A little pre-show goofiness. Here I am with my studio audience, about to kick off my Color & Tone class.
Hi everyone! I hope everyone had a good a week, and for all the moms out there, that you had a great Mothers Day! For me, it was another week and another city. This past month has just been crazy travel-wise. We’ve hit all four corners of the country and the middle as well! This week, it was Seattle, as I was presenting my Photoshop Mastery: Color & Tone class at creativeLIVE. This was a two-day course that is part of a larger series designed to make you efficient in Photoshop. The first part of this series, which I presented last month, is called Photoshop Fundamentals, and is designed to give anyone a solid foundation with the program. This week’s Color & Tone class, covers just that: How to enhance, and even fix, the color and tonality of your images. If you missed the live broadcast and would still like to see it, you can purchase it HERE. When you buy the class, you also get the training materials, including my practice images and the handbook that goes with the course.
If you’re not familiar with creativeLIVE, here’s how they work. They broadcast all kind of classes live, every day, and while you watch them live, they’re free. If you decide that the class really resonates with you, you can purchase it to watch any time, and you will also receive the bonus material that comes with the class. I’ll be returning to creativeLIVE next month to present the next part of this series, Photoshop Mastery: Retouching & Collages. Click here for more info or to register for the free broadcast.
As always, my time at creativeLIVE was excellent. They’re such a fun gang to work with, and Karen and I really enjoy being there. We also really lucked out with the weather in Seattle while we were there. It was in the 70s and 80s, and the sun was out! For some of you, this might not seem like a big deal, but if you’re used to rainy Seattle, it’s huge!
Karen and I on the creativeLIVE set
After wrapping things up at creativeLIVE, I flew back to the bus in Eugene, Oregon. It had been nearly a month since I’d last been “home.” Since my vintage bus is also being restored near Eugene, I was able to collaborate a bit with the shop that is working on creating the interior of that bus that we will eventually call home. Unfortunately, I must have caught the bug that seems to be going around, so the last part of my week was shot. I feel tons better now, which is good, because tomorrow, I need to fly to Columbus, Ohio to present my Kelby Training seminar, Photoshop Artistry. If you live near Columbus, I hope to see you there!
And last, but not least: This week, the schedule for this year’s California Photo Festival was posted! The California Photo Festival is five days of digital photography immersion. Intensive workshops, seminars, lectures, shooting, parties, and more with over 15 industry leading photographers and digital industry gurus designed to boost your creativity, spark your passion, and take your photography, art, or business to the next level. This year, it’s Oct. 7-11 in San Luis Obispo, CA. Learn more about the festival and schedule 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…
A little pre-show goofiness. Here I am with my studio audience, about to kick off my Color & Tone class.
Karen and I on the creativeLIVE set
