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This issue features 14 Tips For Low Light & Night Photography.
Plus it’s packed with inspiration from my Exhibit / Open Studio / New Work 2015.
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OPTIC 2015 featured dynamic presentations by the world’s top outdoor photographers and gear from the premier manufacturers over three days in New York City brought to you by B&H and Lindblad Expeditions.
Couldn’t attend in person or want to review at your own pace? Now you can view all the presentations of your favorite speakers from the conference.
I presented tips and strategies For Mastering Color In Photoshop. Watch it and you’ll get a taste for the artistic perspective and advanced color adjustment strategies I offer in my digital photography and digital printing workshops. You’ll see in new ways.
View Mastering Color In Photoshop here.
Enjoy this collection of quotes on Focus.
“If you chase two rabbits, both will escape” — Anonymous
“That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” – Steve Jobs
“Focusing is about saying No.” ― Steve Jobs
“My success, part of it certainly, is that I have focused in on a few things.” — Bill Gates
“Most of what we say and do is not essential. If you can eliminate it, you’ll have more time, and more tranquillity. Ask yourself at every moment, ‘Is this necessary?’” — Marcus Aurelius
“A person who is gifted sees the essential point and leaves the rest as surplus.” – Thomas Carlyle
“If you don’t pay appropriate attention to what has your attention, it will take more of your attention than it deserves.” – David Allen
“One way to boost our will power and focus is to manage our distractions instead of letting them manage us.” – Daniel Goleman
“Avoid fragmentation: Find your focus and seek simplicity. Purposeful living calls for elegant efficiency and economy of effort—expending the minimum time and energy necessary to achieve desired goals.” – Dan Millman
“Do whatever you do intensely.” — Robert Henri
“To create something exceptional, your mindset must be relentlessly focused on the smallest detail.” — Giorgio Armani
“If you just focus on the smallest details, you never get the big picture right.” – Leroy Hood
“When you are completely caught up in something, you become oblivious to things around you, or to the passage of time. It is this absorption in what you are doing that frees your unconscious and releases your creative imagination.” – Rollo May
“For a person to become deeply involved in any activity it is essential that he knows precisely what tasks he must accomplish, moment by moment.” — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
“The more a person feels skilled, the more her moods will improve; while the more challenges that are present, the more her attention will become focused and concentrated.” — Mihaly Csikszentmihaly
“Life is a train of moods like a string of beads; and as we pass through them they prove to be many colored lenses, which paint the world their own hue, and each shows us only what lies in its own focus.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.” – Mark Twain
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Read Quotes By Photographer George Tice here.
“Photography teaches us to see, and we can see whatever we wish. When I take a photograph, I make a wish. I was always looking for beauty.” – George Tice
“I try to take my interests and make them my work.” – George Tice
“As I progressed further with my project, it became obvious that it was really unimportant where I chose to photograph. The particular place simply provided an excuse to produce work… you can only see what you are ready to see – what mirrors your mind at that particular time.” – George Tice
“It’s never as good the second time. Things don’t get better. You can’t always go back, a lot of it has been erased. The photograph is a record of it having existed.” – George Tice
“It takes the passage of time before an image of a commonplace subject can be assessed. The great difficulty of what I attempt is seeing beyond the moment; the everydayness of life gets in the way of the eternal.” – George Tice
“The thing itself photographed becomes less interesting when you go back to it years later but I think the photograph becomes more important later when the reality has passed.” – George Tice
“My taking pictures means I’m taking a series of pictures which become an essay and then get extended into a book. That’s what’s exciting, to take an idea and work it through to completion.” – George Tice
“I don’t speak emotionally about my pictures. That’s for other people to do. I will say that I love my photographs. That’s what keeps me going.” – George Tice
Wouldn’t it be great if you could selectively adjust colors based on how saturated they are in Photoshop? You can! How? With a free plug-in Adobe provides called Multiplugin; it hasn’t been updated since Photoshop CS5, but it still works with current versions.
Why Would You Want To Do This?
Do you have images where semi-neutrals aren’t saturated enough, but you don’t want other colors to get too saturated? Select the less saturated colors before adjusting them. Do you have images where you’d like to reduce the saturation of very saturated colors without affecting other levels of saturation? Select the more saturated colors before adjusting them. You even can select colors with medium saturation, separating them from both the high and low range of saturation. Using this technique, you can produce subtle color effects that aren’t possible with any other method.
