Quick Poll: Adobe Lightroom Class
July 11, 2014 | By Nick Carver
At the popular request of many students, I will soon be offering a group class in Tustin all about Adobe Lightroom. The class will total 7.5 hours of instruction and cost $89. The only question I have is, "what schedule works best for you?" So please take 30 seconds to answer the poll below. I appreciate your help!
And for my students in other parts of the world, worry not! I will be creating an online course version. But that's going to take some time to make...
[polldaddy poll="8179874"]
Orange County Photography Classes: 2014 Schedule
June 19, 2014 | By Nick Carver
2014 Summer/Fall Schedule
Orange County Photography Classes
How to Shoot in Manual Mode
July 1 - Tuesday 6:30-9:00pm in Irvine, CA
Learn the correct way to shoot in manual mode in this very affordable single-evening seminar. Nick will demystify the process with his easy-to-understand and fun-to-use technique for manual metering. - 1 day (2.5 hrs) - $39
Get More Info About This Class
Popular Beginners Photography Class:
Understanding Exposure for Beginners
July 12 & April 19 - 2 Saturdays 10:00am-12:30pm in Tustin, CA
Perfect for beginning photographers, this class is designed to make exposure easily understandable to even the greenest students. Learn what shooting modes to use, how to get correct exposures, and what the shutter speed, aperture, and ISO are. You'll leave this class knowing what the f-stop is, how to get blurry backgrounds, how to avoid totally blurry photos in low light, and much, much more! - 2 days (5 hrs total) - $75
Get More Info About This Class
Includes a Field Shoot!
Landscape Photography
July 17 through August 7 - 4 Thursdays from 6:30-9:00pm in Irvine, CA
This class is 1 evening per week for 4 weeks. It covers everything from how to shoot in manual, to using filters, to composition, to final output and much, much more. And this class is my one and only class to include a field shoot! - 4 days (10 hrs total) - $99
Get More Info About This Class
Filters for Outdoor Photography
August 2 - Satuday 10:00am-12:30pm in Tustin, CA
Don't be fooled by the marketing of software companies - filters are just as useful in digital photography as they've ever been! Find out what filters Photoshop can never replace and which filters are most important to keep in your bag. - 1 day (2.5 hrs) - $39
Get More Info About This Class
New Tuesday Evening Class:
Understanding Exposure for Beginners
August 19 & August 26 - 2 Tuesdays 6:30pm-9:00pm in Tustin, CA
Perfect for beginning photographers, this class is designed to make exposure easily understandable to even the greenest students. Learn what shooting modes to use, how to get correct exposures, and what the shutter speed, aperture, and ISO are. You'll leave this class knowing what the f-stop is, how to get blurry backgrounds, how to avoid totally blurry photos in low light, and much, much more! - 2 days (5 hrs total) - $75
Get More Info About This Class
Composition for Dramatic Landscapes
September 9 - Tuesday 6:30-9:00pm in Irvine, CA
Composition is what will make or break your landscape photographs. Don't get so caught up in the technical stuff that you forget to give due attention to the artistic side of landscape photography. - 1 day (2.5 hrs) - $39
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Macro DSLR Photography
October 18 through November 8 - 4 Saturdays 10:00am-12:30pm in Tustin, CA
This class is 1 saturday per week for 4 weeks. Learn how to improve your macro photography with your DSLR camera, what equipment you should invest in, what settings to use, how to frame a shot, how to find good light and more! Includes an in-class shoot. - 4 days (10 hrs total) - $99
Get More Info About This Class
Don't wait, sign up before these orange county photography classes fill up!
More information and enrollment details
can be found here.
Large Wall Art: 7-Foot Wide Panorama
May 30, 2014 | By Nick Carver
Large Wall Art: Nick Carver and the 7-Foot Wide Beast
Click Any Image to Enlarge
I recently made a large wall art piece for a client to hang in his TrueCar executive office in Goleta, CA. I've made some large wall art before. My record is 10-foot wide, a panoramic view of Sedona, AZ that hangs proudly in my Tustin classroom. But on the 10-foot wide piece, I broke up it into 3 smaller pieces, forming a triptych, simply because it's nearly impossible (or prohibitively expensive) to create a single piece that large.
For this wall art at TrueCar, we were looking at doing a 6-foot wide print with a 4" double mat and a 2" frame. All in all, the piece would measure 7-foot edge-to-edge when it was complete. Since we were going with traditional matting, doing a triptych wouldn't look right. The gaps between prints would be distracting. So the goal was to do a single continuous piece framed under glass.
Before this, I'd never done a piece this large with glass. The triptych hanging in my Tustin classroom is float-mounted with plexiglass and no frame. Doing it under a single pane of glass presents a different set of challenges. Thankfully my framer, Salamon Art in Fountain Valley, provided much needed guidance on this process. I learned from the head honcho over there that matting prints this big is so uncommon that there are only 2 colors available for matting: white and warm-white. Good thing that's what we wanted anyway. The next challenge was glazing (meaning the glass). They don't make glass this big for picture framing. We could get a pane specially made, but that would cost a fortune. Thank God for acrylic. Acrylic glazing made the whole piece surprisingly lightweight compared to glass and it made the materials far more affordable.
I typically like high-gloss metallic prints, especially for landscapes like this, but I decided to go with a regular matte finish paper. It was a tough decision because I don't really like matte photo paper, but it was the right decision. High-gloss prints this big become distractingly riddled with ripples and reflections. Also, it's a good idea to do really dark photos in a dull finish. High-gloss picks up reflections even worse when the picture is dark. If you got yourself a really bright composition, though, gloss can look great. The printing was done, as always, by the experts at Pro Photo Connection in Irvine. It's the only place I trust with my prints. This photo, by the way, is a 6x17 panoramic made on Fuji Velvia 50 film in Rancho Palos Verdes, CA.
The finished piece came out great, it was huge, it didn't break on transport (my biggest worry), and it looked gorgeous hanging on this exec's wall. As I've said before, getting the photo framed and hanging on someone else's wall is the ultimate reward of photography. Feels good.
On to the next one.
