Recently I caught up with Liana Lehua, one of the co-hosts of the Girls Gone Geek podcast. The show is targeted at, you guessed it, girls. More specifically, geeky girls… or rather females who like technology. On the show they discuss hardware, software, gadgets, etc. — all from a female perspective. It’s really a unique take on the idea of informing folks about the latest trends and tech gadgets.

Liana is also an amateur photographer and can often be found wandering around the streets of San Francisco with her Canon camera, taking photos of whatever strikes her fancy. And she’s deep into the whole Social Networking scene (Twitter, Facebook, etc), with a variety of presences online, thankfully she’s wrangled all of various sites she posts on into one place.

Do check out the show, and also be sure to check out some of her photos on Flickr.

http://www.girlsgonegeek.tv
http://www.lianalehua.com
http://www.flickr.com/photos/fittorrent

This past weekend I had the pleasure of meeting Canada’s sexiest geek – Lisa Bettany of mostlylisa.com. She was an in-studio guest on the This Week in Photography (TWiP) podcast, and did an awesome job putting up with our on-mike craziness.

It was interesting to learn about her life, and the things she likes to shoot. She’s a photography do-it-yourselfer, and schooled us on how to save a few bucks by making soft boxes from shower curtains. And as if you couldn’t tell by the photos, Lisa is also a model. Some of the questions centered around how she manages to deal with knowing as much about photography as some of the people shooting her. You’ll have to listen to the podcast to hear her response.

The next day the TWiP crew met up with Lisa outside of San Francisco’s AT&T Park for a photoshoot, I snapped a few pics of her and recorded a quick video. Lisa is equal parts beauty, brains, talent, and just the right amount of geekiness.

Be sure to check her out at mostlylisa.com. She rocks, mostly.

My good friend, Wedding Photographer Dane Sanders, talks about his highly anticipated new book Fast Track Photographer. We chat about the book, and the changing face of wedding photography and what it takes to break into the business, especially considering with the current market climate.

I met up with Photojojo CEO Amit Gupta last week in San Francisco. Check out this video to hear how he suggests convincing strangers to pose for photos. And he wasn’t kidding! There’s even a write-up on his website with tips and instructions on how to best utilize “candy for candids”.

Apparently Amit has a history of bribing passers-by with candy. Having recently relocated back to the Bay Area from NYC, he’s now spreading his technique for impromptu portraiture to the left coast. Here is some photographic evidence of the Lollipop Photographer in action. And it looks like this movement may be catching on.

Be sure to head over to Photojojo and subscribe to the newsletter... it’s awesome and a must read.

Oh, and here’s a link to that song???????? I was referring to in the video. Somehow I don’t think these are the Lollipops Amit was referring to.

Last Friday I had the opportunity to hang out with Thomas Hawk. One of the most popular photographers on Flickr, and one of the founders of Zooomr. It was a fascinating conversation, and I can honestly say that I’ve never met any photographer who shoots as much as Thomas. He shoots every single day, between 100 and 500 shots on average! If you add to that the fact that he maintains a very popular and active blog, runs a company, has a day job, and is also a Dad and it becomes a mystery how he finds the time to do all of this stuff. Thomas tells me part of the secret is that he’s “always online”. The easiest way to keep up with Thomas online is probably through his FriendFeed page.

Check out the video for some great tips on how to increase your Flickr popularity. And you’ll learn how Thomas manages to keep all of those images backed up (hint Drobo), and more. To get more tips from Thomas on being successful on Flickr, check out his blog post on the topic. This was a great chat.

Meet Merkley??? You’ll need to read his blog to find out what the three question mark thing is all about.

It’s not very often that one gets the opportunity to meet a true artist. Not only is Merkley a true artist, he’s one of the top photographers on Flickr. In the time he’s been a member on the site, he’s managed to gain a following of almost 15,000 “contacts”. That’s an amazing audience for any photographer… on Flickr, or otherwise. Even though he vehemently claims that he’s NOT a photographer.

