Sean Duggan Blog

Modern Cowboy

Alternative Transportation  [Canon 5D]
Santa Fe, New Mexico  May 1, 2009
(click in the image for a larger version)

On the final day of my Santa Fe workshop last month I was driving out Cerrillos Avenue to pick up some supplies for my drive south when I saw this cowboy and his dog riding into town. At first I continued on my way, which was in the opposite direction, but after stopping to photograph an old motel sign, I realized that this was too good of an opportunity to pass up. So I turned around and headed back until I caught up with the cowboy. I drove some ways ahead, found a spot to park my car and then waited until he arrived at my position. I followed him on foot for a bit, taking photos as he passed by new backgrounds. As he approached the gas station I saw the scene as a perfect juxtaposition of the old and the new, as well as a subtle commentary on our dependence on gasoline and the rising cost of fossil fuels.

Here's anotehr view of him and his faithful dog crossing an intersection:

I am in Maine at the moment and will be here for a few more days. Images from this trip will begin to appear on the blog in the next couple of days.

Upcoming Workshop in Connecticut

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

Boogie Boarders

Boogie Boarders  [Canon 5D with a Lensbaby Composer]
April 2, 2009  Honolulu, Hawaii
(click in the image for a larger version)

Another image from one of my end of day Lensbaby strolls along Waikiki Beach last week.

Next Workshop..

The Creative Eye: Digial Photography & Digital Darkroom Essentials
Santa Fe, New Mexico, April 27  May 1

Solar Assist

Big Hat  [Diana camera]

A scan from a slightly underexposed toy camera negative livened up with some fundamental tone and contrast modification, uneven sepia toning and a solar assist for special flare effects. The original scan is below.

New Workshop in February

On Feb 14 & 15 I'll be in Monterey, California teaching Photoshop Essentials for Photographers. More details coming soon!

James and Spike

James and Spike  [Canon 5D]
Union, Maine  August 19, 2008
(Click in the image for a larger view)

This is from the same county fair in Union, Maine as the previous image. For only five dollars you could get a Polaroid photo taken with Spike the python draped around your neck and shoulders. Business was pretty slow at this booth, though I did see two giggling teenage girls spring for some reptilian photo memorabilia.

After making this image I showed it to James on the camera's LCD screen and offered to send him a copy, but he was not interested. I had assumed it was his snake, but as it turns out, he was just a hired gun with no emotional attachments to Spike.

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Workshop Discount!

Secrets of the Mask:
Selections and Masking in Adobe Photoshop CS3
September 27 - 28, Santa Cruz, California

There are still spaces left in my Secrets of the Mask workshop coming up next weekend in the beautiful seaside town of Santa Cruz, California.

NAPP members and subscribers to my newsletter receive a special discount for this workshop.
Click here for a description of this class and registration info.

Side Show

Side Show [Canon 5D]
Union, Maine  August 19, 2008
(click in the image for a larger version)

This was taken at the county fair in Union, Maine during my Real World Digital Photography class last month. This carny was very proud of his tattoo, which refers not only to his line of work, but also to his nickname.

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Workshop Discount!

Secrets of the Mask:
Selections and Masking in Adobe Photoshop CS3
September 27 - 28, Santa Cruz, California

There are still spaces left in my Secrets of the Mask workshop coming up in a little less than 2 weeks in the beautiful seaside town of Santa Cruz, California.

NAPP members and subscribers to my newsletter receive a special discount for this workshop.
Click here for a description of this class and registration info.

Apologies to Andrew Wyeth

Real World Digital Photography Class, [Canon 5D]
Cushing, Maine, August 21, 2008
(click in the image for a larger version)

Here's the class photo we took for my Real World Digital Photography class a few weeks ago at the Maine Media Workshops. This was taken at the Olson House, which is a part of the Farnsworth Museum and Wyeth Center in Rockland, Maine. The Olson House, located in nearby Cushing, is famous in the world of American painting because it figures in one of Andrew Wyeth's most celebrated works, "Christina's World" (see below). This location was also featured in several other Wyeth paintings.

