Sean Duggan Blog

Breakwater

Breakwater [Canon 5D]
Honolulu, Hawai'i
April 13, 2008
(click in the image to see a  larger view)

This is a blend of two 30-second exposures of one of the breakwaters at Waikiki Beach. The waves sloshed over my feet and the bottom of my tripod a couple of times while making this image.

The reason I took two shots is that even with 30 seconds and all the ambient light of the hotels behind me, the rocks on the breakwater were much darker than I wanted them to be. I didn't do a longer exposure because I didn't want the sky to wash out. So I used my Canon 580EX speedlite to flash the foreground three or four times during one of the 30-second exposures and then combined the two shots in Photoshop using a layer mask. There were also some adjustment layers added that further darkened the sky and lightened the water and modified the color balance a bit.You can see the Layers palette for the finished image below.

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5-Day Creative Collage Workshop

I'll be teaching a 5-day version of my Creative Collage class at the excellent Lepp Institute of Digital Imaging in Los Osos, California June 2 - 6, 2008. The extended time frame of this class allows for more time to explore personal collage projects, not to mention enjoying the beautiful natural surroundings on the coast near Morro Bay. More about this class.

25 Seconds on Waikiki Beach

Watching the Twilight [Canon 5D]
Honolulu, Hawai'i
April 16, 2008
(click in the image for a larger version)

This man kept remarkably still for 25 seconds! Grooving on the twilight Hawaiian surf can have that effect on you.

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I'm off to the Bay Area for some private consulting and then down to Monterey to teach my 2-day Creative Collage with Photoshop class. I just got word that the class is full, but if you're interested in this topic, I will be teaching a longer version near San Luis Obispo in central California in early June. See below for more details.

If you want to be kept up to date on my upcoming workshops, as well as receive digital darkroom tips and tutorials, I invite you to sign up for my free newsletter. There's a sign-up form above in the left column and you can also see more details here.

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5-Day Creative Collage Workshop

I'll be teaching a 5-day version of my Creative Collage class at the excellent Lepp Institute of Digital Imaging in Los Osos, California June 2 - 6, 2008. The extended time frame of this class allows for more time to explore personal collage projects, not to mention enjoying the beautiful natural surroundings on the coast near Morro Bay. More about this class.

Night Fishing

Night Fishing  [Canon 5D]
Waikiki Beach, Honolulu, Hawai'i
April 16, 2008
(click in the image for a larger version)

After spending the afternoon hiking and photographing around Makapu Point (see previous post), I wandered around Waikiki with the tripod in the evening. The ambient light from the street and the hotels behind me provided ample illumination for some long exposures on the beach. I really like how the motion in this 30-second exposure tells the story of the fisherman preparing his line for another try.

The major correction to this image was an adjustment to the White Balance in Camera Raw (I could have also used Lightroom, but I haven't added these images to my Lightroom catalog yet). The camera was set to Auto White Balance (AWB), which wasn't the best setting given all the ambient spill from the hotels and the street lights. You can see a comparisons between two shots below. The one on the left is the first photo I took that has not been corrected, and the one on the right is the shot I posted above, which I corrected in Camera Raw by setting the white balance to Tungsten and then customizing it with the Temperature and Tint sliders. While this fixed the overall white balance pretty well, the mixture of light sources left the beach a bit too green for my tastes. To fix this I added two adjustment layers with layer masks in Photoshop to apply some further minor color corrections to the sand and also to the ocean. You can also see my shadow with the tripod in the far right of the second shot. I cropped this out for the main version posted above.Click the thumbnails image to see it larger.

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2-Day Creative Collage Workshop

This coming weekend, April 26 - 27, I will be teaching a 2-day class on Creative Collage with Adobe Photoshop in Monterey, California. This was one of the classes I taught in Hawai'i last week. The price is only $200! This is a really great deal because most 2-day hands-on classes like this are more expensive. Seating is limited, however, so if you want to attend, call 831-373-4600 during business hours this week to register. More about this class.

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5-Day Creative Collage Workshop

If you want a more in-depth collage workshop experience, I'll be teaching a 5-day version at the excellent Lepp Institute of Digital Imaging in Los Osos, California June 2 - 6, 2008. The extended time frame of this class allows for more time to explore personal collage projects, not to mention enjoying the beautiful natural surroundings on the coast near Morro Bay. More about this class.