It might be his saturated, irreverent and unapologetic photographic style, or as he told me.. “maybe it’s because people just like looking at naked women”. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect while making my way to his home in San Francisco. I already had Flickr on the brain as I’d just finished recording an episode of This Week in Photography (aka TWiP), and during the show I had the opportunity to ask a few questions to Flickr’s Community Manager Heather Champ. I wish I’d asked her about Merkley.

We chatted about all kinds of stuff, from Photoshop techniques, to the question of “why Lightroom”. Somehow we got onto the topic of Flickr censorship and I have to say, the way he expressed his opinion on the topic was by far the most concise I’d heard to date, he said; “you don’t go into the mall with your d!ck hanging out and not expect someone to say anything about it do you?”.

Here are some excerpts from the “I am not a Photographer” post:

“Photographers only really like 2 or 3 other photographers, the one’s whose photographs most resemble their own and they like to keep those books right out on the coffee table where everyone can see them.”

“Photographers make use of make up artists, hairdressers, location scouts and stylists which is way way WAY different than photoshopping out zits and wrinkles.”

“Photographers talk about how little they use Photoshop IF AT ALL, and even then it’s only to “adjust some curves” or “make the blacks a little more black.”

Even if you don’t agree with what he says, you should do yourself a favor and check out his work. I’m particularly fond of his “111″ project. It’s a book (and Flickr set) comprised of 111 beautiful women in various stages of undress.

The book is amazing (thanks for the signed copy Merkley!), it fits very well right out front on my coffee table.

Oh, and you can check out my Flickr Photostream here.

While prepping for a recent photo shoot, I asked myself “is it possible to take a fresh look at portraiture?” The standard definition of portrait is pretty broad and I guess by design, leaves much to the individual “portraitists” interpretation.

Portriat
noun
1 a painting, drawing, photograph, or engraving of a person, esp. one depicting only the face or head and shoulders.

When shooting this series of images I wanted to break beyond the “tilted head” posed portrait and create a look that would really catch attention. I wanted to at once be provocative, evoke a sense of sensuality, while not being pornographic.

Since this photo is posed (or rather, guided), it’s not really a candid, looking at the definition above it is technically a portrait… or is it?

Could this be Portrait Photojournalism?

These images were captured in my studio with a Nikon D3, Speed-o-tron studio strobes, and post-processed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and Photoshop CS3 Extended

**note: the original image in this post has been replaced with the current one.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Remembering those who served and sacrificed, and those who continue on in the armed forces of the United States of America. I shot this photo (actually a stitched panorama) today at the Golden Gate Memorial Cemetery in San Bruno, CA. There’s a high-rez version on Flickr.

Over the past several months, I’ve had the honor of being a regular on the This Week in Photography (aka TWiP) podcast. It’s been an amazing experience to hang out with, and shoot the breeze about all things photography with the likes of Scott Bourne, Ron Brinkmann, and Alex Lindsay.

We’ve had some amazing guests on the program, from prolific photographers to authors on many important aspects of the photographic industry. Being the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Marketing Manager of course I bring an Adobe perspective to the show. While Alex and Scott are decidedly agnostic with regard to software at this point.

It’s a fun and informative show and we generally have a blast recording it. It’s not all fun and games however as we do dive into some very topical photography related issues such as Canon vs Nikon, Lightroom vs Aperture, raw vs JPEG, and more. However, we keep things relatively light-hearted, but at times things do get a bit heated… so far to my knowledge, no one has stormed off of the “set” yet.

If you haven’t done so already, you should subscribe in iTunes, and give the show a listen.

What an awesome Sunday.

I was invited down to the Ansel Adams’ house, along with Robert Scoble and Marc Sibler for a late morning visit with Michael Adams, son of Ansel Adams. Michael gave us an amazing tour of the house, the darkroom, and the gallery. What an amazing house it is, and what a permeated feeling of art that place has. You can almost feel “photography” in the wood.

