Los Angeles Digital Imaging Group Blog

I’m a bit of a history buff, especially the history of technology. While doing some research today on a completely unrelated subject, I came across a link that I thought was interesting and thought I’d share: A History of Digital Cameras

Enjoy, and have a safe and happy New Year.

MJ

I recently discovered ( with the help of John Nack) the coolest set of brush and tool presets I’ve come across in a very long time. Justin Gerard from Portland Studios has them on their site  where you can see them in action.  For those of you who bristle at paying someone else to do stuff you can for yourself like writing actions or creating color palettes I can understand thinking “why would I pay for this?”  Thing is, these are amazing, a lot of work went into them and as presets you can fool around with ‘em all day long and get wildly different combinations of natural brush effects. For any  one who uses lots of textures in their Photoshop images I can’t recommend this enough. It’s that cool.  So there.   -je 

For the past couple of years I’ve been having a lot of fun with what I consider to be one of the best creative capture tools available. No, its not a new camera or software plug-in. Its not a new RAW file processor or special light control/diffuser/bounce/softbox… etc… It is the “Lensbabie” a unique, low cost, selective focus lens available for most of the DSLRs as well as old school film SLRs (they even have a model for motion picture cameras with a PL mount). I’ve found that this little wobbly lens is a welcome relief from the hyper-technical, precise photography that I tend to do for advertising and commercial clients. Working with the selective tilt focus lens commits you to a certain look at the time of capture – no turning back! This is photography without the safety net of digital in the extreme and it informs your creative vision  in a way that few other approaches do. It also liberates you from the technical concerns of focus and chromatic aberration – hell everything is soft with blue fringe! Its definitely one way to turn an $8k digital camera into a $8 toy camera though it will set you back $100 – $200 depending on which model you go for. I do have a lot of fun with this … Here are a few samples of shot taken with the Lensbabie!

I’ve introduced a new category for posts concerning the group’s activities. We’ll use this LADIG News category to talk about what has been happening and what we’d like for the future. Anything related to USDIG/LADIG events or other activities as well as the news surrounding individual members activities – like shows, exhibits, or talks and seminars.  To kick this off, I’d like to offer a review of our holiday party. This past December 11th we had our annual Holiday Party & Print Swap at Anthony Nex’s studio in the Helms Building Annex. Board member extraordinaire, Richard Kephart supplied his special home made chili for dinner and various members brought additional holiday spirits to supplement the usual sodas and water refreshments. The focus of the party was the member print swap. We had several tables where members spread out their prints. Anyone that brought a print could negotiate a swap with anyone with another print to swap. We did this last year and as last time it was a big success. There was also a continuos slideshow of members work and this all contributed to a great environment for sharing. It was really great to see all the good work that members are producing. Guests were welcome and I saw quite a few new faces –I hope most will continue to support the LADIG at regular events.  We also tried out a little game we called “Whose Picture is it Anyway” where the audience had to guess who among 3 or 4 different people was really responsible for the picture. I’m not sure this was that successful – the audience had some initial difficulty in deciding between two of the contestants but by the end everyone had guessed correctly – but it was fun hearing the rather outlandish stories told by the contestants.I’m hoping to receive some photos from the event and once I do I’ll post them here (hint for other bloggers who attended the party). All in all, the print swap was a big success –I came prepared and I walked away with a lot of really cool images for my collection. I would love to hold more community building events like this that focus on members images. Maybe we can do a “Show and Tell” kind of event where people get up and talk about a cool image they created. Lets talk!

First of all – my thanks to Lee and Mark for setting up this space to knock around ideas and hopefully generate a bit of interest in some of the stuff that might otherwise escape our notice in the blur of activity we’re involved in every day. Hopefully I’ll be able to avoid inane posts referring the recent release of Photospray or any further mention of Photoshop Your Pooch.

So let me just dive with the first thing that grabbed my attention today.  Microsoft has released their gold master version of the HD Photo plugin for Photoshop. Bill Crow is the chap at Microsoft heading up the project and over at his blog he has a profusion of information on the format and its requisite usage of a new color space they had to come up with. If you go here you can find all the dirt on what they (the boys and girls at Redmond)  expect of this new file format. Much of the stuff on these sites is pretty dang geeky even for me so just scoot past all the gamma displays, pixel count arrays and get the plugin and see what you think about it.  I don’t shoot a whole lot of HDR – images that have high dynamic range and therefore need multiple exposures to blend together, compensating for the limits of the capturing sensor’s range. However, just to satisfy my curiosity, I’ll be fooling around with this in the next few days and I’ll post my findings here.  Maybe some of  you can also. I’d certainly be interested.  -je