During last month’s Central PA Tweetup I ran into a few friends that I hadn’t really seen since we were part of a group visiting Rome in 2002. The encounter reminded me of a Website of my Rome pictures I’d built shortly after the trip.

I posted the site to share the photos with friends (pre-Flickr, mind you), and I remember being scolded by people that were offended of a bunch of Penn State students hitting foreign bars so close to 9/11.

Apparently I’d taken the site down years ago, but I decided to restore it in its table layout, 800×600-supporting glory (you can check it out here).

The way I built the site and formatted the photos reminds me more of my age than any old picture of me ever would (Ugh, I’m getting old!).

*SHAMELESS PLUG*

(that’s what blogs are for, right?)

I’ll be presenting a few Photoshop tricks I’ve learned over the years at the upcoming Central PA Photoshop User Group (CPPUG) meeting on May 12th (6-8 pm) at Penn State Hershey (more information is here on the CPPUG site). If you’re interested in joining the discussion on improving your own photos (and are in the area), I hope to see you there!

I decided to attempt to make some tilt-shift photography miniature faking photos as examples for my class. They’re not quite there, which makes me wonder if it was a matter of the photos I chose or the blurs I applied. Regardless, it was fun revisiting some photos I’d shot over the years.

Last week, I introduced HDR to my digital photography class. To present a working example, I chose to use a photo of the Subway Cafe that I shot six years ago. Fortunately for me, it’s one of the few photos from my past where I kept all of the originals I shot, so it gave me an opportunity to play around using techniques that I didn’t really know of back then.

Here’s the 2003 version, which was composed of two exposures.

Here’s the version I did this year (2009). It’s composed of three exposures. I used an underexposed version of the sign, added some unsharp masking to the bricks, did some Shadow/Highlight to the sky, and did a bit of dodging and burning with my Cintiq.

As a photographer, it’s frustrating to realize how many of my pieces I’ve done in the past that could be revisited and improved upon–furthermore, how many that could have been revisited had I not saved over the files. Nowadays, I make a point to save all of the originals.

I was recently at a FlashCodersNY meeting where a rep from Adobe acknowledged that CS3 has some bugs in Leopard. I told him I hadn’t run into anything, however, I clearly spoke too soon. Two bugs I’ve found in Photoshop:

1. Using the crop tool crops the image to 1×1 pixels. As a workaround, I’ve been using the marquee tool and cropping based on what’s selected.
2. Sometimes the font menu in the top panel won’t accept typed-in font names or scale the font’s pixel size based on pressing the up or down keyboard arrows. I’m having trouble replicating this, so I didn’t report it.

I’m not trying to point fingers, but rather find out if there are other bugs I haven’t run across yet. I’ve already submitted one to Adobe bug form, and figure that Adobe will be releasing updates soon enough.