Hi everyone! I wanted to give you all a heads up that tomorrow morning kicks off my 3-day online class, “Post-Processing for Outdoor & Travel Photographers” at creativeLIVE. I’ve spent the past week hunkered down in preparation and am on my way to Seattle today. As with all creativeLIVE classes, they’re absolutely free to watch while they’re live. If you want to watch at your own pace and get all the bonus material (including the course handbook), you can purchase the class for a discounted price while it’s live.
The classes run 9 am-4pm PST on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday (July 21-23), and they will be rebroadcast in the evenings as well. In these sessions, I’ll be teaching both Photoshop and Lightroom. Here’s the course description:
Spend more time actually taking photos
It’s time to make the images you capture as you travel or explore the great outdoors even more jaw-dropping. Join photographer and image editing expert Ben Willmore to explore the Lightroom and Photoshop tools that will optimize your images to really make them shine while keeping them easy to find and organized.
In this course, you’ll master the post-production process every travel and outdoor photographer needs to know. From panorama stitching to HDR to fixing distortion in architectural images, you’ll dive deep into the editing tasks best performed in Photoshop. You’ll adjust and optimize your images – even if they’re overexposed, underexposed, or have color or contrast issues.You’ll also learn how to organize your images with Lightroom make them easy to find by location taken, subject, or date. Ben will cover specific tips on uploading and organizing while you are still on the road that will save you time and make things easy when it is time to edit. You’ll also develop an editing workflow that helps you retouch quickly and efficiently.
If you’re ready to spend more time outdoors taking stunning photos and less time stuck indoors processing (or finding!) them, this is the course for you.
And finally, I’ll leave you with some fun before & afters to give you an idea of some of kinds of processing we’ll be doing. Hope you’re able to tune in!
[beforeafter]
Hi everyone! This is just a reminder that my Photoshop for Photographers: The Essentials online class kicks off tomorrow at 9 am PST and runs for three days. As with all creativeLIVE classes, it’s totally free to watch while it’s live. If you want the class to watch later (and get the bonus material), you can purchase it while it’s live for a discounted price.
So what will you learn? Here’s the class description:
Overwhelmed by Photoshop? Ready to start editing your photos more efficiently? Join creativeLIVE for a three-day course that will give you an in-depth understanding of the Photoshop skills every photographer should know.
Award-winning photographer Ben Willmore has taught hundreds of thousands of photographers worldwide how to harness the power of Photoshop, and he’s ready to share his unique insights and style with you. You’ll learn about optimizing images, sharpening, retouching, black and white conversion, directing the viewer’s eye, and much more. Ben will take the guesswork out of Photoshop by covering which menus and tools are essential — and which you’re better off ignoring.
By the end of this course, you’ll have the core, everyday Photoshop skills that every photographer needs to produce professional-grade work.
If you do choose to purchase the class, you’ll get the course handbook, which is a pdf that Karen is creating that will review all the techniques I cover.
Find out more info and enroll for free HERE. (You get my “5 Tips for Making your Images POP” pdf just for enrolling.)
Hey gang! Things have been crazy busy lately, between training events, my vintage bus project, and prep for future events. We DID manage to get a day’s worth of exploring in, and I have pictures of that at the bottom of this post. Here’s whats up:
creativeLIVE
On Monday and Tuesday of this past week, I taught my Photoshop Fundamentals course at creativeLIVE. As with all creativeLIVE online courses, while it was live, it was free to watch. During those two days, I covered the following:
• Simplifying the Interface
• Browsing your images with Bridge
• Understanding Resolution
• Which File Formats to use
• Essential Tonal Adjustments
• Essential Color Adjustments
• Isolating areas with selections
• The fundamentals of layers
• Troubleshooting Techniques
• Workflow Overview
If you missed the live broadcast, and still want the course, you can purchase it HERE. This two-day event is part of a series called Photoshop Mastery. I’ll be returning to creativeLIVE for the next few months to teach additional titles in the series. The next one will be Photoshop Mastery: Color & Tone, on May 6-7. To learn more about that one, and to enroll for the free live broadcast, click HERE.
