We are back from a long weekend of dancing at the 2014 USA Dance Mid-Atlantic Championships. No, we did not get a chance to go out on to the floor and actually dance, but we did come away with over 10,000 photos! I have to thank my assistant photographers, and my wife for helping to make it a successful weekend! The editing of all the photos has started, and I hope to have them available at the proofing site by this Saturday.
Similar to other events, we will correct the color for each photo, and crop them as needed. On this occasion, we had a nice setup with our strobe lights. So I do not anticipate much work is needed on most of these. Additionally, we need to sort them by competitor. Likely, that will take the most time until then!
If you add your email list to the event site below, you will get an email as soon as they are ready to view. I will also announce it here on the blog. Back to work for me!
Wow – that last snow storm really packed a punch. Although we are sore from all the shoveling, my Valentine and I will be getting ready for our work weekend. It is a day to setup all the gear, to photograph the USA Dance Mid-Atlantic Championships this weekend. The blog will probably not be updated until at least Monday since we will be busy clicking the shutter, downloading cards, and trying to keep up with all the action this weekend! To keep up with the latest updates, I will try to post updates to the Facebook page and to my Twitter feed. They are much easier to update from the side of the dance floor!
We enjoy starting off our year with this event. With all the different experience levels, and the seeing all of the dancers enjoying the spectacle whether it is the first or fiftieth dancesport competition is so much fun. There are some great photographers helping us this weekend, and we are excited to make some new photos for everyone to enjoy. From our average, it will take at least a week for us to edit the photos, and sort them according to number. It is always a big job, but that is the goal right now. To view all the photos from the event by next Saturday, February 22, 2014, you can go to the proofing site here:
If you add your email list to the mailing list for the event, I will let you know as soon as the photos are ready to view. Have a great weekend, and we hope to see everyone dancing this weekend!
I am working on a personal project to preserve as much of my photo history before everything fades away. My memory will not hold for very long either, I suspect! In some cases, there are some publications where my photos are used, and these larger formats are difficult to preserve digitally. Due to the size of some of these publications, it is not possible to capture the entire spread with one pass of the scanner which is only letter sized. To do this before was a very complicated puzzle-building process. I would have to scan as much of the newspaper-sized pages on the scanner in sections making many different parts that overlapped each other in content. Sometimes, I would have up to 8 different images depending on the size of the print. In this example, I only have 2 separate images:
Photo Merging
As can be seen in this example all the overlap between the text and the images on the page. In older versions of Photoshop, I would bring in both source images, and lay one on top of the other on a large empty background. Then I would reduce the opacity of the top layer, and maneuver it until the overlapping parts were right over each other on the layer below. It was time consuming, but it was possible. In the newer Photoshop versions, there is a nice automated way of doing this. First, open both images in Photoshop, then click on “File > Automate > Photomerge” which bring up this dialog box:
Click the Add Open Files button to add the open images to the process box. Make sure the box – Blend Images Together is selected, then click ‘OK’. Now Photoshop will quickly merge these two images using the overlapping information from each piece to create one large, merged document! This couldn’t be easier. I now only have to make sure that I have lots of overlapping areas from the large print. Knowing that the computer will do all of the aligning, you can scan in as many images as you would like. I have done this with up to 10 different images with no problem.