Monday, March 17, 2014

Photography Club…

Gethsemane Lutheran Church in Hopkins sponsored a small group ministry initiative this winter that included a photography club. Dave Johnson and I volunteered to lead the group that met for six weeks in January and February. The group decided to concentrate on learning how to use our digital cameras and editing software in the time we had together. We spent a lot of time discussing camera settings and shooting techniques as well as talking about different approaches to “enhancing” images using Photoshop.

In the example below we took one of Earl Rodine’s very nice photographs of the Sydney Australia harbor and played around with crop ratios and image enhancements. The screen shot below shows the original image with the “Golden Ratio” crop tool selected. This is an image that I think benefits from this sort of crop. The ferry boat in the foreground makes a nice focal point and the opera house ends up on the strong diagonal across the image.

Golden Ratio Crop

Digging a bunch of details out of the sky and water using the NIK Software plugin for Photoshop Elements 12 produced the nice image at the bottom. It is fun to see folks become aware of all the artistic possibilities available using Photoshop. I Hopefully Dave and I inspired a few others to dive in a little deeper!

Golden Mean