Acadia National Park, Maine

Digital Workshop Format
Our digital workflow workshops are designed to give you access to the best digital workflow instruction at a location convenient to excellent wildlife and landscape photo opportunities. The instructor(s) join participants in the field at specified shooting locations, and then return to the classroom with half of the day used for extensive hands-on instruction in a comfortable meeting room between the scheduled morning and evening shoots. Participants are responsible for providing their own transportation, meals and lodging arrangements for the workshop.

Location
Rugged, rocky headlands, a lighthouse carved into a granite ledge, a quiet harbor on a foggy morning, tide pools and crashing waves, or a hillside of flaming maples and birches—all of these exciting photographic possibilities describe Acadia National Park in October.

Our visit is timed for the peak of autumn color. Acadia is famous for its glorious autumn display of red and sugar maples, interspersed with stands of birch, oak and aspen. With luck you will photograph not only the colors themselves, but also their reflections in mirror smooth beaver ponds. You will also explore Jordan and Bubble Ponds, nestled between the glacially-carved summits of Sargent and Cadillac Mountains. The 1,530-foot summit of Cadillac Mountain, accessible by car and overlooking the vast horizon of the Maine coast, is a photographer’s delight at any time of day, covered with blaze-red huckleberry growing amidst the deeply-cracked granite boulders.

Acadia also offers the human-made landscape with lobster traps piled high, colorful “pot buoys” hanging on weathered cedar shakes, handcrafted wooden boats and lobster boats reflected in silvery, still water. Stone barns, inland farms and even the quaint shops of Bar Harbor all offer photo possibilities. Photograph atop Cadillac Mountain as the sun rises over the idyllic Down East coast and sets the landscape ablaze with color!

Instruction
This field workshop is designed specifically for the digital photographer. We spend approximately half of each day photographing a variety of subjects in the field, and the other half in a classroom setting, dealing with the digital photography process and working on the images we have just taken. The emphasis throughout the workshop will be on two main topics: streamlining the digital workflow, and optimizing the digital images through the use of Adobe’s Photoshop and Lightroom software.

Topics to be covered in depth include:

• file formats for shooting and for archiving
• exposing for digital
• downloading for automatic image organization
• proper file naming
• cataloging of images: Lightroom or other software
• keywording and captioning of images
• the many uses of metadata
• processing the raw file
• using the tools in Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom’s Develop Module
• the best color space to use for the best results
• the many faces of Bridge
• creating panoramic images
• color adjustment strategies
• using Photoshop to finalize the image: dodging and burning, adjustment layers and layer masking, controlling luminosity and contrast, sharpening for output
• creating a PDF electronic book
• color managed workflow from input to output

John Shaw has been photographing digitally since the Nikon D1X became available in 2001, and has been using Photoshop even longer (since Version 4). He is a beta tester for both Lightroom and Photoshop, and has been part of Epson’s Stylus Pro fine art printmakers group since 2001.

Pam Atkinson was an early adopter of digital photo technology, starting with the first generation Nikon digital cameras. She has been a Photoshop user since Version 4 was introduced years ago, and added Adobe’s Lightroom into her workflow as soon as it was released. Her particular photographic interests are in graphic design and the emotion of color.

Requirements
Participants should have a fundamental working knowledge of their digital camera and basic familiarity with either Photoshop or Lightroom. They should bring a laptop computer with one or both of these programs pre-loaded (30-day free trials of both programs are available from www.adobe.com). Both Mac and Windows machines are welcome!