Summer is coming to it's end

It has been a while since I have posted to my blog. This summer seems like it has gone by quick. I took a trip to Vegas with Grace, Randy, Krista, and Vergil a little while back. There was some excitement going down the shark tube water slide at the Golden Nugget Hotel. Other than that, I have been spending the summer learning about video editing. I watched all 8 hours of Lynda.com’s training for Adobe Premier CS5 and almost half way through After Effects CS5 training. Once I get a little better, I might start turning this into a video blog.

This upcoming semester is going to be a little different for me. I am going to be spending less time at the Cypress College Photography Department. The business building will become my home again. I have decided to take up accounting. I know it doesn’t seem interesting, but I am hoping to look for a somewhat steady nine to five job in the future. I will not be completely away from the photo department this semester. I have enrolled in the conceptual photography class. There is nothing like a class where the object of the class is to just make stuff up. My instructor will be Jonathan Fletcher aka “Mr. Pinholio”. Well that is about it. I will start posting more frequently now that the new semester is getting ready to be starting back up.

Things to come

I have been thinking about upgrading my Photoshop CS3 for a little while now. The computers at school have allowed me to get use to the new interface of CS4. I was almost ready to pick it up on JourneyEd.com at an academic price. On a whim, I decided to look around for when the release of CS5 would be. The very first website I found was CS5.org. After looking at the first video that shows off some of the new features of CS5, I decided to hold off on CS4. From the sites speculation on Adobe's usual release times it could be as soon as this April when I could pick it up. Right now it would be nice to move up to CS4, but CS5 looks like it’s bells and whistles look to be a good reason for waiting. So for now it looks like I am holding off from upgrading right now. He’s hoping CS5 will be out in April.

Winter Break

Well, it has been awhile since my last blog. During this winter break I have been spending most of my time watching Lynda.com. It has been hours of fun, learning, and a refresher on some of the programs I am always using. With all the time I have spent watching these training videos, it has helped my retouching quite a bit. Some of my favorite courses that I have watched so far are "Beyond Skin: Going Deeper with Photoshop CS3" and "Photoshop CS4 Retouching: Fashion Photography Projects". They showed me better way to organize my workflow, and to "reduce and simplify" as Chris Orwig would say. I went back to a couple of images that I corrected before watching the videos and reworked them. With the new techniques that I am incorporating into my workflow the images have really started to pop. This upcoming semester my post productions should be great. Now I just need to work on some concepts to shoot.

Capture One 5 Workshop

Since taking the Advanced Digital Workflow Class at Cypress College, I have been introduced to many new and fun programs. One of them being Capture One 4. It is a great raw processing engine for photos and with the pro version shooting tethered to a computer is a breeze. While surfing the net and Calumet’s website, I just happened to notice that they were have workshops on the new Capture One 5 software. The closest one to me is the Calumet Los Angles workshop on Feb. 1, 2010. After seeing the deal that everyone who takes the course gets a free copy of Capture One 5, I was hooked. The normal cost of the program is $129.99. Registration for the workshop is $49.99, so you get the software and two and a half hours of training on the software. If anyone from the Digital Workflow Class is going to be going let me now. Right now Grace and myself have signed up for the Capture One 5 Workshop.

Flickr War

Well, another month down in Grace and my Flickr war. Only three more to go.

Grace's Flickr

My Flickr

Racket Ball Challenge

Clifford Lester has been playing racket ball for a while now. He has gotten really good at the sport. So when Luis Munoz challenged him to a match, it sounded like it was going to be a good competition. Luis had been playing up the challenge all day trying to psych Cliff out. He new that Cliff played a lot, but Cliff didn’t know that Luis had never played before. It wound up being less of a match and more of a practice for Cliff. At the end you could see who won by who was sweating less. During an intermission for Luis, Grace went in and gave it a try. Wearing completely the wrong cloths and having no shoes did not help her game either.

Most of the time while Luis was playing Grace was shooting video with the Canon 5D Mark II. She is trying to get a feel for it so she will be able to show students how to work it. I on the other hand decided to shoot with the Nikon D700. After a few minutes of getting use to Nikon’s ergonomics, it was a good and responsive camera. The autofocus was very quick and the aperture priority seemed to give pretty good exposures. It was fun to use something other than my regular old Canon 5D. If I hadn’t already invested so much money into Canon I might have gone over to Nikon. But at the time I went with Canon they were to only ones with a full frame digital sensor. Now that times are changing it seems that both camera systems are equally as good now. It is now at the point were Canon and Nikon are just playing leap frog with each other. Canon had full frame sensors then Nikon made one. Nikon had amazingly high ISO’s and now Canon does also. My best advice in getting a camera is to get whatever feels good to you.

Our Broken Window

On the same night of the Available Light Class we had a problem at the Cypress College Photography Department. Grace went into Studio 2 and noticed some glass lying on the floor. It didn’t look like any of the typical glass that we have around the department that might have broke. On closer inspection, she noticed that it had the same tint as the large plate glass window that are in that studio. Once she opened up the blinds there it was. A perfect shaped hole that fit the glass found on the floor. Grace immediately called campus security and talk to the auto body department to make sure no one was standing under the window. From upstairs the window seemed to be fluctuating with the wind and seemed like the rest could fall out at anytime. When Campus security arrived, they decided to break the rest of the window out just to be safe. So with all of the excitement going on, Grace and I decided to document it by photographing upstairs and from ground level. After patching the hole with some black plastic the nights excitement ended. The next day a plywood board now sits where the window us to be.