Sean Duggan Blog

Above it All

Sky Tram  [Canon 5D]
Santa Cruz, California -- March 26, 2008
(click in the image for a larger version)

This was taken a couple of days ago at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. My wife and I were visiting friends in this seaside town were we used to live.

Now that I am back in the studio I can return to projects that were put on hold for the short sojourn to the coast. Chief among those is finishing up a new website design and launching the first issue of my newsletter. If you're interested in signing up, you'll find a subscription form in the left column. If you want to learn more about the newsletter, you can read about it on my main website (there's also a sign-up form there).

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BOOK REVIEW: "The Creative Digital Darkroom is Practically Perfect"

Jeremy Schultz over at Designorati has posted a review of my new book (co-authored with Katrin Eismann) The Creative Digital Darkroom:

"I rarely rave about a book, but this one is an awesome blend of Photoshop technique, artistic process and photography know-how. The subject of the “creative darkroom” is covered thoroughly and expertly...I consider this book a perfect resource for mastering the creative digital darkroom. The techniques are extensively documented, thorough and come from some of the best workflows in use today. The writing is excellent and copious, and not bogged down with large images. The theory behind the techniques is timeless and relies on the fundamentals such as channels, Lab color, luminosity and blending. I cannot recommend this book highly enough if you are a digital photographer with a creative bent."

Here's the link to the entire review (scroll down a bit if it doesn't appear at the top of the page)

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Workshop News

I have some cool workshops coming up in Hawaii in mid April, Monterey and Pacifica, California in late April and early May, and near San Luis Obispo, California in early June. For a complete listing of my upcoming classes, click on over to the Workshops Page at my web site.

Souvenir of Young Love

Souvenir of Young Love  [Canon 5D]
Summer, 2006

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New Newsletter!

Beginning in a week or so (late March/early April) I will be sending out the first issue of a new email newsletter that will contain Photoshop tips and tutorials, musings on photography and the creative process, and updates on upcoming workshops, seminars and special offers.

This is a low volume mailing that will be sent out approximately every 4 to 6 weeks. For example, the tutorials in the first one are about using Photoshop Actions.The tutorials will not be in the actual email, so you don't have to worry about image-heavy mail cluttering up your bandwidth. A link will be provided where you can view them on my website.

If you would like to subscribe, there's a sign-up form near the top of the left column of this blog. Should you ever wish to unsubscribe in the future, there will be a simple link at the end of each newsletter that will allow you to do this. Your email info will never be shared, bartered or sold to nefarious spammers. I've had a world of trouble with spam myself so I am sensitive to this!

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Workshop News

I have some cool workshops coming up in Hawaii in mid April, Monterey and Pacifica, California in late April and early May, and near San Luis Obispo, California in early June. For a complete listing of my upcoming classes, click on over to the Workshops Page at my web site.

The Narrator

The Narrator  [Canon 5D]
May, 2007

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New Newsletter!

Beginning in a week or so I will be sending out the first issue of a new email newsletter that will contain Photoshop tips and tutorials, musings on photography and the creative process, and updates on upcoming workshops, seminars and special offers.

This is a low volume mailing that will be sent out approximately every 4 to 6 weeks. For example, the tutorials in the first one are about using Photoshop Actions.The tutorials will not be in the actual email, so you don't have to worry about image-heavy mail cluttering up your bandwidth. A link will be provided where you can view them on my website.

If you would like to subscribe, there's a sign-up form near the top of the left column of this blog. Should you ever wish to unsubscribe in the future, there will be a simple link at the end of each newsletter that will allow you to do this. Your email info will never be shared, bartered or sold to nefarious spammers. I've had a world of trouble with spam myself so I am sensitive to this!

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Workshop News

I have some cool workshops coming up in Hawaii in mid April, Monterey and Pacifica, California in late April and early May, and near San Luis Obispo, California in early June. For a complete listing of my upcoming classes, click on over to the Workshops Page at my web site.

Islands

Islands [Canon 5D]
October 2, 2007
(click in the image for  a larger version)

This is a reworking of an image that I posted here about four and a half months ago. In the previous version I treated the color original as a split-toned black and white.

I revisited this because I realized it fit in very nicely with a new group of images I am preparing for the gallery section on my re-designed web site (it's not live yet, but coming soon). That series of images uses a color scheme similar to what you see here: muted natural colors with a strong sepia flavoring that I call sepiaesque. The foreground here has been slightly blurred in Photoshop CS3 using a gradient mask along with the Lens Blur filter. In the first version I posted here I decided that I had blurred it  bit too much. I like this version much better. I also like the colors.

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New Newsletter!