Michael is amazing. Turns out we were both in the Air Force! Though he was a General, and I was an enlisted man. It was hard to fight the impulse to call him “sir”, but it’s nice to know that there was that common ground. Veterans can talk for hours about stuff. Not to mention that when I was active duty, I NEVER had the opportunity to shoot the breeze about photography with a General!

It was also great to finally meet Robert Scoble… aka the Scobelizer! Robert showed up and immediately began streaming his visit live to Qik.com, twittering, and more. He’s a social media machine! He said he’d get a blog post up later about it. It was great to get tips on blogging from one of the pioneers. He streamed the below interview LIVE to his legions of Scobelites! Wow.

The surreal thing about this visit was that as we were departing, General (ret) Michael Adams asked me if I might consider coming back down to help him learn Lightroom and Photoshop! Imagine that… the son of one of the most important names in photography asked little ‘ol me to help introduce him to the world of digital photography.

I’m going to have to just consider that a direct order

**check out the Flickr videos I snapped here.

The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 beta is out in the wild, and some of the more powerful features in this application lie within the tight integration with its 300-pound older sibling, Photoshop CS3.

And the brilliance of this integration lie within the fact that Lightroom is able to leverage the power of Photoshop CS3 to do some of the more complex and niche “heavy-lifting” imaging tasks, while still providing seamless access to the powerful organizational features in Lightroom 2.

To demonstrate this, on my way back to San Jose from Sausalito, CA today I pulled over to snap a few photos of the Golden Gate Bridge. I only had my G9 “point-n-shoot” with me, and the lens wasn’t wide enough to capture the scene like I wanted … so I captured it in several chunks.

This tutorial demonstrates how to use Lightroom 2 and Photoshop CS3 to merge those chunks into one seamless image. Check out a higher resolution of the image here.

UPDATE: You’ll need to be running Photoshop 10.0.1 (or later) for the Lightroom 2 integration to work.

How timely is this?! I’m in the middle of reading the book Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds and turns out just last week he was right up the street with my little sister (from another mister) Katina Johnson (she’s the one introducing Garr). He was up there doing one of those famous @Google talks.

The book is amazing. And has changed the way that I create and approach not only my own presentations at Adobe, but also the other communications materials I deliver. From marketing plans, to trip reports, and even proofs to photography clients. It’s not a big book, but it has helped me make big changes in the way I perceive other peoples’ presentations, and in how I create my own.

Do check out the other @Google talks… they feature such notables as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, and the list goes on and on….

I think it was one of the very first episodes of the TWiP podcast (This Week in Photography) that I sort of bragged to my co-hosts about some of my secret Photoshop kung-fu skills. Basically I was saying that I knew of a technique for easily removing crowds from, say, a busy street scene.

So, after much taunting (practically every show), here’s the promised screencast! In it I reveal the secret and mysterious technique to all. Seriously though, It’s actually pretty cool that you can have Photoshop do the heavy lifting in a retouch job that previously might have taken hours.

I’ve also created a video page that will host all of the videos I post (gotta love Wordpress). Oh, and by the way, all of the photos and video for this screencast were taken with my Canon G9!

I originally found out about this technique from Martin Evening. Be sure to check out his blog on Photoshop Lightroom. He’s also written a “bible-sized” book called “Photoshop CS3 for Professional Photographers“. It’s a must read, and an excellent reference guide. And finally, be sure to check out his work.

I’ve pretty much grown up with Adobe products, as both a graphic designer and a photographer. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen splash screens appear, and never really gave much thought to the names on the graphic.

Now having worked very closely with the people on the Photoshop Lightroom team, it’s clear how much blood, sweat, and tears go into each release of the software. And now that some my own skin is in the game, I am extreemly honored to have been included (and immortalized) in the splash screen of the next generation of digital image management software … Photoshop Lightroom 2 beta.