I really can’t say enough good things about creativeLIVE. From an educator standpoint, they are wonderful to work with, and from a student/viewer perspective, they are an excellent resource, broadcasting high quality classes every single day. I very frequently tune in as a student. Also, to purchase the courses, they’re usually only $80-$100… for 2-3 days worth of content and course materials.
Here I am on my creativeLIVE set during my Photoshop Fundamentals course.
Here I am with my lovely creativeLIVE hosts, Susan and Kenna.
New Gear
When I returned back to the bus after teaching at creativeLIVE, my new laptop was waiting for me! I ordered a new MacBook Pro, with retina display, and was looking forward to getting that baby set up! My current laptop isn’t actually that old, but it’s been behaving very strangely lately, and I didn’t want to risk having it bomb while I was using it to teach a seminar. Karen and I are both working on plans to optimize our work setups for the vintage bus. We’ll probably both end up with desktop Macs on the bus, as well as laptops for travel.
My new MacBook Pro arrived!
Vintage Bus Progress
If you read this blog regularly, you know that I’m restoring my next “home-on-wheels,” a 1963 Flxible Starliner bus. The shop that’s creating the interior has been making lots of progress lately, mocking up the layout and giving us lots of decisions to make. This past week, we’ve been choosing wood veneers and stain colors for many of the walls and cabinets. When the interior mockup is complete, and we like the way everything is set up, they will remove everything and start building it from scratch with all the real materials. (Right now, the mockup is made of mostly plywood and is just there so we can tweak the layout to exactly what we want.) If you want more vintage bus info, you can follow the Creative Cruiser facebook page . I post lots of progress pictures there.
We had lots of veneer samples to choose from for the interior of the vintage bus. They stained several of them so we could tell how they would actually look.
Tulip Fest
Every year in Oregon, the Wooden Shoe Tulip Farm holds a festival while the flowers are in bloom. There are acres and acres of tulips that turn the landscape into a rainbow of color. It’s pretty amazing to see. Karen had gone a day earlier, and wanted to go back so I could check it out. It was definitely worth it. Because the weather has been pretty nasty (as it often is in the Pacific Northwest) we didn’t get a lot of time out there before the skies turned gray and it started pouring. It would be ideal to visit this event on a weekday (we were there on Saturday) because the crowds wouldn’t be as bad. Karen was there on Friday and said it wasn’t nearly as crowded. But if you have to go on a weekend, it’s still quite easy to focus on close-up, detail shots of the flowers. At the festival, they had vendors, music and food, so when it started to rain, we just headed for a tent and had lunch.
This is my iPhone pano of the tulip field.
One of Karen’s shots from the festival.
The Antique Powerland Museum
I had been wanting to visit this museum for a while because, on the museum grounds, there is a vintage Texaco service station I wanted to photograph. We finally found the place on Saturday and paid a visit. They have two big warehouse-sized buildings full of old trucks, especially a lot of old semis. Since we were the only people there, we got a personalized tour of the whole facility that included a lot of fun, historical tidbits. There were a couple trucks in there I would LOVE to return and lightpaint! After the tour, I spent a while photographing the old service station. The weather was pretty cruddy, so I wouldn’t mind returning on a better day, but I still got some decent shots.
The old Texaco Service Station at the Antique Powerland Museum. This is an iPhone shot.
At the end of the week, we made our way back to Portland. I have a good amount of work here, including my Photoshop Artistry full-day seminar on Friday, April 12. If you are going to be in the Portland area and would like to soak in some Photoshop knowledge, you can read more about the event and sign up HERE.
*All the images in this post were provided by the creativeLIVE team. Thanks guys! *
Hey gang! I’ve just wrapped up a great week teaching classes with creativeLIVE in Seattle. It’s been an intense couple of days, jam-packed with Photoshop, photography and light painting sessions. If you’re not familiar with creativeLIVE, they are an online classroom for all topics relating to photography and creativity. They have the best description of themselves on their website, which reads as follows:
creativeLIVE is about providing the best free, live creative education on the web. From our studio in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood, we offer free online workshops in photography, video, web and graphic design, app development and a wide array of other creative topics.
All of our live creative workshops are available to watch for free in realtime. Once a live workshop is over, we edit the best of this content into easily downloadable files available for purchase through our online store. It’s that simple.
