Championship Rock Skipping
Earlier this year (hehehe) okay, on January 12th, I was a participant in a live audience for the Creative Live online channel, it was a class called “Incredible Engagement Photography” and the instructor was Mr. Pye Jirsa who also is the creator of the website, “F-Stoppers”
I truly enjoyed his class, he pulled a lot of his posing instruction from a book I had just gotten at Christmastime, Picture Perfect Posing by Roberto Valenzuela. (Check out Robertos extremely cool portfoli website here)
It was a tremendous help to be able to participate in a classroom setting and see demonstrated just what the book was describing, When it comes to posing, it’s not obvious in photographs how the pose is achieved and what steps you need to get there because poses are designed to look the most flattering in the way the camera sees, from where the camera is positioned. A good pose to the camera is all about angles, negative space and touch points (and sometimes dumb luck). All of this knowledge is absorbed over time and lots of practice.
Practice in any craft, be it piano or math or computer programing or photography, it can be a grind. Without practice though, I get off track, I get stuck and feel like I’m in the same place with my photography, not making any real progress. A lot of the time, just “noodling” instead of practicing.
One of the “new” things that I learned from Pye’s class at the Creative Live studio, he walked us through how to create a GIF in Photoshop. I knew I had several sets of “series” images so I decided last night to put together a couple GIFs. In order to upload to Instagram or Facebook, the GIF has to be uploaded to a GIF host first, like GIPHY.
However, for my own site, I can just throw it on here, full size – isn’t that fun?
Kinda cool. I think this counts as practice because it’s stretching my skills a bit, using Photoshop, going into areas of Photoshop I didn’t know existed. Hopefully I’ll remember that ⌘+ opt + ⌂ + S = going into the save for web dialog box.
I love the Flipbook looking style of a GIF, it’s very vintage and fun. Pye taught me how to actually utilize the technique to make interesting and fun “flip books” that clients will love to share with their friends and of course make them say, “oh, fun, who did your photography?” thus causing their friends to all stampede over to my website.
Thanks for stopping by!
Suzy