Of course, when visiting such a place, the urge to create an image that references the original work is darn near impossible to resist, so we gave into temptation and the above group photo is the result. I am in the center, assuming the "Christina pose" (though I was unable to contort myself into quite the same posture!). It was a quite a fun group of people for that class and I really enjoyed exploring different parts of coastal Maine with them in search of perfect pixels.

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Newsletter

The next issue of my free newsletter, Creative Digital Darkroom News, will be sent in the next couple of days. Subscribers are eligible for a special discount on an upcoming workshop in Santa Cruz, California (see below). You can sign up using the form above left, of over at my website.

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Upcoming Workshops

Secrets of the Mask:
Selections and Masking in Adobe Photoshop CS3
September 27 - 28, Santa Cruz, California

NAPP members and subscribers to my newsletter receive a special discount for this workshop. Click here for more information about this class.

Creative Digital Black & White
Lepp Institute of Digital Imaging, November 3 – 7.
NAPP members (as well as NANPA members) recieve a 15% discount.
More Info

Leaping into Digital

Leaping into Kung Foo Digital Photography  [Canon 5D]
August 10, 2008 -- Rockport, Maine
(click in the image for a larger version)

My final workshop week in Maine was another blur of full days, both in the classroom and in the field, wonderful scenery, good people and lots of learning and laughter. The week was so full and rushed by so fast, in fact, that I soon gave up the idea of trying to post here every day. So now that I'm back home in California I'm playing catch up and will be posting images from Maine foir the next week or so.

Amy, one of the students in the "Leaping into Digital" class, had motored up from Cape Cod on her 40 foot boat, the Banyan. On the afternoon of the last day, after the class had formally concluded, Amy invited a few other people from the class and myself to go out for a short cruise. The fog was so thick, however, that we only ventured a short distance into the outer harbor before deciding to come back and have a party at the dock, where there was no shortage of cameras, pixels or silliness.

The photo above shows Frank and Sue practicing the ancient art of Kung Foo Photography on the dock. The fresh sea air also inspired Bridget to perform a spontaneous display of dockside gymnastics, a traditional skill revered by sailors and sea-faring folk the world over. Having already lept enthusiastically into digital the previous week, Frank and Sue were there to make sure the event was thoroughly documented from a variety of angles.

Click here to see a gallery of the photographs from the "Leaping into Digital" class

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Next Workshop

Secrets of the Mask:
Selections and Masking in Adobe Photoshop CS3
September 27 - 28, Santa Cruz, California

NAPP members and subscribers to my newsletter receive a special discount for this class.
Click here for more information about this class.

Lightroom 2 and Camera Raw 4.5

The Speaker  [Diana Camera]
October, 2007
(click in the image for a larger version)

Camera Raw 4.5 Update & Lightroom 2

Along with the release of Lightroom 2 this week, there is also a free update to the Camera Raw plug-in, version 4.5. If you are upgrading to Lightroom 2 you should also update Camera Raw for any other programs that use that technology. This includes Photoshop CS3, Photoshop Elements 6 (Mac & Win) and Premiere Elements 4.0 for Windows. This is the first step to ensure that any edits you make to images in Lightroom 2 will be visible in those other applications. There is also one other thing to do, which I'll cover below.

Here's a link to the Mac version of Camera Raw 4.5
And here's a link to the Windows version of Camera Raw 4.5

Making Lightroom edits Visible in Camera Raw 4.5

Any edits you make to images in Lightroom are stored in the Lightroom database and will not be immediately visible to Camera Raw. In order to share these edits so that Camera Raw sees them, you have to save them to an XMP sidecar file that is stored in the same folder as the images, or directly to the DNG file if you are using that format for your raw files (this is the case no matter what version of Lightroom you are using). Fortunately this is a very quick and easy step of using the keyboard shortcut of Command-S on Mac or Control-S on PC (the menu path for this is found in the Library module and is Metadata > Save Metadata to File).

Leaping Into Digital & Real World Digital Photography

There's still a few spots left in my two upcoming classes at the Maine Media Workshops:

Leaping into Digital  Aug 10 – 16

Real World Digital Photography  Aug 17 – 23

You can see my complete Workshop Schedule here.

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.