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Change Someone’s Life Today

PLUS: Aaron covers LIGHTING DESIGN for an upcoming shoot!

Lighting, Photography, Post-Production, Pre-Production Dec 19 , Episode 199

Changing People’s Lives

This week’s contest is so perfect for the holidays. We are gathering together our best Bokeh Photos, and I will show you some great ways to apply them to your images to give them a magical feel. This time of year you will be able to find a lot of small twinkling lights, which are the best subjects for these photos. In this video we talk about some camera settings that will make your job much easier, as well as what to look for when taking these photos.

What You Will Learn

0:40 – Announcing Contest winners from last week’s BOKEH CONTEST!
2:00 – Thank you to our amazing Phamily
4:00 – Discussing Chris’ follow up, and how it changed his life.
5:40 – Announcing This Week’s Contest
7:10 – Bringing the Passion
9:00 – How we will pick our winners
10:00 – Teaching How to Create Lighting Design
11:00 – Idea for Photo Shoot
12:00 – Establishing Mood Through Lighting
13:00 – Matching Ambient and Flash Light
15:00 – How to figure out placement for KEY Light
18:00 – Using a Fill Card
19:00 – Changing things up when the shoot isn’t going right
20:00 – In depth CAMERA SETTINGS & LIGHTING SETTINGS
24:30 – Making everything simple
25:30 – Outro & making a difference in People’s lives

Last Week’s Contest Winners

Lets us know which Phlearn PRO Photoshop Tutorial you would like!

Eli- Great photo of a girl laying down with added bokeh. Amazing Tones
Oo Achew Oo- By far some of the most creative shots I have seen using bokeh. Making it into physical objects is awesome!
Lenart- Your Bokeh looks like FIRE! i don’t know how you did it, but it looks amazing!
Gixter- Bokeh and implied violence, nice!
Judy – Bonus points for making bokeh in christmas theme!

Change Someone’s Life Contest

Teaching someone how to do something can be the greatest gift you ever give someone. Most people never feel REAL time and energy devoted to them in an unselfish manner.

The contest for this week is easy and POWERFUL. Teach someone to do something. Devote yourself to make them better. If you want to teach MANY people, make a video and post it here on PHLEARN.

If you do teach someone, and cant record it, no worries! It is the act that matters, just let us know what happened, and how everyone reacted to a true gift.

How to Enter The Contest

Simply post it in a comment below. If you have a story, tell it. If you have a video, upload it to youtube or vimeo and link it below. Don’t feel like you have to teach photoshop or photography. Anything you are good at, that you can share with the world, and help us all grow.

Gear Used in This Episode

Wacom Intuos 4 Small

Adobe Photoshop CS6

15" Macbook PRO

Sony NEX 5N

Audio Technica AT2020USB Microphone

« AMAZING Portfolio Critique – Chris D

Help Design Chicago’s Best Photography Studio! »

http://www.nightmarephotography.com Michael Nightmare

Thanks Jenna
http://photography.paulliebrand.com Paul Liebrand

As a developer / web designer, I get people all the time asking me to teach them how to do web design. For those who know how to do web development / design, you know it is a lot more difficult that it might be. It requires you to learn some fundamental skills to be effective at it.

If you are not doing web development as a living and you are not really passionate about there should be no reason for you to take the time to really learn and understand it. Why am I bringing this up? As photographers, we want to have a portfolio at our disposal and an online portfolio is a perfect way to do it.

Sure, we have sites like Filckr and 500px which are all great but it is just as important to own your own destiny. I think most if not all photographers should have their own site to host their portfolio. But how do we find time to create an awesome portfolio site if we are not in the field of building websites?

If you do not already have a website, I recommend you check out a hosting company like http://www.squarespace.com. Squarespace makes it extremely easy to create a website and give it your own custom feel without having any real knowledge of web design. They make it easy to drag and drop columns to make them bigger or smaller. One of the greatest things is you can try out squarespace today without even providing a credit card.

Check out some of these photographers sites that are being hosted on Squarespace.

http://rrhys.squarespace.com/
http://www.chookooloonks.com/
http://www.chookooloonks.com/
http://twitter.com/MerellePhoto Rhiannon Connelly

I always carry a little notebook with me for when inspiration strikes. Sometimes its a song lyric I hear on the radio, a snippet of conversation I hear or a location that I spot that I need to come back and look at later.
http://jpetronephotography.carbonmade.com/ Jenna Petrone

This is awesome! Thank you for sharing!

I have an online portfolio on a site called carbonmade but I’m going to look into squarespace because there seems to be a lot of flexibility to the site and I can customize it easily.
http://photography.paulliebrand.com Paul Liebrand

The key is to find something that you like and is easy to use. Squarespace maybe it… it may not be. The nice thing is you get a 2 week free trial and do not even have to provide a credit card.
Reem

I know I’m late but I think I’ll just write my story!
Few years ago I worked as an arts and crafts teacher in the summer and I had students from the age 7 to 13! One shy girl cought my attention because she was so creative and smart but yet she had no friends and always kept her hands in her pockets! Later I found out that she had two thumbs in her right hand and all the kids teased her about it!! I talked to them and made them apologize but they didn’t stop!! So the poor girl left class and I’ve never seen her again!
Five months ago my sister had a baby girl with two thumbs in her right hand and the first thing that came to mind was that girl!!
I looked her up and finally found her two days ago and I was shocked to see that she was failing school and not doing well in anything at all!!
I decided to spend the whole day yesterday to talk to her,
We talked about everything!! Tv,food, annoying brothers and most importantly selfesteem and passion.
She had low selfesteem because her hand was not like everyone else’s and there, she lost her passion! She promised me to start getting back to her passion to creating things and she even tried out photography for the first time and loved it!!
The thing that made me even happier is hearing her say ” I’m going to help someone today!!” I realized that “giving” is contagious !!
http://www.facebook.com/people/Sébastien-Roignant/1347672577 Sébastien Roignant

Here’s my video !
It’s in french
http://vimeo.com/34150249
http://www.facebook.com/people/Sébastien-Roignant/1347672577 Sébastien Roignant

Here’s mine !
http://vimeo.com/34150249
It’s in french
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001436136016 Daniel James T. Cook

Hey Jenna, My wife and I just watched your video. So precious and sincere!
Looking forward to hearing more from you on Phlearn!
Makes me all excited seeing the same enthusiasm and passion in someone that I had at the same age. I was a part of a fine art photography group through UC Santa Cruz back then and they really encouraged my enthusiasm and I hope you get that encouragement here too!
http://phlearn.com Aaron Nace

For sure, once they release the photos
Judy

OMG…this changed my life!! My focus with the 50mm is always soft. I’ve read so many things trying to fix the focus problem. Everything I’ve found on the internet was very complicated and not much help. I was just about to send the lens back to see if having it calibrated would help. Thank you so much for posting this!! It was very simple and easy to understand but such important information! What else don’t I know?!!!!
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Tavis Glover

You’re welcome, I’m glad it helped you! I know it was always frustrating for me when I thought I nailed the auto focus, and come back to find out it’s way off I read about a technique where if you are taking self portraits with the auto focus you can hold a small flashlight up to your eye, so the camera will easily focus on that spot. I’m rambling now, but I hope this helps ya! Take care!
http://jpetronephotography.carbonmade.com/ Jenna Petrone

Thank you Daniel! I do get a lot of encouragement from phlearn even tho I’ve only been on this site for a short amount of time. I feel so much more motivated after watching these videos and seeing the community here : )
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http://www.gemwindowsanddoors.com.au/ gemwindowsanddoors

Thank you for it ! really interesting! It have been always interesting to read shuch news.