Work & Play in Portland

by | Apr 16, 2013

The Work

This past week has been a busy one, and my time was mostly occupied with work engagements. For three full days, I did some corporate training for a local company. What does that mean? Well companies can hire me to teach private events or do custom training sessions with their staff. This often times works out for groups with really specific needs. This way, they’re not stuck with the generalized sessions you’d receive at one of my public events. If you’re ever interested in private Photoshop or photography training, check out the In-House area on this site.

I also presented one of my 1-day Photographic Artistry seminars in Portland. Usually, I fly to all of my Kelby Training events, but for this one, we just happened to be in town! If you haven’t been to one of these one-day events yet, I’ve got more coming up in the next month in Denver, CO, Columbus, OH, and Boston, MA. More dates will be added as well. I’d love to see you there!

The Play

There is a vintage service station south of Portland that I have been wanting to shoot for some time now. After all the work events this week, I finally made my way down there to go shooting. This one is an old Flying A station. Below is an iPhone shot I played with a bit. I haven’t had time to process the RAW files yet.

BenFlyingAStationThe vintage Flying A station I shot the other day. This is my iPhone image.

This week, I also bit the bullet and ordered the new bike I had been planning on getting for a long time now. It’s a hybrid (paddle and electric) folding bike. This is the smallest and lightest folding bike you’ll find. It can be folded/unfolded in about 15 seconds and will easily fit in the boot of our Mini Cooper as well as in the storage area under our bus. I’m adding an electric conversion from NYCEwheels.com to help me up the hills and boost my speed when peddling as well.

BenBikeThis is the bike I just ordered. I had been eying it up for a while!

Lastly, Karen and I paid another visit to the Wooden Shoe Tulip Festival, and were actually able to make it on a sunny day! As I mentioned in my last post, it’s just a color explosion, and very much worth going to if you’re a photographer or photo enthusiast. Despite the weekend crowds, I was able to get plenty of shots without loads of people in them. I played a lot with my circular fisheye lens, placing it in interesting locations, including underneath the tulips.

TulipFest-BEN-138One of my circular fisheye shots from the Tulip Fest.

This coming week, we’re in Orlando for another Photoshop World Conference and Expo! More to come…

New Mexico Update

by | May 21, 2012

Travels

After spending an excellent week in Page, Arizona, it was time to head east into New Mexico. We made travel plans for the next few months and the next stop on our map put us in Albuquerque. (See map below) We spent two days getting there, staying a night in Gallup on the way.

Here’s our [tentative] travel plans for the next month or so.

While in Albuquerque, we’ve been spending a lot of time working and a bit of exploring.We also got to meet up with my friend Charlie Mosher, who owns Graphic Authority, a leading provider of Photoshop templates and design resources. I would see Charlie at my seminars all the time, as he’d be manning a trade show booth, but it was nice to go out to dinner and spend some one on one time catching up.

Shooting the Ring of Fire

When we rolled in to Albuquerque, we knew that the solar eclipse was approaching, but we DIDN’T know that we’d be positioned perfectly to see it. Literally, we could see a perfect eclipse right from where the bus was parked. There was a whole crowd hanging out with lawn chairs, cameras and even telescopes. I took a stab at shooting it as well. You need an extremely dark filter for your camera in order to capture it. To view it with your eyes, you need to be wearing a pair of solar glasses. Considering this is one of those things that only happens a couple times a lifetime, and the chances of it happening where you can actually see it are slim, we were extremely excited and blown away by it.

Here I am shooting the eclipse. You can see the really dark filter on my lens.

My image of the eclipse.

Mastering Curves now available on Kelby Training

I also wanted to announce that my online training title, Mastering Curves, is now available on Kelby Training. I believe that Curves is the single most powerful adjustment in all of Photoshop, yet it can be intimidating if you don’t understand it. In this title, I cover Curves in a series of easy-to-understand videos.You can check it out HERE. The two-DVD set, which includes all the same videos, is also available for purchase HERE.

A screenshot of my Mastering Curves title on Kelby Training.