Sean Duggan Blog

Memorial

 
Memorial  [Canon 5D]
June 14, 2009  Monhegan Island, Maine

This is very close to the tugboat shipwreck that was featured in the previous post. As with that image, this is also an HDR composite. Unlike the other file, however, which was made using 6 exposures from a tripod-mounted camera, this shot was made from 3 hand held exposures created using the camera's Auto Exposure Bracketing feature. As long as the shutter speeds are not too slow, for some shots this can be a viable alternative to using a tripod for HDR. The initial HDR blend was made in Photoshop CS4 and then the 32-bit HDR file was opened into Photomatix to create the final HDR blend. Some additional color "seasoning" was also applied in Photoshop. You can see the three source frames below.

It was raining lightly for the entire time of my visit to the island and I was constantly wiping rain drops off the front of the camera lens. For this shot, a drop was present on the lens and it reveals its presence in the form of a blurred area in the middle of the foreground rock and the clump of grass behind it. I may inspect other exposures of this scene to see if I have a shot with sharp detail of that part of the rock and grass that I can use to cover up the blurred area. The grass doesn't bother me so much, since that looks a little like motion blur from the wind, which is acceptable to me, but the blurred area on the rock is a bit annoying. Whether or not such a fix is viable will depend on a number of factors. If I do give it a try, I'll let you know how it turned out and how I did it.

Workshop News

My upcoming Creative Digital Darkroom workshop in Connecticut has fallen victim to the lagging economy and has been canceled due to low enrollment. Workshop enrollments have been consistently low for most of the year so far and this is a new venue so while it is disappointing, considering the current economic climate, it is not surprising.

I will be spending the rest of the summer on a family vacation, teaching my online class for the Academy of Art University and working on other projects and my next scheduled workshop will be in early October. It will be in Maine again and is a follow-up to the Real World Digital Photography class I just finished:

Real World Digital Photography II
October 4 - 10, 2009, Maine Media Workshops
Click here for More Info

There are already some sign-ups so if you are interested, please inquire about registration soon. October is a beautiful time of year in Maine. The trees are turning color and there is a wonderful crispness to the air.

Following that, I'll be in southern New Mexico in early November for a 4-day workshop on creative collage techniques in Adobe Photoshop CS4:

Creative Collage with Adobe Photoshop
November 5 - 8, 2009, Mesilla Digital Imaging Workshops
Click here for more info

Rail Runner Express

The Rail Runner Express  [Canon 5D]
Santa Fe, New Mexico •  April 27 2009
(click in the image for a larger version)

The first day of the Creative Eye workshop was spent going over some fundamentals of photography with digital SLRs. The first part of the day was in the digital lab and for the afternoon we went into Santa Fe to work on controlling exposure in a variety of situations. After a short stop at the Plaza downtown we headed over to the Santa Fe Depot. The old observation car that was featured a few posts previous to this one is located there (in fact it is pictured above at the far left of this photo).

Since the last time I visited here a new train service between Albuquerque and Santa Fe has been launched: The New Mexico Rail Runner Express. Apart from being a very convenient way to get back and forth between these two major New Mexico cities, it's also one of the more stylish trains I have seen in a long while. Kudos to the designer who came up with that great paint job! The image above is a hand held panorama made from three separate frames (you can see the original frames below). The panorama was launched from within Lightroom and then finished in Photoshop CS4 (there was a minor alignment glitch that had to be addressed manually with a custom patch layer).

In addition to my next workshop, Real World Digital Photography I, which is coming up June 7 — 13 at the Maine Media Workshops, I also want to let you know of a few other workshops coming up this summer and fall.

The Creative Digital Darkroom
July 5 — 11, 2009
CT Media/Photography Institute, Farmington, Connecticut

Real World Digital Photography II (a follow-up to the June class)
October 4 — 10, 2009
Maine Media Workshops

The Creative Collage with Photoshop CS4
November 5 — 8, 2009
Mesilla Digital Imaging Workshops, Mesilla, New Mexico

Mesilla is in the south, right next to to Las Cruces and only an hour away from El Paso, Texas. It is also only an hour's drive from White Sands National Monument (where I spent a couple of days towards the end of my recent trip...pictures from there coming in the days ahead). If you have ever wanted to visit this amazing place, then combining it with a creative Photoshop workshop might be a good opportunity to make it happen.

