Photography Lessons

Nikon D300s DSLR Photography Lesson St. Petersburg Florida with Ron

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Ron with his Nikon D300s & Nikkor 28-300mm VR lens under a banyan tree in downtown St. PetersburgOn the first somewhat chilly morning of the year I met new DSLR Photography Lesson student Ron at my usual spot in downtown St. Petersburg.  Ron has two Nikons, the D300s and the D90, as well as a bag full of all Nikkor lenses (what Nikon brands its lenses).  He shot with film cameras before and knew what photography terms like aperture, ISO, bracketing, etc meant, so in our lesson I showed him how to apply and use them in the DSLR world.

Ron had been shooting in aperture priority mode which is fine.  However, he never changed his aperture so I can only guess all his shots were at the largest aperture for whichever lens he was using at the time.  I started the lesson with giving him an in-depth tour of the menus and buttons on his D300s since I am extremely familiar with it from shooting with a D300 for years.  

Throughout the lesson I got to learn about what an interesting life Ron has lived.  He currently runs a super successful home pet sitting & walking business that he said has him (and his wife) working every day of the week!  If you need a pet sitter contact me and I will pass your info on to Ron.

We concluded the lesson with a photo critique of all the dog photos Ron takes of his pet sitting clients as well as his other photography interests.  I was impressed with his mural and graffiti photo collection focusing on the central St. Petersburg area.  I look forwad to seeing Ron again soon for our next lesson.  

Dali Museum DSLR Photography Lesson with Pam & her Canon 60D

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Pam with her Canon 60D at the New Dali Museum during our 8th & final DSLR Photography LessonIn the two full years I have been teaching 1-on-1 private DSLR Photography Lessons here in the St. Petersburg area, Pam is now my most tenured student as last evening she took her eighth total lesson.  We went to my new favorite location for having a lesson, the new Salvador Dali Museum at the southern edge of the downtown St. Petersburg waterfront.  The museum offers the opportunity for architecture, macro and portrait photography, as well as night time tripod shots.  

Over the course of our 16 hours of photography lesson time together Pam has learned well how to shoot in manual mode and to take control over exposure to produce a shot as she wants be it in daylight, twilight or full on night.  This is the most important skill one needs to be able to continually improve as a photographer, and to be able to start to teach oneself how to shoot better.  Therefore, I am confident Pam will be able to from this point on improve her skills on her own each time she goes out shooting.  

Thanks Pam and I look forward to seeing your work in the future!

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    Layer Mask Photoshop CS5 Digital Photo Editing Lesson with Ed

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    Using a layer mask in Photoshop CS5 to change the background of a portrait - book your lesson today to learn tomorrow!

    I met Ed from Jacksonville again this morning for our second of two Photoshop CS5 centered DSLR Photography Lessons.  After giving him a crash course on the basics of using many common Photoshop tools yesterday, today we focused mainly on one thing:  layer masks.  As seen in the image above, if you take a texture, drop it onto a portrait, create a layer mask, then "brush back in" the portrait, you have a very quick and easy way of completely changing the background of a photograph.  You could also keep some of the texture visible over the portrait subject as well to create a different look to the entire frame. 

    This layer mask technique is also very useful for fixing clouds in HDR images, which often turn out too dark.  Using one of my own HDR shots as an example, I showed Ed how you can get the benefit of an HDR image without the drawback (dark clouds) by taking a single frame of the bracketed shots that has very white clouds and using it as a layer mask to blend into the HDR image.  I will be posting this tutorial using the HDR example later this week.

    The four hours (total) I spent showing Ed what I know about Photoshop went by very fast.  We easily could have filled another four.  He took detailed notes so I am confident that with what he learned during our intensive lessons he will be able to apply to his own images and begin teaching himself how to use more features of Photoshop.  

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    Introduction to Photoshop CS5 Basics & Keyboard Shortcuts with Ed

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    Grand Tetons photograph by Ed, editing by Jason - the lens correction filter in Photoshop CS5 sets things straight 

    I received a phone call from Ed all the way in Jacksonville (about 3 hours away) asking about taking extended 1-on-1 Photoshop CS5 lessons.  I am not a certified Photoshop expert or anything like that so at first I wanted to make sure he was not looking to learn how to do something like someone's face and put it onto another person's body.  My Photoshop skills lie mostly in the areas that pertain to editing digital photographs, not graphic design.  After talking for a few minutes though I realized that what Ed wanted to learn I could most definitely teach.  We booked two lesson sessions, one for today and another for tomorrow.

    Ed had his own photos to use during the editing lesson and I was pleasantly surprised to see the Grand Tetons.  Florida photographers of course have no local opportunities to photographs mountains of any kind.  Ed's photographs already looked good, but there is almost always something that can be done to improve any photograph, and for sure any published or portfolio photograph by a serious hobbyist or a pro has had at least some editing done to it.  I am not afraid to say that editing is often 50% responsible for the final look of a photograph.  

