The SMUGS Blog

The Philly Smug held its meeting at Calumet Photo, where 27 members attended.  Our guest speaker, John Bodensiek, owner of PhotoFusionUSA, provides hands-on, in-depth photography workshops on anything related to photography and post-processing.  At our meeting, he provided an introduction to Lightroom 3 and CS5.  

During the presentation, John shared his workflow and stressed the importance of developing our own workflow for quality and consistency. He shared some of the many options that Lightroom users have, like using two monitors and various ways to catalog and tag photos for improved organization.

Of course, the best way to achieve good post processing is to start with a good photograph. Avoid contaminants when shooting a photo. Contaminants include lens flare, stray light, condensation, dirt and dust, and distracting elements within the frame. He also reviewed the noise reduction and sharpening features in LR3 and some creative techniques. Lightroom is intuitive, and the workflow goes from left to right, starting with the Library Module through to exporting for print or web.

He ended his presentation with a quick review of some of the new features in CS5.  He demonstrated how to crop an unwanted element out of a photo and how CS5 automatically fills in the spot based on other things around it in the photo.  John did an excellent job providing an overview and introduction for people new to Lightroom, and he added enough special features that he maintained the interest of experienced LR users. He is a dynamic, knowledgable speaker who is easy to listen to. His presentation was very well received by our group, and we are hoping he will do a encore presentation in the future.

Photos for this post were provided by Natasha Esguerra.  Natasha, one of the co-organizers for the Philly SMUG, is a wedding and lifestyle photographer based in Southern New Jersey.  She travels all over the country to photograph special events, and she has been an excellent leader and teacher for Philly.

Scribe:  Nancy McPeak

The Philadephia SMUG held a mini studio-lighting workshop at the Calumet Photographic Store of Philadelphia, PA, to help prepare for their “Help-Portrait Day” to be held in December. Help-Portrait is a day where photographers from all over the world take photos of people in need and give the pictures to others so they are informed of the poverty. If you would like to get involved, you can go here to learn more.

22 members learned from portrait and sports photographer, David Kappler (www.kapplerphoto.com), as he shared his knowledge on studio lighting with the group. We learned about:

• The different light sources we can create in a photo

• The proper way to achieve softer light

• The different types of lighting patterns

We were also shown that you don’t need to have the most expensive equipment to achieve good light- you just need to know how to make the most of what you’ve got. He shared tons of information with us on how he captures the light in a very entertaining way.  After his overview on studio lighting, we were able to divide ourselves up amongst three lighting set ups and take turns practicing our craft

The reviews of the evening were very positive and everyone seemed to take home at least a few new things from the workshop.  We look forward to planning more meetings with talented guest speakers who can help us learn more about the different elements of photography and help improve our craft

Check out the photos from this Philly Scribe, Natasha Esguerra!