Mirror, Mirror

Untitled
March 28, 2009
(click in the image for a larger version)

I've been a real stranger to my own blog for the past couple of weeks. I had a busy week teaching in Florida at the Palm Beach Photographic Workshops and then spent another4 days exploring wild, natural Florida and visiting with a friend in the north central part of the state. Tomorrow morning I leave for a week in Hawaii, four days of which will be spent teaching a series of three workshops at Pacific New Media on the campus of the University of Hawaii at Manoa in Honolulu. If you're in the neighborhood, I believe there still might be a few spaces left. More info on the Hawaii classes this week can be found here.

The photograph above is a combination of two image mirrors. An image mirror is created when one photograph is copied and "reflected" next to the original. They are a true gulity pleasure in the digital darkroom and can produce some surpising and very satisfying results.The 2-day class I am teaching in Honolulu this weekend is Creative Collage with Adobe Photoshop. This image was created as a lesson in the class and also on a training DVD on the same subject that I am working on. More info on the Creative Collage DVD will be coming after I return from Hawaii.

Next Workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico!

I'm looking foward to returning to one of my favorite cities at the end of April: Santa Fe, New Mexico. I'll be leading a 5-day digital photography and digital darkroom workshop at the world famous Santa Fe Photographic Workshops. Seee the link below for more details on this class. It's already more than half full, so sign up soon if you want to take this course!

The Creative Eye: Digital Photography & Digital Darkrom Essentials
Santa Fe Photographic Workshops
April 27 - May 1

 

The Colony

The Colony Hotel, 4:30 AM  [Canon 5D]
Delrey Beach, Florida
(click in the image for a larger version)

I returned from my Florida trip on Sunday, quite jet lagged from lack of sleep due to the fact that my airport shuttle picked me up at my hotel at 4:30 AM. Considering that I got to bed at about 1:00 AM, By the time i finally arrived home in California and got to bed that evening, I had been up for nearly 24 hours, which is enough to make anyone a bit loopy, especially after precious little sleep the night before.

So, what's a sleepy-eyed photographer to do in the wee hours when he finds himself in an abandoned and picturesque hotel lobby? Why, make some photographs, of course! In this case, I was playing around with multi-image panoramas to get the whole scope of the glorious lobby of The Colony. The image above is a panorama assembled from 7 vertical handheld shots (see below).

The initial white balance and exposure corrections were made in Lightroom and then all seven frames were selected in the Library module and opened directly into Photoshop's Photomerge command. The rest was all automated apart from some final tonal correction in Photoshop. There are a few minor glitches in the alignment of some of the ceiling beams (I will fix those later using detail from some of the individual source exposures), but overall it is very impressive at how well the automated merging turned out. Better living through technology!

I had a great time at FOTOfusion in Delrey Beach and as always, it was fun to meet up with friends and colleagues whom I only see once or twice a year. Equally satisfying was making new friends and being immersed in five days of photography in the company of many creative individuals. I'll have more to write about FOTOfusion in the coming days.

South Florida Workshop
I'll be returning to Delrey Beach, Florida March 16 - 19 to teach a 4-day class called "Selections, Masking & Creative Collage" (click the class title for more info and a registration link). This is a blend of two of my most popular classes and I'm really looking forward to teaching it in south Florida (the warm weather is an extra fringe benefit!). Space is limited so be sure to sign up soon if you are interested in joining this class.

The Spring

The Spring  [Canon 10D]
May, 2004
(click in the image for a larger version)

Following the train of thought from the previous post, here is another mirrored image from a few years ago (re-discovered this past weekend while cleaning up the clutter on some older hard drives).
Natural forms work particularly well for mirroring. This was taken not far from my house on the Bear River. The other river near us is the Yuba, which is where we go swimming a bit later in the summer once the flow and water level becomes a bit safer and the water temperature a bit warmer. I feel very fortunate to to live near scenic mountain rivers that flow through sculpted, rocky channels. It's good for photography, of course, but it's also good for the spirit to just go there and hang out, watch the water and admire the beauty of it all.