    The example above did not need that 50% level of editing.  I showed Ed my workflow which starts with cropping (I cropped the photo even more here than I did during the lesson to better show the edits we made) and then removing any dust spots on the sensor that appear as dirt blemishes in the photo by using the healing brush (keyboard shortcut - j).  Then I taught how to use the quick select tool (w) to highlight only the mountains for a contrast adjustment.  Then the foreground grass and fence were selected for a color balance boost.  Lastly, we used unsharp mask to increase the overall sharpness of the image resulting in more defined blades of grass and details in the fence and mountains.  

    Tomorrow we will move on to editing portraits and using layer masks.  

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    DSLR Photography Lesson with Alok & his Canon 60D

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    Alok with his Canon 60D at the end of our DSLR Photography Lesson in downtown St. PetersburgWith the sun setting earlier and tempertures only at hot and not broil, DSLR Photography Lessons on weekday evenings are starting earlier.  I met new student Alok at 5pm in downtown St. Petersburg.  He was no longer happy with the results from his point and shoot camera so he went right from that to a Canon 60D!  My 1-on-1 private lessons are exactly designed to help someone bridge that large gap between using a camera on auto-everything to using a DSLR with auto-nothing.  Although there is a good amount to learn at first, it does not necessarily need to take a long time to go from brand new DSLR owner to skilled photographer using manual mode.  

    Case in point, Alok showed he was quick on the uptake on how to correct overexposed images by manually adjusting shutter speed and aperture.  We started out using aperture priority mode, but in the early evening light, a dark subject (a tree) and a very pale white-gray sky was too tricky for his Canon 60D's meter to expose correctly.  The sky was coming out blown out.  So by switching to manual mode and increasing the shutter speed from a glacial 1/20th of a second to 1/100th of a second, the sky was no longer blown out, though at a bit of a tradeoff in that the tree was now darker.  Still, as a photographer, I want to make that choice myself, not leave it up to the camera to decide for me.

    Alok only has one lens now for his Canon 60D, a Sigma 18-50mm f/3.5-5.6.  This lens is a good workhorse choice, but to get the kinds of photos he told me he would like, he will definitely need a longer lens around 70-200mm.  I also advised him to invest in an external flash since he will be doing so much indoor shooting.  

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    50mm DSLR Photography Lesson at a St. Petersburg Florida Marina

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    Pam showing very good portrait orientation holding technique with her Canon 60D during our 7th photography lesson!For our seventh DSLR Photography Lesson I met Pam in the usual downtown St. Petersburg spot, but thanks to her mother-in-law, who has a sailboat docked at a nearby marina, we were able to shoot from a unique spot on the southern waterfront area.  A huge thunderstorm also passed harmlessly by at the start of the lesson, leaving us free to explore new shooting locations among the long and narrow piers of the marina.  

    This was a 50mm only lesson, and Pam kept it secret from me that she upgraded her Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens for a Canon 50mm f/1.4 lens since our last 50mm only lesson!!  When a student gets new gear for me it is almost as exciting as if I got some new gear myself!  Pam wanted a 50mm lens with better build quality, which the Canon 50mm f/1.4 provides with a metal housing and an silent focusing motor.

    A unique vantage point for photographing the new Dali Museum - Pam with her Canon 60DThe marina provided unique views of both The Pier and the new Salvador Dali Museum.  The setting sun had plenty of clouds around it producing great dusk light for us to photograph both of them in.  Pam now has all the photography gear she needs to produce the shots she wants and during our thirteenth and fourteenth hours of instruction she is beginning to understand and realize the settings she needs to change in order to correct exposure mistakes, while developing her own composition style.  

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    DSLR Photography Lesson Night Tripod Instruction with Pam & her Canon 60D

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    The top of The Pier offers a great vantage point for a sunset to twilight DSLR Photography Lesson in St. PetersburgFor our sixth DSLR Photography Lesson I met Pam at the usual spot in downtown St. Petersburg, each of us with DSLR, tripod and cable release in tow for practicing twilight and night photography.  I finally was able to figure out how to unlock the focus point in her Canon 60D viewfinder without having to go inconviently into the menus to do so.  Pam said, "I just learned something new."  She then said how her mother told her that if she learns at least one new thing each lesson, then it's worth it.  I thought to myself, "hmm, $75 to learn how to move the focus point!"  Of course though we did practice and hopefully learn a lot more over the course of the 2-hour lesson.

    Being able to easily move the single focus point throughtout the frame in the viewfinder is especially useful when working with a tripod.  Once you frame the shot how you want it, the best place to set the focus may not be the dead center.  So instead of having to set the focus and recompose again, just being able to direct the focus point to the ideal location for a given shot in the viewfinder is a huge advantage.  Deep in the settings menus of her Canon 60D we found the ability to unlock the focus points.  Many other cameras have a dedicated button on the back to lock or unlock the focus point.  Check your manual if it is not intuitive for how to move your focus point with the D-pad on the back of your DSLR.  

    For once Pam and I also did not have to dodge any passing thunderstorms and The Pier was surprisingly free of people for a Thursday night.  We photographed in peace from dusk to nightfall using manual mode to get the exact exposure we wanted.  One time, to Pam's delight, several cars drove down the causeway to The Pier allowing her to get light streaks in her long exposure shot.  

    For our seventh lesson, we will return to using our 50mm f/1.8 lenses starting out in a bakery Pam has raved about.  Hopefully they will have some free samples!

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