Photo.net Newsletter: June 8, 2010

Hi %%First Name%%,

Planning an underwater vacation soon? Brushing up on your scuba diving skills? The thought of being so many meters underwater not close to any land is daunting for me (Hannah). I’m sure being in tropical water seeing coral and vibrant aquatic life would be exhilarating, not sure if it could offset my fears though. I’d probably avoid the Gulf of Mexico as well. What gear would an advanced photographer bring on an underwater vacation if they wanted to get started with UW photography? Post your list here.

This month’s newsletter features a few different articles to choose from. Or heck, why not read them all? Awhile back, the community interviewed Jeff Ascough, UK wedding photographer. The questions and responses have now been editing into article form to best learn from one of the top 10 wedding photographers in the world. Harold Davis presents the wonderful world of compositing, and Patrick Lavoie shares tips on Advanced Skin Retouching. Also included in the editorial section is a new Gizmos and Gadgets review and a Canon lens review.

Don’t miss the deals and discounts from Adorama (scroll down), and share your thoughts about editorial, community, photography, and anything in between on the Photo.net Blog, Facebook Page, and Twitter Feed.

As always, if you have any questions or suggestions, please send them to us directly at contact@photo.net. Enjoy the newsletter!

Sincerely,

Hannah Thiem, Managing Editor, and Josh Root, Chief Admin, Director of Community, Mop & Bucket Man

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Editorial Highlights

We already featured a bunch of articles in the earlier newsletter this month. Mid-month, the focus is on gear: software and hardware reviews.

Intro to Advanced Skin Retouching

Want to learn portrait editing tips from a professional retoucher? Patrick Lavoie, based in Montreal, works with top professional photographers as a retoucher. He has honed his skills to compete with some of the best. In this first article on skin retouching, Patrick shares tips on what skin retouching should look like and how to achieve that.

Read the Intro to Advanced Skin Retouching.

Advanced Photoshop Tutorial: Intro to Compositing

Compositing, or photo compositing, is the technique—art and craft—of combining images to create a new image. The newly created image often presents its own version of reality. Compositing comes into its own as a fine art technique, where concerns are conceptual, aesthetic and visual rather than related to factual concerns, ethics and marketing. In this latest advanced Photoshop tutorial, Harold Davis concentrates on compositing to create art images—in any case the techniques are essentially the same no matter what the intended usage.

Disclaimer: this article contains a partially nude art image. Those at work or who find nude images distasteful may wish to skip reading this piece.

Read Intro to Compositing.

Wedding Photography Insight with Jeff Ascough

A number of months ago, Maryball, wedding forum moderator, ran another interview with Jeff Ascough, a top UK wedding photographer, in the wedding photography forum. Jeff shares insight on his photography techniques and image editing. He’s a master at available light photography.

”If I look at the development of my own style, I’ve always been interested in light, geometry, and rhythm when it comes to photographs, rather than the content. I guess I am firmly in the Cartier-Bresson camp here, whereby the construction of the image is as important as the content.”

Read Wedding Photography Insight with Jeff Ascough.

Canon EF-S 15-85/3.5-5.6IS USM Review

The Canon EF-S 15-85/3.5-5.6 IS USM was introduced in 2009 as a replacement for the Canon EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM. In addition to the extra 2mm of focal length on the wide angle end of the range the lens was optically redesigned, adding 2 more aspheric elements and one UD element. This results in increased performance—though unfortunately also in increased cost.

Read the full review of the Canon EF-S 15-85/3.5-5.6IS USM Review.

Gizmos & Gadgets: Gorillapod Focus

As with any tripod, you need to look at what the device can do for you and ask yourself how you could achieve that result for less money. With the Joby Gorillapod Focus, there aren’t really many other options. Yes there are other small tripods that use wrap-around legs or even Velcro straps to mount onto whatever is handy. But none of them work for anything larger than a point and shoot camera. If you want that ability for a larger camera, there is really only one choice out there and that is the Focus. Overall, if you have a use for its abilities, having a Gorillapod Focus in your bag would not be a bad choice for any photographer.

Josh writes a short and sweet Gizmos & Gadgets review of the Joby Gorillapod Focus.

Gifts for Dad: 2010 Gift Guide

Father’s Day is the only occasion left for which you might need to consult the 2010 Photo.net Moms, Dads and Grads Gift Guide. In the guide, you can read recommendations for the best selection of tried and true photography gear—organized by price point. You can choose to look at recommendations only in your price bracket. A lot of the choices in the “Under $100” category look very useful.

Read the Photo.net Moms, Dads & Grads Gift Guide.

Winners of the MacGroup Sweepstakes on Photo.net

Congrats to the winners who were selected in the MacGroup Sweepstakes on Photo.net!