Beginning in a week or so I will be sending out the first issue of a new email newsletter that will contain Photoshop tips and tutorials, musings on photography and the creative process, and updates on upcoming workshops, seminars and special offers.

This is a low volume mailing that will be sent out approximately every 4 to 6 weeks. For example, the tutorials in the first one are about using Photoshop Actions.The tutorials will not be in the actual email, so you don't have to worry about image-heavy mail cluttering up your bandwidth. A link will be provided where you can view them on my website.

If you would like to subscribe, there's a sign-up form near the top of the left column of this blog. Should you ever wish to unsubscribe in the future, there will be a simple link at the end of each newsletter that will allow you to do this. Your email info will never be shared, bartered or sold to nefarious spammers. I've had a world of trouble with spam myself so I am sensitive to this!

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Workshop News

I have some cool workshops coming up in Hawaii in mid April, Pacifica and Monterey, California in late April and early May, and near San Luis Obispo, California in early June. For a complete listing of my upcoming classes, click on over to the Workshops Page at my web site.

Closed Carousel

Closed Carousel  [Canon 10D]
September 4, 2004  Germany
(click in the image for a larger version)

Another one from the archives. This is one of my favorite images that I've made in the past few years. I may have posted this before, but if I have it's been awhile. It's part of a series that I am putting together so it's fresh in my mind again. This series of images has been in the works for quite a while but has never before been displayed as a series. I am trying to get it added to the gallery section of my new web site. The redesigned site, and this series, is still not up, but hopefully will be soon (I'll announce it here when it's available).

Everything comes together perfectly for me in this photo: the sense of a story or narrative, the mystery and ambiguity and the strong role of symbolism and metaphor. Not to mention the simple serendipity of finding this enigmatic tableau. This image has received some extensive color and tonal transformations to alter the mood of the photo. I started off by combining two different processings of a single raw file in order to control the contrast between the brightly lit tarp covering the carousel and the more normal tones in the rest of the scene. I then applied quite a lot of localized lightening, darkening and color toning to arrive at the final result. You can see the two different interpretations of the original raw file below (click in the image to see it larger). Click here to see the Photoshop layers palette and the 18 layers that comprise this image.

I took this photo while visiting family in Germany and did most of the work on it on the same trip on my laptop. The layers palette could probably stand some rearranging and some layers might be consolidated or eliminated to achieve the same effect, but this is where it stands now. The original Photoshop master file was 8-bit and not full size to conserve file size while I was traveling but I recently transferred all the layers from the 8-bit original into a larger 16-bit version in order to have a master image that had the increased tonal integrity that a high-bit file offers.

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New Newsletter!

Beginning in a week or so I will be sending out the first issue of a new email newsletter that will contain Photoshop tips and tutorials, musings on photography and the creative process, and updates on upcoming workshops, seminars and special offers.

This is a low volume mailing that will be sent out approximately every 4 to 6 weeks. For example, the tip on exactly how to do the transferring of layers from one version of an image to another, as mentioned above will be featured in one of the newsletters (not the first one, but probably the second; the tutorials in the first one are about using Photoshop Actions).The tutorials will not be in the actual email, so you don't have to worry about image-heavy mail cluttering up your bandwidth. A link will be provided where you can view them on my website.

If you would like to subscribe, there's a sign-up form near the top of the left column of this blog. Should you ever wish to unsubscribe in the future, there will be a simple link at the end of each newsletter that will allow you to do this. Your email info will never be shared or sold to nefarious spammers. I've had a world of trouble with spam myself so I am sensitive to this!

****************
Workshop News

I have some cool workshops coming up in Hawaii in mid April, Pacifica and Monterey, California in late April and early May, and near San Luis Obispo, California in early June. For a complete listing of my upcoming classes, click on over to the Workshops Page at my web site.

Departing Ferry

Departing Ferry  [Canon 10D]
August 17, 2005
(click in the image for a a larger version)

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Upcoming Workshops
(click on the class titles for more information)

April 11 -- Selections & Masking in Adobe Photoshop CS3
at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu.

April 12 - 13 -- Creative Collage with Adobe Photoshop CS3
at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu.

April 14 -- Camera Raw and Adobe Bridge Workflow
at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu

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May 3 – 4 -- Photoshop for Photographers: The Basics
at the Stephen Johnson Photography Studio in Pacifica, California. Enrollment is limited to only 10 students.

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June 2 - 6 -- Creative Collage with Adobe Photoshop CS3
an expanded 5-day version of my collage class where we really have time to get in-depth and work on more advanced projects...at the excellent Lepp Institute of Digital Imaging on the central California coast near San Luis Obispo. 

For a complete listing of other workshops in the summer and fall, click on over to the Workshops Page at my web site.