Makapu Point

Makapu Point, O'ahu, Hawai'i [Canon 5D]
April 16, 2008
(click in the image for a larger version)

It's been almost two weeks since my last blog update and that's pretty scandalous. But also reflective that sometimes life just gets very busy, which is what happened to me recently.

I spent a week in Hawai'i and that's bound to get in the way of regular blogging! Four days were spent teaching workshops at the University of Hawai'i and then I had three days to catch up on other work that needed my attention, deal with a computer crisis, and actually get out and enjoy the island a bit.

This shot is from a hike I took up to the top of Makapu Point. Nothing special went into processing this. Just some basic Camera Raw adjustments. And yes, as those of you who have been to Hawai'i know, the water really is that blue. More photos from this trip coming in the days ahead.

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2-Day Creative Collage Workshop

This weekend, April 26 - 27, I will be teaching a 2-day class on Creative Collage with Adobe Photoshop in Monterey, California. This was one of the classes I taught in Hawai'i last week. The price is only $200! This is a really great deal because most 2-day hands-on classes like this are more expensive. Seating is limited, however, so if you want to attend, call 831-373-4600 during business hours this week to register. More about this class.

**************************
5-Day Creative Collage Workshop

If you want a more in-depth collage workshop experience, I'll be teaching a 5-day version at the excellent Lepp Institute of Digital Imaging in Los Osos, California June 2 - 6, 2008. The extended time frame of this class allows for more time to explore personal collage projects, not to mention enjoying the beautiful natural surroundings on the coast near Morro Bay. More about this class.

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New Web Site

A few weeks ago I launched a re-designed web site, but hadn't gotten around to mentioning it here. There is also a new gallery section that features three different bodies of work that have been percolating for the past couple of years. A Techniques page will feature digital darkroom tips and tutorials, as well as essays and musings on the creative aspect of being a photographer.

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Newsletter

If you're interested in additional tips, techniques and tutorials, then consider signing up for my free newsletter. The May issue of Creative Digital Darkroom News was sent out this morning. If you'd like to subscribe, there's a sign-up form at the top of this page in the left column, or you can also find one on the page that the link will take you to. Although the first round of Photoshop tips are the ones currently posted on the Techniques page of my web site, future issues will contain links to content that is only available to newsletter subscribers.

Red and White Boat

Red & White Boat [Canon 5D]
Oahu, Hawaii  April 17, 2007
(click in the image for a larger version)

I'll be heading to Hawaii in a few days to teach a few classes at Pacific New Media on the campus of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. I was there last year at this time and am looking forward to my return visit. My impending trip has me looking back through some of last year's images as I prep files for the workshop.

Lightroom 2 Public Beta

I returned from Florida on Saturday where I had been attending the Photoshop World conference.  While there's always lots of interesting things and new developments to see there, perhaps the most exciting was the announcement of the Lightroom 2 Public Beta. If you use Lightroom and are interested to see all the cool new features (localized correction tools, expanded keyword and metadata support, and smart collections are my favorites), head over to the Adobe Labs site to download the in-progress version of this very cool, and for many photographers, essential application. Do keep in mind, however, that it is BETA software and it is common in the beta phase that everything might not work as expected, or that features and functionality may change. If they have it ready for a public beta then it's probably reasonably stable, but you never know. Therefore, you should not be using it as a replacement for your primary image catalogs that are currently in Lightroom 1.4. To play safely in Lightroom 2 Beta, I recommend that you designate a separate folder of images and use that as the pool of files that you add to the Lightroom 2 catalogs for testing and exploration purposes.

And speaking of Lightroom, my colleague and co-author Katrin Eismann is currently in Tasmania on the latest Lightroom Adventure with fellow photographers and O'Reilly authors Mikkel Aaland, Peter Krogh and other photographers from the U.S., Australia, England, Germany and Japan. Check out the Lightroom Adventure blog over at the O'Reilly site to see what the team is up to way down under.

Newsletter Update

Due to recent travel to Florida and the upcoming trip to Hawaii, I'm a little behind in getting the newsletter out the door but I hope to have it wrapped and sent out by next week. Stay tuned!