Thank You For Another Great Year!

It’s the end of another great year, and I would like to thank all my Blog followers and clients for keeping up with all the postings. I would like to especially thank all the Facebook Blog Network followers for making The Digital Imaging Tune-Up Clinic Blog the #1 highest following for the subjects of Digital Photography, Photoshop, and Digital Imaging. Another big thank you goes out to all of you who have taken the time to write to me about my recent webinars with onOne Software, and my new on-line training with Kelby Media. The onOne webinars are archived on their website, so you can now view them at any time at www.ononesoftware.com/university. It means a lot to me that you took the time to give me your feedback and send me your sample images to view so I can make improvements in the future presentations. The feedback has been great and I am looking forward to more webinars and on-line training programs in 2011.

It’s been a busy year with settling into the new studio facilities in Atlanta. It’s been slow and steady progress, but the new studio is finally done with all of the additional electrical work and our new kitchen finished. My studio partner Steve Dinberg and I are looking forward to lots of new assignments and we are ready for action. While Helene and I have been taking a holiday break in our home in Santa Barbara escaping the cold weather, I have been giving my Website a big update adding dozens of new images to each section as well as my new architecture section I mentioned in my last Blog post. If you haven’t visited it in a while, please check it out when you have a moment at www.DiVitalePhotography.com. Your feedback is always welcome and appreciated.

With lots of ongoing programs and webinars on the upcoming 2011 schedule, Helene and I are also working on creating some new hands-on workshops in our Atlanta studio for small groups of attendees to help streamline their creative photography techniques and speed up their digital imaging workflow. We cover everything from setting up a practical color managed working environment, to portrait and still life lighting techniques and all the Photoshop your brain can absorb. We have had some great feedback on our in-house studio workshops in the past, and we are so looking forward in sharing with other photographers in the coming year. If you are at all interested in getting on a direct mailing list when we finalize our dates, please e-mail me at jim@divitalephotography.com or Helene and heleneglassman@me.com and we will contact you directly. We will post the dates as soon as we get them worked out. Have a safe and Happy New Year!.... Jim and Helene

Marietta - The Gem City Of Georgia

For the last 3 years I have been working on a book project of photographing the historic homes of Marietta Georgia. The book written by author Doug Frey, edited by Grace Barr, and designed by art director Michael Leidel is now ready to go to press. This 400+ page coffee table book showcases homes that date as far back as the civil war. It was both a real honor and challenge to take on this ongoing project. Most of the photography had to be done on weekends to accommodate all of us as well as the homeowners. The major challenge from the photographic point of view was to get in and out of theses homes fast without disturbing the homeowners as much as possible. This basically meant that I could not just show up with a truckload of lighting equipment and spend the day photographing each room. Instead I needed to be in and out in 60 to 90 minutes and cover several different scenes for each home with out any elaborate extra lighting. The answer… Merge to HDR and use the available window light to capture the natural look of each home. What I learned along the way was very valuable for any architecture projects I may get to photograph in the future. The only extra lighting I used was a singe ProFoto 600WS battery strobe used as bounced fill light to help reduce the extreme contrast between the windows and room interior. I have more detailed information on the lighting challenges in an upcoming article I have written for Photoshop User Magazine that will be available very soon. I have added a new portfolio section to my web site that showcases many of the images from the book that can be viewed at www.DiVitalePhotography.com in the Architecture Portfolio section. Since this is my first attempt at this area of photography, I found that it was an incredible learning experience along the way. The images are all shot on the Canon 1Ds Mark III camera and an assortment of different Canon lenses. Using the new 17mm and 24mm tilt-shift Canon lenses was a real advantage on the images in getting the proper perspective in the camera from the start. I would love to here some feedback on the new images if you have a moment to check it out. Have a safe and Happy Holidays.

Digital Painting In Photoshop CS5

This fall, I have been teaching an advanced Photoshop Class at the Art Institute of Atlanta as a guest instructor along with my wife Helene Glassman, www.imagerybyhelene.com and photographer Keith Roland, www.krdigitalphotography.com. It has been a long time since I gave up my photography instructor position there in the eighties for doing programs at conferences and schools around the country. The students in this class have some real talent and it has been fun for us to work with them. This week was the last session, and I decided to do the digital painting class like this weeks onOne Software webinar. www.ononesoftware.com/webinars With only a quick 30 minute demo on the painting technique, the class produced dozens of cool painting for their final assignment. I would like to share some of them with you so you can see how cool this can be in taking existing images to the next level in creativity. For more information on this technique, you can visit the archived webinar that will be posted soon on the onOne Software webinar site, and you can also download the tutorial PDF at http://www.divitalephotography.com/digital_painting.zip

Creative Edge In Photoshop & OnOne Plug-ins Webinar

This Thursday at 2:pm EST (11:am PST) I will be doing another webinar hosted by OnOne Software. It is free to register for and I would like to invite you to attend. I will be demonstrating my techniques for creating fine art digital paintings from photographic files using Adobe PhotoshopCS5 and OnOne Software's PhotoTools and PhotoFrame. Hope you can tune in. You can register at: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/442088384

Digital Imaging Institute Yosemite Workshop

Last weekend ended our first three day Yosemite Imaging in Ophthalmology Workshop. With expert speakers in both digital imaging and ophthalmology, attendees had a great time both learning in class and going out on morning and afternoon shoots in the incredible Yosemite National park. Organized by DII president Mark Maio, this workshop was an experience for both speakers and attendees alike. This was my first trip to the park and I was just blown away with the landscape there... We had a nice reception at the Ansel Adams Gallery getting to view many of his different masterpieces. This was just the first in what we hope will be many workshops in different specialties within science and medicine that we will be putting on through the DII. A special treat for the group were programs with Capture Integration http://www.captureintegration.com and the quarter of a million dollars worth of high-end digital cameras they brought for everyone to try out. Helene did portraits of all the attendees so everyone could go home with a great headshot to be used in their future business needs. For more info on our association and to see our digital magazine, visit the website at http://www.digitalimaginginstitute.com.

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Photography In Paradise

Want to mix having a great vacation while attending a photography conference? One that you might consider planning ahead for is The Maui Photo Festival. http://www.mauiphotofestival.com Helene and I had a great time there this year and are looking forward to teaching at the next one on August 25th-28th 2011. There are lots of opportunities to go and learn photography these days, so the big question now is which ones to attend. You obviously can’t see them all, so you have to be a little picky. One thing I get to do a lot more than most photographers is attend photography conferences. Working as an instructor for NAPP, PPA, Canon, and Adobe, I am very fortunate that I get to work at most of the major digital imaging shows. You start to kind of rate them on speaker knowledge and how efficiently they are run. They all start to have their good points about them and there won’t ever be the perfect conference, but this gathering in Maui is a pretty good environment to learn in. Held at the Hyatt in Kaanapali, Maui, you might as well take a trip to paradise if you got to learn photography. Great speakers and a relaxed atmosphere lead to learning at a very high level. I am amazed every time I get to go there at how much imagery there is to take in. I just wanted to share a few more images from my last experience there. Look forward to seeing you there next year… Aloha

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