At our core, we’re a dedicated group of creative-minded individuals. Our aim is to work with the very best instructors who want to share their knowledge and creative expertise with the world.
I’ve got to say, my experience working with the creativeLIVE gang was awesome. Their whole operation is run so well, from the perspective of both the students and myself, the instructor. While the classes are live, tens of thousands of folks tune in from all over the world. Even though this audience may not be physically in front of me, the event is still extremely interactive, as virtual attendees communicate to me and to each other via the creativeLIVE chat rooms and Twitter feed. Periodically, the class “moderators” will relay the chat room questions for me to answer. In addition to the viewers who tune in online, we also have a very small in-studio audience for some one-on-one interaction and Q&A.
Here I am, on the creativeLIVE set during my Photoshop for Photographers class
My first creativeLIVE event this week was a 3-day class called Photoshop for Photographers. During this class, I covered all the Photoshop features that are essential to a photographic workflow – all of the features I use every single day. I included everything from Camera Raw, to Adjustment Layers, to color correction, to HDR and panos. The list goes on and on. Here’s the class description for this event:
Photoshop for Photographers
Photoshop can be overwhelming. Master the art of Adobe Photoshop by focusing just on the tools photographers need to know. Optimizing images, sharpening, retouching, black and white conversion, directing the viewer’s eye, HDR, panorama-stitching, and more, all the things photographers do with Photoshop. But Ben’s not going to dig into every option in every menu–this three day course will have no fluff and no frills. You won’t be wasting any time and energy learning effects that you’ll never use, leaving you struggling to find the meat you need. Everything Ben teaches in this course is something that photographers use everyday!
To purchase the course (download or stream), CLICK HERE.
My second event was a 1-day class on light painting. Light painting is probably my favorite form of photography, as it allows for endless amounts of creativity and creates such a stunning and unique look. In addition to the 1-day, in-studio class, we shot a bonus session the night before! The bonus session was a live night shoot where I demonstrated my lightpainting techniques on a VW Beetle. Here’s the class description for this event:
Lightpainting
You can create amazing images with light painting, and Ben Willmore is going to show you how! Making light trails, highlighting parts of your image, crazy spiral effects–all the fun secrets of light painting will be yours in this special 1-day workshop! Ben will show you how to use everyday light sources to make striking images, as this is a technique that doesn’t require a lot of equipment. If you have a tripod and a flashlight, you can light paint, and Ben is going to show you how!
To purchase the course (download or stream), CLICK HERE.
Here we are, preparing to lightpaint this Beetle during the bonus night shoot session.
Me with Kenna and Susan, of creativeLIVE
As I said before, I had a great week here in Seattle and I look forward to teaching more creativeLIVE events in the future! In the next week, I’ll be preparing for my classes at the upcoming Photoshop World Conference & Expo and then flying over to NJ to spend time with Karen’s family. More to come!
Hello from Seattle! I just arrived in the Seattle area a few days ago, after having spent some time in Portland. While I’m in Seattle, I’ll be presenting two online seminars with creativeLIVE. If you’re not familiar with creativeLIVE, it is a live, online creative classroom offering up tons of photography-related courses. Most of the courses are three days long, and when you watch them live online, they’re absolutely free. Once they’re over, you may purchase the courses to watch whenever you want. This week, I’ll be teaching the following two courses:
Once I arrived to the Seattle area, I was eager to meet the creativeLIVE team and go over the details of my upcoming events. It was sheer coincidence that when I went to visit their studio, my good friend and photographer Lee Varis was presenting his live seminar, on shooting and retouching skin. I sat in on his workshop for a bit, and then we went out to dinner that night.
Lee Varis, on the set of creativeLIVE, teaching his Photoshop/photography class on skin.
While I was sitting in on Lee’s class, I was joined by photographer and instructor Sue Bryce. The creativeLIVE gang gave the two of us a chance to quiz question Lee and talk about our upcoming events. You can see the video clip below.
After the creativeLIVE events, I’ll be hanging out in Seattle for a few more days and then flying over to NJ to visit Karen’s family. Karen is already over in NJ as she’s had some family emergencies to deal with. From there, we’ll both head to Photoshop World in Las Vegas. More to come…
