This Tuesday night, August 26 we will have a program dedicated to portraiture and the use of light meters.  The program will be presented by our own Gerard Vacca.  This will be the first of a two part program geared toward portraiture and environmental portraits, in preparation for our November assignment, Environmental Portrait.  Gerard will present a lecture on portraiture and then a hands-on segment with incident light meters.

If you have a light meter and have wanted to know more about using it, this is the time to bring it.  Also bring your cameras, so you can see the difference between a hand held meter and your camera meter readings.

I will post more news about the second part of this program as we get closer to that date in September.  Don't forget we are meeting at The Arts Alliance Center at Clear Lake.

We look forward to seeing you on Tuesday at 7:00pm.

Doug Haass

BAPC VP and Program Chair

 
BAPC member Cindi Barker has a Gold-winning image from December featured in the July 31^st, 2008 Photoshop Workbench episode entitled Creative Edges and Textures Without Using a Mask.  Way to go, Cindi!  

Scott Bourne at This Week in Photography has posted an article titled "Resolution Solution" which aims to clear up the confusion between PPI, DPI, and LPI.  He takes the simplistic approach of recommending that people memorize when to use each term.  Although this doesn't explain the fundamental differences between the units of measure so one will understand why we use a particular unit with a particular device, it will at least help people use the correct unit for the device they're talking about and may help eliminate confusion when reading or listening to someone else speak on the subject.

Bay Area Photo Club member Barry Armer has had two photos accepted in Houston Center for Photography's 26^th Anniversary Juried Membership Exhibition.  This exhibition runs August 8^th through September 7^th, 2008 at HCP.  

This achievement is particularly noteworthy considering that of the 215 photographers from around the world who submitted, only 30 were accepted and only seven are from the Houston area.  Barry writes, "The two photos I had accepted were from my trip to the Gonzales County Jail Museum last December.  I submitted one of the shots ("Hang Tight") on BAPC Honors Night and received a Gold award for it in the Window Light assignment.  The other is called "Last Thing He Saw?" and is a shot from under the gallows featuring a window to the outside.  Both of the shots are included on my Pbase website at http://www.pbase.com/blarmer/county_jail if anyone is interested." 

 The juror for this exhibition was Alison Nordström, Curator of Photographs at George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, New York.

Congratulations, Barry!

Adobe promoted Lightroom 2.0 out of beta today.  According to Webmonkey, the new Lightroom will do a lot of the manipulations photographers commonly perform on images, saving the time-consuming trip to Photoshop and perhaps even reducing the need to own Photoshop.

We have postponed this tutorial until next year.

Have you been having a problem getting that photo to look the way you visualize it?  Are you having a problem with your editing software and don't understand how to make it do what you want?  Are you using Adobe Photoshop CS2 or CS3, or maybe Photoshop Elements?

We all have those problems.  It takes time to develop experience in these programs where you feel comfortable with them.  On Tuesday, August 5, 2008 we will try to help you with those problems.

We will set up the projector and have 2 or 3 laptops hooked up for show and tell.  We will have Photoshop CS2 and CS3 for sure.  We will try to get Photoshop Elements on one computer also.  We need you to provide the photos.  Bring as many as you like but we would like to help as many people as possible. If there are more than enough to get through the night we may stop each person at two.  We will get through as many of them as we can in the allotted time.

If you have been working on a photo or two and just can't seem to get it lined out, bring it in.  We will perform a general workflow on it and see where that gets us.  If there are specific questions about a technique, we will try to answer your question that night onscreen.  If we cannot get you an answer that night we will make a log of questions and present the answers at another meeting.

We are not experts, but we will do our best to help with the knowledge we do have of the different versions listed above.  Anyone who has skilled knowledge of these programs, and has the time, should come out that night to help.

Please bring your photos on CD, DVD or USB key.  We would prefer it be in .psd format if you have already been working on it.  This will allow us to see the different layers and adjustments you tried to make while processing the photos.  Photoshop Elements also allows saving as a .psd file.

Please bring the original file also.  We will need it for the workshop.

Doug Haass
BAPC VP and Program Chair

As you can see, we have a new web site!  There are a lot of things that are not yet working.  Some that I can think of off the top of my head:

1. Photo Gallery  The gallery now works but I am still working on its appearance
2. Download repository, including newsletters  Newsletters are now online under "Downloads" "Newsletters" but not pretty.  Still working on it.
3. Web links

Please be patient.  I will get those features working as soon as possible.  For those of you who had user accounts on the old web site, I've migrated your account over to this new site.  I have no way of reading your password so I have to trust that the new site software knows how to use the same authentication mechanism to log you in.  If you have trouble logging in, please let me know.

It would be immensely helpful if you would visit the "My account" link on the left and update your profile.  After some reasonable period, I plan to clean up the user accounts (in other words, delete the ones I can't identify).

We will be discussing ICC profiles and photo papers at Tutorial Night this Tuesday, July 1.

I will be presenting the topic to the club. Anyone interested in ICC profiles is welcome, not just members, visitors too!

I have sample papers from several manufacturers that I have printed on so you can see how paper choice affects your photo. I have Moab, Legion, Ilford, Epson and a few other brands you can pick up off the shelf at your local store. I will tell you where you can find some of the higher end papers without going to the Internet.