For a “pixel-geek” like me, this is almost the equivalent to getting your hand-prints in the cement outside of Mann’s Chinese Theater in Hollyweird.

I’m very happy to be apart of this evolution of Lightroom and digital photography. Version 2 represents the latest in digital image mangement, non-destructive editing, and superior (and unmatched) integration with the Adobe Photoshop, the gold standard in image editing.

You can snag your free copy of the Lightroom 2 beta from Adobe Labs. Everyone is free to download and try the applicaiton for 30 days (even our competitors), and if you have a Lightroom 1.0 serial number you’ll be able to use the app for the duration of the beta period.

And of course, in the spirit of the first Lightroom beta we’ll be listening to, and incorporating user feedback into the final finished product. And you can bet, it’ll be stellar.

There are already a TON of videos, tutorials, and resources created to help you get up to speed quickly on this release, some of my favorite videos are over on the Photoshop User magazine Lightroom 2 Resource Center.  One of the best overviews I’ve read so far is from Ian Lyons. For some inside perspective and technical details, check out my co-worker Tom Hogarty’s blog.

Here are just a few of the new features you’ll find in the beta. (appropriated from John Nacks post)

• Library Module:
  
  • Streamlined Library layout
  • Smart Collections (based on search criteria)
  • Powerful Filter Bar to search and refine images
  • Suggested Keywords for simplified keywording
  • 10,000 pixel size limit raised to 30,000 pixels
  • Output-based collections
• Multiple monitor support:
  • Four flexible modes for an alternate window: Grid, Loupe, Compare, Survey
  • Live Loupe mode
• Export functionality:
  • Auto-add exported images to the Lightroom catalog
  • Auto Output Sharpening for images on export
• Develop Module:
  • Non-Destructive Localized Correction for dodging and burning specific areas of an image
  • Post-Crop Vignette
  • Basic Panel Keyboard Shortcuts
  • Improved Auto Adjustment
  • Improved memory handling through 64-bit support on OS X 10.5 and Vista 64-bit.(Not limited to develop module)
• Print Module:
  • Picture Package for multi-page layouts
  • Print Module output directly to JPEG
  • Enhanced Print Sharpening based on PhotoKit Sharpener algorithms
  • 16-bit Printing for Mac OS X 10.5

Again, I’m extreemly excited to see what photograpehrs are able to do with this software. Please download your copy of the Lightroom 2 beta, play with it, and post your comments in the Lightroom 2 Beta Forums.

Enjoy!

Whassup Peeps! I bet you haven’t heard that before on Easter Sunday.

But do you know the true history of those squeezably-soft, yet oh so edible little conformist candies? Do you really want to know? Well, if you’re bored on this Easter Sunday … or if you don’t celebrate it for one reason or another, here’s the back story of one of this holidays most recognizable icons.

All hail Peep-ditty, step-off Easter Bunny.

The weekend before last, took a random drive up to San Francisco, on a mission to photograph the Golden Gate Bridge. It was a text-book Californian day and I had my Nikon D3 and Bogen tripod tow – I was ready for action. But a funny thing happened when I arrived at the bridge. Of course there were scads of tourists doing their point-and-look thing, but aside from that, suddenly I had the overwhelming feeling that there probably was no way to take a photo of this beautiful bridge… that hadn’t been done before.

Now, maybe it was because landscape photography really isn’t my thing, as I much prefer photographing people. But regardless, I felt decidedly uninspired as I hiked around the bridge area, and down to the pier, looking for a unique spot to shoot from. I recall thinking to myself, even if I was to rent a helicopter, there were already millions of photos of the bridge from every imaginable vantage point. So, I snapped a few photos and left.

On the way back to San Jose, I was thinking that there HAS to be a way to capture that bridge in a new and exciting way. So, I’m challenging myself to get a little more creative… get myself back to the bridge and do something never done before. Stay tuned.

If you’ve seen any photos of the Golden Gate Bridge done in an unexpected way, I’d love to see them… stick a link in the comments.