• Don Cann
• Marina Diaz
• Munawar Hafiz
• Jen Kanaba
• Joel Magnusson
• Tony Nievera
• Zuri Sabir
• John Tkacs
• Riselle Bonner
• Claude Levet
• Shanda Washington

Photo.net Community Updates

Just a couple reminders of existing features:

Don’t forget to tag your gallery images!

This is just a reminder to everyone that they should be sure to tag their photo.net gallery images. The tag search system is getting TEN TIMES the traffic of the image caption search system. What does this mean to you? It means that you’ve got a better chance of getting your images seen if you have them tagged correctly.

Get to it!

Image tagging tutorial

Please post in the Photo.net site Help forum if you have any tagging questions:

http://photo.net/site-help-forum/

New Forum: Member’s Photo News

To address the need for the Photo.net community to be able to announce photo-related news or updates (professional or otherwise), I have created a new forum called Member’s Photo News. This is a forum for Photo.net members to announce gallery shows, publications, new websites, and so on. This forum is somewhat heavily moderated to prevent abuse. It exists to help our established members get a little attention for themselves. It does not exist as a place for industry press releases, SEO boost efforts, “for sale” ads, or anything of that sort.

PLEASE read the forum guidelines. If you do not understand or have questions, please ask in the Photo.net Site Help forum.

Click here to go to the new Member’s Photo News forum.

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Community News

YOU can support Photo.net!

Server space, programmer time, hours and hours of customer service all cost money. Photo.net is a business and we have to keep our head above water. How can you contribute to make sure that Photo.net keeps growing and improving? Here are four easy ways.

How to help support Photo.net

Top 10 Deals and Discounts from Adorama this Week

Note: these specials have a limited availability and tend to fly off the shelf quickly.

1. SanDisk 4 GB Extreme III Compact Flash Memory Card
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3. Adorama Fluorescent Lighting Outfit, with stand, Reflector, bulbs,and umbrella
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4. Nik Software Complete Collection with Dfine 2.0, Viveza, Color Efex Pro 3.0, Silver Efex Pro & Sharpener Pro 3.0 Plug-in Softwares
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5. Flashpoint VL-48, 48-LED Macro Ring Light with Adapter for 49mm-62mm Diameter Lenses
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6. Polaroid PoGo Instant Mobile Printer, prints 2×3in prints from cameras and phones
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7. Photoflex LiteDome XS Kit
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8. All Profoto Acute Value Kits
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9. Adobe Photoshop CS5 Kit with Adobe Lightroom 2
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10. Dymo LabelWriter 450 Turbo
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Find great deals on thousands of other products at the Photo.net Adorama Store.

What’s Happening In Our Forums

• Casual Photo Conversations (26 Responses) May is National Photography Month here in the USA, anyone doing anything special?

Last month’s community question: May is National Photography Month here in the USA, anyone doing anything special?

Gordon Bowbrick: Spent the first week of May diving the Caribbean while trying to fine tune the results with my new strobe set up. Returned home for two days before going out on a shoot taking promo stills with a documentary crew doing a doc on 2012. Some of that was in Kansas in the bottom of a missile silo, had to be lowered to the bottom by a crane and some shooting in Colorado up at the tree line in a fall out shelter. Now that I am home I will be heading back out to Tobermory to do some shooting for myself of the local orchids and other early season wildflowers..

Thomas Sullivan: went to the NY Photo Festival in DUMBO, Brooklyn, NYC.

Rick Maschek: I just learned how to capture an image off digital video. This is of our MiniSShot flight, part of the Sugar Shot to Space project. For some things video is the way to go for what I like to refer to as a continuous stream of pictures. For example, we had an anomaly at 11,000 feet with the MiniSShot. Going over the video frame by frame we were able to extract information to compare with on board computer data. Would I have preferred the far superior resolution of a photograph? Absolutely and that is what we do for most of our work. It might be worth noting that for all the cameras clicking, this video image is the best picture we have of the liftoff.

Mike Dixon: Finished up a third shoot on Thursday for a local magazine article and cover. Also shot a band for the same magazine. Shot a few concerts/events, and another is coming up tonight. Got another upcoming shoot for a different band’s new CD. That’s in addition to shooting just for fun on the weekends. It’s been a very photographic month.

What’s happening in some of the other forums?

• Minox (18 Responses) New Minox DSC Silver 5.1 MP 0,5m focus
• No Words (35 Responses) Natural Bright ColorsAlso view as a Cooliris Wall.
• Sony/Minolta SLR System (102 Responses) Opinions about the new Sony NEX 5 - excited?
• Leica and Rangefinders (32 Responses) June: Leica / RF Film Month (Join Me?)

Go To Photo.net Forums. »

Editors’ Picks

And this month’s editors’ picks is… Flower Photography.

Samples:

Also, take a look at what the Editors found visually interesting in the previous months—perhaps one of your images has been selected…

Also, take a look at some of the most popular Editors’ Picks from previous months:

• Beautiful Brides Photography
• Fashion Photography
• Creative Light Photography

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