Community Room

Community Room 
Multi-image collage, from 4 Canon 5D exposures
June 1, 2008
(click in the image for a larger version)

This collage came about because I recently wrote a tutorial on creating Image Mirrors for the latest issue of my free newsletter (the tutorial is currently on my website but is for subscribers only, so sign up for the newsletter if you are interested), In addition to showing how to create a basic mirror, I also wanted to show how pre-cropping an image before the mirroring process can create interesting results, and also show that image mirrors can sometimes be used quite successfully in a multi-image collage. The only problem was that I didn't have a cool collage on hand that I could use. I could have used the Leviathan collage that I posted here a few months back, but that wasn't pre-cropped. Plus, if truth be told, I was actually quite interested in using an image of a banyan tree that I had taken on a recent trip to Hawaii. It was just crying out for the mirroring process and in the end, I could not resist its siren call.

The main image of the banyan tree was mirrored and then flipped upside down to create the forest portal. Another image of banyan trees formed the tree that can be seen through the opening. The door was photographed in a small town on the coast of Maine, and an image of peeling paint from San Francisco was used to add some texture to the door. Here's the three main images used in this collage; the mirrored banyan tree is on the left (you can click in the image to see it a bit larger):

If you're interested in learning how to create your own multi-image collages, I have a class on that very topic coming up in southern New Mexico early next year, (click the class title for more info):

Creative Collage with Photoshop CS3
Mesilla Digital Imaging Workshops
at the Preston Center for Contemporary Art
Feb 19 - 22, 2009

Leviathan

Leviathan

This is a collage (obviously) created from a mirrored image of the tail of a DC-3 airplane and two photos of the ocean. I added the dark circular vignette to suggest a view through a telescope. The steel "whale tail" has been finished for awhile but I hadn't found the right ocean image for it yet. Just a digital doodle, really...I find that making collages is a good way to relax and get the creative juices flowing just for the fun of it.

And, speaking of collage (how's that for a segue?)...

Creative Collage Workshop Next Weekend:

If you live in California near Monterey, Santa Cruz, or the San Francisco Bay Area, then you may be interested in a class that I'll be teaching next weekend, March 1st and 2nd:  Creative Collage with Adobe Photoshop at the Monterey Adult School.There's still about 6 spaces left so sign up soon if you want to attend (click the class title for a link to a page with all the info). This class is being offered for the incredible price of only $200!

I'll also be teaching this same workshop at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa in Honolulu on April 12 - 13. A 5-day version will be offered June 2 - 6 at the at the excellent Lepp Institute of Digital Imaging on the central California coast near San Luis Obispo.

Coloma Cemetery

Coloma Cemetery  [Canon 5D, HDR)
Coloma, California  February 10, 2008
(click in the image for a larger version)

Here's another image from the Gold Rush-era cemetery at Coloma. This is an HDR merge of two hand held exposures . If I had a tripod with me, then I would have used it, of course, but as I did not, I took advantage of the auto-bracketing feature on my camera to quickly take the two shots (see below).

The two exposures were merged into a 32-bit HDR file in Photoshop CS3 and then imported into HDRSoft's Photomatix for most of the HDR tonemappng. Then it was back to Photoshop for some final dodge and burn and contrast adjustment layers.I'm still playing around with this image and trying out lower color saturation and even moody black and white versions.

Unfortunately, the small JPEG version does not do justice to the high-frequency of all the intricate details such as the leaves on the ground, the rough stone, the lichen and and lacy tree branches overhead.

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Workshop News

I'm pleased to announce that on May 3 – 4 I will be offering a new 2-day hands-on workshop on Photoshop for Photographers: The Basics at the Stephen Johnson Photography Studio in Pacifica, California. This class is designed for photographers who are new to Photoshop and who want to learn the most important fundamentals for using this powerful software to work with their photographs. The class will take place in the new state-of-the-art digital lab at Stephen's studio and enrollment is limited to only 10 students. Click the class title for registration details and more information about the class.

