Olympic National Park, Washington

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
Of all the US national parks, the most diversified in character and climate is found in Washington State. Olympic National Park, which encompasses the Olympic Mountains and a great deal of the Olympic Peninsula, incorporates pristine seacoasts and ruggedly beautiful mountain peaks, rain forest and alpine tundra, tide pools and flowering meadows—all with swiftly shifting light and weather patterns. The western side of the park has the wettest climate in the continental US, soaking under nearly 12 feet of precipitation annually. But amazingly, the northeastern side of the park is the driest part of the Pacific Coast outside of southern California.

Probably more art-calendar photographs of deer browsing in flower-carpeted meadows have been taken in this park than all of our other national parks combined! Olympic marmots, denizens of these same meadows, offer comic relief and excellent photo subjects. At Hurricane Ridge, scenic mountain panoramas are punctuated with stately alpine firs whose tangled roots are home to a marauding band of tourist-acclimated ground squirrels. Much of the wildlife in this exceptional park is remarkably unwary—including blue grouse, black oystercatchers, Clark’s nutcrackers, gray and Steller’s jays, common ravens and the ever-present banana slugs!

Deep, glacially-carved Lake Crescent, renowned for the clarity of its brilliant sapphire-hued waters—the lack of nitrogen limits the growth of algae—sparkles among evergreen-covered mountains. The verdant old-growth forest of Douglas fir and hemlock in the valley of the Sol Duc is one of the finest in the park and the white cascades of Sol Duc Falls are highlighted by shafts of sun that find their way into the mossy ravine.

Local growers have discovered that lavender thrives in the dry microclimate created by the Olympic Mountain rain shadow. The purple striations of the lavender fields create explorations in composition for the photographer.

Such diversity is the basis for unique photography as we explore a fantastic cross section of habitat of one of Washington State’s finest natural areas. Predictably good weather in July provides an excellent window of opportunity to capture the “flavor of the Northwest” with your camera.

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
• downloading for automatic image organization
• proper file naming
• cataloging of images
• 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
• using Photoshop to finalize the image: dodging and burning, adjustment layers and layer masking, controlling luminosity and contrast, sharpening for output
• marketing in the digital world

Darrell Gulin has been photographing digitally since he helped introduce Canon’s first Digital Rebel in 2003 at Dana Point, California, and has been using Photoshop since 2001. As one of Canon’s elite Explorers of Light, he travels around the nation presenting programs for Canon.

Jeff Vanuga has been shooting digitally since the introduction of the Canon 1 DS. As an award-winning photographer with pictures in numerous publications and image representation by Corbis and Nature Picture Photography, he shares his expertise in Photoshop and Bridge.

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!