1. Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I. My Old Stuff… 1 of 3 Chronological but Random

2. Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I My Old Stuff 1 of 3/ Chronological but Random2002 - 2003 Photography as Meditation: Recently I was feeling tired and burned out. So, I meditated by doing a major ‘file management‘ update on my laptop and 6 external USB hard drives. That in-turn led to reworking some very old digital images. They were mostly 3 mega-pixel dgital images captured using the Nikon Prosumer compact digital camera, Coolpix 5000 and 5400 back in 2002 to 2003.

3. Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Compact Digital Prosumer Coolpix: 3 MP2002 - 2003 Product Shot: Stage 2 I shot a series of b&w images for my lighting class that I was teaching at The Seattle Art Institute. This ‘ready to use’ image was done as a product shot example. The soft 10 o’clock lighting is meant to draw both the form and shape of the subject.

4. Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Compact Digital Prosumer Coolpix: 3 MP2002 - 2003 Detail Inspection: The Coolpix image shows excellent image quality detail even with only 3 million pixels.

5. Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Compact Digital Prosumer Coolpix: 3 MP2002 - 2003 Stage 3: In use The cordless phone is out of its cradle ‘ready-for-use’ in a work environment. Lighting source has changed from the controlled studio soft box photo-quartz light to a natural light coming through a big picture window. The light direction remains a side light to draw both the form and shape.

6. Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Compact Digital Prosumer Coolpix: 3 MP2002 - 2003 Detail Inspection: Up close look Again, the image quality remains high even with only 3 million pixels.

7. Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Compact Digital Prosumer Coolpix: 3 MP Available Light & Cropping: The Coolpix with its superior ED glass lens did just as well under available light in the street. The black area of the image represents the fine tune cropping and it is kept to within the 10% safety cropping margin.

8. Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Compact Digital Prosumer Coolpix: 3 MP2002 - 2003 Detail Inspection

9. Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I osumer Coolpix: Found Shot: I got into shooting bike cables when I use to walk a lot between the bus stops and The Seattle Art Institute.

10. Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Compact Digital Prosumer Coolpix: 3 MP2002 - 2003 Mundane Pace: If I had been driving, I would have sped by this mail and mail storage box combination. Walking by it slowly, I found the combination and its connection to the neighborhood interesting. I also liked the unusual diagonal installation on the sidewalk.

11. Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Compact Digital Prosumer Coolpix: 3 MP2002 - 2003 Postal Service: ID shot While shooting the image, I toyed with the idea of mail and mail delivery. My imagination got hooked on to the idea of Movement. And that idea inspired me to apply some photographic technique that went along with the idea of movement.

12. Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Compact Digital Prosumer Coolpix: 3 MP2002 - 2003 Stage 2: Test panning I followed my intuition and combined a diagonal motion of the camera with a slow shutter speed’. I twisted the camera down and to the right while shooting using 1/30 sec shutter speed to get the example image.

13. Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Compact Digital Prosumer Coolpix: 3 MP2002 - 2003 Learn To Recognize… visual ideas. I found something interesting in the test image. I wanted some of that in the final image. Take a moment to absorb the look & feel of the image to the right for yourself.

14. Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Compact Digital Prosumer Coolpix: 3 MP2002 - 2003 Image Manipulation: For the stage 3 image, I decided to combine stage 2 idea with the ID stage 1. To do so, the subject had to be carefully separated from the background of the stage 1 image.

15. Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Compact Digital Prosumer Coolpix: 3 MP2002 - 2003 Lab Work: Photoshop Carefully and precisely ‘outline-select’ the subject. In this case, I used the Polygon Lasso Selection Tool. The outlined subject is then ‘Copied as a New Layer’. Refinement – I painted on the Layer Mask to feather (soften) the legs. In this image, the background layer is turned off.

16. Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Compact Digital Prosumer Coolpix: 3 MP2002 - 2003 BG Layer: Select it When the background layer is turned back on, the image looks as if nothing has been changed. Remember This – when you try to do things in Photoshop and nothing seems to happen, that is usually because you do not have the right layer selected. Always select the image or adjustment layer that you want to interact with.

17. Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I My Old Stuff 1 of 3/ Chronological but Random Moving On: Turn off the subject only layer and select the BG layer and apply Blur / Gaussian / Radial / Zoom effect to it. Since most affect under Blur is not a 1-button solutions, it’ll experimentation on your part to get what you want.

18. Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I My Old Stuff 1 of 3/ Chronological but Random Combine Layers: Turn on the subject only layer to make the final image look like the example to the right. The partially transparent mail box legs help the two images to merge together believably. Use the keyboard Up & Down arrow keys to compare this with the previous image.

19. Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I My Old Stuff 1 of 3/ Chronological but Random Start-to-Finish: Reference points ID Plus ExperimentFinal Stage 3 Establishing shotIdea shotFinal Fun shot

20. Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I My Old Stuff 1 of 3/ Chronological but Random Studio Lighting: Low-key self portrait lighting example shot for a Studio Lighting class that I was teaching at The Seattle Art Institute.

21. Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I My Old Stuff 1 of 3/ Chronological but Random Using Two Lights: Lighti the subject and the background separately. Sounds simple but not easy to do in practice. To do so successfully, the subject and the background must be separated by a distance of 12 to 18 feet. 18’ works better than 12’. Notice that the light is coming from different directions for the subject and the background. Talk about Reflected Light and Light Falloff concept in relationship to the required subject to background distances if time permits…

22. Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I My Old Stuff 1 of 3/ Chronological but Random Sandwich: When 2 slides were combined for a double exposure effect, it was called sandwich. This example image is made up of 2 separate shots and combined in Photoshop.

23. Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I My Old Stuff 1 of 3/ Chronological but Random Found Elements: I found the brass weights at a thrift store and the map at the library. Both shots were done on location using available light.

24. Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I My Old Stuff 1 of 3/ Chronological but Random Shadows: It’s the quality, direction, and the amount of the cast shadow that’s making this fake image look real.

25. Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I My Old Stuff 1 of 3/ Chronological but Random Use Example: It was used as a b&w image for the Lighting Class. Reducing or eliminating the color aspect of an image can help showing the lighting of a scene or an object.

26. Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I My Old Stuff 1 of 3/ Chronological but Random Squint Viewing: Making comparisons Compare both images to notice how much easier it is to see the grayscale on the black & white image. Color and color saturation (intensity) can affect the appearance of the grayscale interpretation. Part of the effectiveness of squint viewing is that it reduces the color and color saturation in the scene.

27. Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I. End of 1