Saturation masks aren’t for saturation adjustments only. This simple selection/mask can be used with any color adjustment tool in Photoshop, greatly expanding your ability to adjust color. Imagine adjusting the lightness and/or hue of high, medium or low ranges of saturation independently of one another.
Read more here.
Download Adobe’s free Multiplugin here. Mac or PC.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.
Master photographer Richard Misrach discusses his photography.
Read quotes by Richard Misrach.
View 12 Great Photographs By Richard Misrach.
View more in The Essential Collection Of Videos On Photographers.
Enjoy this collection of photographs by master photographer Richard Misrach.
Read quotes by Richard Misrach.
Read my conversation with Richard Misrach.
View more in 12 Great Photographs Collections here.
Enjoy this collection of quotes by master photographer Richard Misrach.
“I’ve come to believe that beauty can be a very powerful conveyor of difficult ideas. It engages people when they might otherwise look away.” – Richard Misrach
“It’s hard for art to really solve problems but I’ve come to believe that art is an important way of communicating, not only with current generations, but future generations.” – Richard Misrach
“To me, the work I do is a means of interpreting unsettling truths, of bearing witness, and of sounding an alarm. The beauty of formal representation both carries an affirmation of life and subversively brings us face to face with news from our besieged world.” – Richard Misrach
“I’m not interested in victim photography. Photographing people suffering and putting it on a museum wall is too weird.” – Richard Misrach
“The very act of representation has been so thoroughly challenged in recent years by postmodern theories that it is impossible not to see the flaws everywhere, in any practice of photography. Traditional genres in particular—journalism, documentary studies, and fine-art photography—have become shells, or forms emptied of meaning.” – Richard Misrach
“In spite of recent trends towards fabricating photographic narratives, I find, more than ever, traditional photographic capture, the ‘discovery’ of found narratives, deeply compelling.” – Richard Misrach
“The desert … may serve better as the backdrop for the problematic relationship between man and the environment. The human struggle, the successes … both noble and foolish, are readily apparent in the desert. Symbols and relationships seem to arise that stand for the human condition itself.” – Richard Misrach
“People have responded to the pictures I make as mystical things, and they somehow carry the illusion further thinking that the place is this mystical, magical place. The desert is also a very barren place, a very lonely place, a very boring, uneventful place.” – Richard Misrach
“The one thing that seems to be consistent through all my work that I like, and I experimented a lot, is the viewer is allowed to meditate on something that normally we don’t stop and stare at, whether it’s people or a cactus.” – Richard Misrach
“One of the things that was really influential early on was Ezra Pound’s Cantos, one poem he worked on for 50 years. It’s epic. I had a great deal of difficulty understanding it. One of the problems was you’d be reading along in English and he would move to a Chinese ideogram or French–he actually used seven different languages in a given poem. And for somebody who’s not fluent in different languages it has the impact of rupturing your way of understanding something. It was very purposeful on his part to put these obstacles of language in there so that you become conscious of the whole system. You don’t get a neat narrative or a neat poem. Once you run into these obstacles of language you have to stop and think about other things. So, for me, in putting The Playboys or The Paintings or these language things in with these more conventional landscapes they inform each other. It does scatter, it does rupture, the way cubist paintings would. Each gives you a different way to approach something and sheds light on everything else.” – Richard Misrach
“Our experience with knowledge, the way we know things, is not that neat. It doesn’t fit into a grand narrative, the way we’ve been taught to read.” – Richard Misrach
“I am not unaware that I have the mindset, as contradictory as it may sound, to discover in the world what I am in fact looking for. Perhaps the best pictures are a seamless hybrid of discovery and construction.” – Richard Misrach
“Whatever else a photograph may be about, it is always about time.” – Richard Misrach
“I think this is the most exciting time in the history of photography. Technology is expanding what photographers can do, like the microscope and the telescope expanded what scientists could do.” – Richard Misrach
Read my conversation with Richard Misrach.
Enjoy this collection of quotes on communication.
“Art is communication.” ― Madeleine L’Engle
“Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.” – Anne Morrow Lindbergh
“The first ingredient in conversation is truth: the next good sense; the third, good humor; and the fourth wit.” – Sir William Temple
“Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing.” – Rollo May
“The way we communicate with others and with ourselves ultimately determines the quality of our lives” – Anthony Robbins
“To effectively communicate, we must realize that we are all different in the way we perceive the world and use this understanding as a guide to our communication with others.” – Tony Robbins
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