PHOTO TRAVELER

My Go-To Gurus
With so much to learn about new technology, it’s helpful to have a troupe of experts on whom you can rely
By Bob Krist

Anticipating the e-mails from digitally savvy readers who will tell me three “easy” ways to accomplish it, I want to reiterate that I was in my digital infancy with Photoshop, so you might as well have asked me to scale Everest than to blend Smart Objects! Fortunately, though, I was familiar with Dr. Brown’s Place-a-Matic script, which would do all the heavy lifting for me.

I simply shot a series of exposures over the course of the 15 minutes or so when the lobby was populated. In several exposures, I shot daylight white balance and exposed for the interior. In several others, I switched to tungsten balance and underexposed to get the sky rich blue as it is at actual twilight. Later, in Bridge, I selected two frames—one for the sky, one for the interior—opened them up in Place-a-Matic, made the adjustments to the RAW files and, bingo, they were overlayed and aligned perfectly in Photoshop, where a layer mask and some brushing gave me the shot. And I could watch the Dr. Brown tutorial each step of the way.

Let George Do It
Some of the new photo software, such as Lightroom, is mellow and user-friendly, so it figures that my third go-to guru would be the same way. George Jardine is the guy I like to show me the Light...room.

George does his teaching through podcasts. Some of these are straight tutorials about Lightroom and some are group discussions with Adobe software developers. This is a fascinating way to hear these digital pioneers just sitting around talking, as they might at a dinner table. You may not pick up specific tips for using the software during these conversational podcasts (as you do in the straight tutorials), but you get an idea of what the Adobe people are thinking and what directions they might take.

Finally, George does one-on-one photographer interview podcasts with a wide variety of pros like Bob Sacha, Steve McCurry and Pete Turner, to name a few. You can access George’s podcasts at www.mulita.com/blog/ or download them from iTunes by searching “Lightroom.”

Don’t Lose Sleep
There’s so much to learn these days in all aspects of digital photography that having access to these “gurus on demand” can help you not only improve your craft, but sleep better at night, too.

For a schedule of Bob Krist’s workshops and seminars, check his Website, www.bobkrist.com.

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