’s ready to push in different directions to find different things. In short, it doesn’t know about the detours.

Yet the detours define us. When you go off the beaten path, it will just keep telling you to get back on track, and for awhile, the more you veer, the more it nags. If you listen to it, know that you’ll be navigating by a you of yesterday, and sometimes, a you from a very distant yesterday.

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See, the GPS is loaded with all sorts of destinations. Notions of who we are and what we’re supposed to do. Maybe we never got over the idea that a certain career was right for us. Maybe we thought there was a best way to talk to people.

And in the heat of the moment with the shot on the line, it’s sure not going to know that some new and different pose in this new and different light is the one you really want to go for.

Of course, your GPS isn’t to blame. It was designed for different times. Times when eating the wrong berry could kill you, or taking the wrong path would leave you short an appendage. It’s conservative for good reason.

But this is a bubble-wrapped world. We’re insulated from everything, and we can bounce back from a whole lot more than we think. You post the wrong post. So what? You get a mediocre review.

So what? What’s really going to happen? Not to say that it won’t hurt, but at the time these things happen, it feels like you’ve just RUINED. YOUR. LIFE. In other words, we fear pain more than we feel the potential.

Don’t listen to the fear. The fact is you change every day. You have new needs, you have new desires, and you just plain grow. But your mind and body take some time to catch up. Your GPS holds on to the old directives, and it takes the full force of all the will you’ve got to send the message that this new place you’re heading is exactly where you want to go. Don’t stop.

We start all things free. Full of ideas. Full of purpose. To be sure, tangled and blurred and ever just so hidden, but it’s there. We lose this along the way as we find success. Once we make things work and the patterns become apparent, our bodies hard-code the recipe into a user manual for living, when, in reality, there can never be a user manual for living.

As this happens, we go from a state of freedom to a state of constriction, which is utterly backwards.

After all, shouldn’t learning free us?

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And it can, if you stay open and aware.

Success can be so much worse than failure. Failure hurts, but it pushes us to keep exploring. Success, on the other hand, limits us. It tells us to keep doing the same.

It’s all that damn stuff. Literal. Metaphorical. You know – baggage. Once you have something, you fear the loss, which is why nothing is more perilous than early success.

See, once you are something – once you earn something, deserve it, have it and need it, letting go is hell. We’re all a bunch of pack rats, when it comes down to it, but it’s not just about keeping this or that, which is hard enough. What we really cling to is ego, and losing that is most painful thing of all.

So we stay the course and re-tread familiar ground.

We let creativity die. Don’t.

You live by the fear or you live by the potential.

When you know whatever you do this second is all you are, you know you can be anything. When you know today is what matters there’s no ego to feed. But more than anything, when you turn off the GPS, you get over yourself in the most glorious way possible. You live free of definition and free of restraint.

And that’s the detour you want to take.

Got News? e-mail it to Chuck@ChuckVosburgh.com

Photoshop Tips Provided by the National Association of Photoshop Professionals

Fast Processing

Harmonize Your Color

Use the often-overlooked Image Processor (from Photoshop: File>Scripts>Image Processor; from Bridge:Tools>Photoshop> Image Processor) to quickly create new file types, such as TIFFs and JPEGs. In the Image Processor dialog, select your images (if you run it from Bridge, select your images first), choose an output location, select the file type you want, specify the quality and size, and click Run.

To help harmonize the color balance of a composition, add a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer (Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Hue Saturation) on top.

This will allow you to desaturate the image a bit or add a color cast to the whole image.

Provided by John Shaw

If you press Command-T (PC: Ctrl-T) for Free Transform to scale a layer but you can’t see the bounding box handles because the layer is larger than the document, press Command-0 (PC: Ctrl-0). The page will zoom out to show the layer’s bounding box.

This is the best method I’ve found: Click the Add a New Layer icon; get the Brush tool (B); choose a very small, soft-edged brush (slightly larger than the veins); then up in the Options Bar, lower the brush Opacity to 20%. Option-click (PC: Alt-click) next to the vein in a clean area of eye to sample that color, and paint a few strokes over the veins until they’re gone. Lastly, go to Filter>Noise>Add Noise. Add 2% of Uniform, Monochromatic noise to bring texture back to the retouched areas.

Provided by Colin Smith

Provided by Scott Kelby

Find Bounding Box Of Oversized Layer

Provided by Pete Collins

Removing Red Veins In The Eyes

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BOARD OF DIRECTORS

2014 Officers President

Kevin Newsome

813 968-2810

Kevin@NewsomesStudio.com

Vice President

Susan Black

813 230-6472

Susan@Bespics.com

Secretary

Carol Hackman

727 867-9254

HackmanC@tampabay.rr.com

Treasurer

Christine Reynolds

813 760-0831

ChristineR@aol.com

Past President

Benjamin Todd

813 431-2873

Benjamin.Todd@Verizon.net

Directors

Constance Avellino

813 600-8152

Me@ConstanceAvellinoPhotos.com

Lee Burgess

813 245-3320

Lee2810@verizon.net

Booray Perry

813 728-7110

booray@boorayperry.com

Melissa Sewell

813 230-7092

Melissa@DontBlinkllc.com

Chuck Vosburgh

727 743-1740

Chuck@ChuckVosburgh.com

Committees Delegate

Julie Johnson

Membership

Melissa Sewell

813 230-7092

Melissa@Dontblinkllc.com

Program

Susan Black

813 230-6472

Susan@Bespics.com

Salon

Constance Avellino

813 600-8152

Me@ConstanceAvellinoPhotos.com

Door Prize

Amber Wilkes

605 351-5865

ambi57106@yahoo.com

Scholarship

Susan Black

813 230-6472

Susan@Bespics.com

Audio Visual

Lee Burgess

813 245-3320

Lee2810@verizon.net

Newsletter Editor

Chuck Vosburgh

727 743-1740

Chuck@ChuckVosburgh.com

813 245-3320

Lee2810@verizon.net

Photographer Web Master

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Lee Burgess