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On June 2 - 6 I'll be teaching Creative Collage with Adobe Photoshop CS3, at the excellent Lepp Institute of Digital Imaging on the central California coast near San Luis Obispo.  These classes tend to fill fast, especially at that time of year, so if you are interested in participating, click the class title for a link to the workshop's page at the Lepp Institute site. The computer lab at the Lepp Institute is really first rate, with fast Windows computers kitted out with dual monitors and Canon 5100 printers (as well as larger format printers adjacent to the main lab area). Tiered stadium seating ensures that everyone has a clear view of the main screen. I've taught there several times over the past five years and I always look forward to going back. It is truly one of the best digital lab facilities I've taught at.

For a complete listing of other upcoming workshops, including classes in Florida, Hawaii and Monterey and Pacifica, California, click on over to the Workshops Page at my web site.

The Red Dress and the Sea

The Red Dress and the Sea  [Canon 5D]
January, 2008

Today's image is a blend of three photographs: the red dress is from a shop window in Honolulu; the coastal photo is from Acadia National Park in Maine; and the top part of the sky above the hook is from another Maine image. This is a recent collage created specifically for a short session on Creative Collage that I taught at FOTOfusion last week in Delray Beach, Florida. I really like how this one turned out. I feel it has just the right amount of quiet surrealism that is necessary in a collage.

If you want to learn more about the technical and aesthetic considerations involved in creating multiple image collages, then I have a couple of workshops coming up this year that may be of interest to you:

For an in-depth exploration with plenty of time to work on your own images, the ideal class is a 5-day workshop called The Creative Collage with Adobe Photoshop CS3 that I'll be teaching June 2 - 6 at the excellent Lepp Institute of Digital Imaging on the central California coast near San Luis Obispo.  These classes tend to fill fast, especially at that time of year, so if you are interested in participating, click the class title for a link to the workshop's page at the Lepp Institute site. The computer lab at the Lepp Institute is really first rate, with fast Windows computers kitted out with dual monitors and Canon 5100 printers (as well as larger format printers adjacent to the main lab area). Tiered stadium seating ensures that everyone has a clear view of the main screen. I've taught there several times over the past five years and I always look forward to going back. It is truly one of the best digital lab facilities I've taught at.

If a shorter version of that class will fit your schedule better (or if you're hankering for an excuse to make a trip to Hawaii), then I'll be teaching a 2-day version at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa in Honolulu on April 12 - 13. I'm re-working the syllabus for both versions of this class with new material that takes advantage of new features in Photoshop CS3. When I have that finished I'll post a link to it here. Stay tuned!

Bass Harbor Head Light

Bass Harbor Head Light  [Canon 5D]
Acadia National Park, Maine
Oct 2, 2007
(click in the image for a larger version)

A couple of months ago I posted another image from this same day, but one that was taken later after the sun had set and a heavy fog had rolled in.

I hadn't really played with the sunny versions from this series yet, but a call for some Maine lighthouse images landed in my lap yesterday and so I found myself gathering up some of my lighthouse shots from that beautiful state.

This is a blend of two tripod-mounted raw exposures: one to hold detail in the sky and the far horizon, and the other for the lighthouse, rocks and foreground water. It is a manual blend done with layers and layer masks and not an HDR shot. I also added some of my Sepiaesque "seasoning" to this image. If you have The Creative Digital Darkroom book, the Sepiaesque technique is covered in Chapter 9 on pages 325 and 326. Click on the image of the layers palette to see a larger version.

FOTOfusion

I'll be heading to south Florida on Monday to do some classes and presentations at FOTOfusion, the annual photography and digital imaging festival put on by the Palm Beach Photographic Centre. I'll be doing two hands-on computer labs on Creative Collage with Photoshop CS3 and The Creative Digital Darkroom, as well as a presentation seminar on The Creative Digital Darkroom and some portfolio reviews. If you're attending, stop by one of my sessions and say hello!

*Upcoming Workshops *

The Creative Digital Darkroom, March 17 -€“ 21 at the Palm Beach Photographic Centre in sunny south Florida. Based on my new book, this hands-on class is focused on exploring essential creative digital darkroom techniques for photographers. Short photo field sessions will also be featured on some days to practice critical exposure skills with digital SLR cameras. Click the course title above to learn more or to register for this class.

In mid April I'll be at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa in Honolulu teaching three short courses on Selections and Masking in Photoshop CS3 (April 11), Creative Collage in Photoshop CS3 (April 12-13), and Camera Raw Workflow (April 14). Click the links to see a description and more information on registering for these classes.