How to Make The Ordinary Extraordinary with Raymond Gehman Mar 22-24, 2010

© Palm Beach Photographic Centre

Members: $495 • Non-members: $545 • Prerequisites: None

Space Limited to 12 participants.

Description

Raymond Gehman has spent 20 years on assignment for National Geographic, creating three magazine covers and numerous books and articles. But always mindful to shoot “something for myself,” he would save time and film for more imaginative pictures of ordinary subjects without worrying so much about sharpness, content, edges, or telling a story. He discovered that art could be found anywhere, that you don’t have to travel far or away. With the advent of the digital age, Raymond quickly embraced digital shooting, realizing it was a great tool for freeing up the way a person artistically captures visual sensations.

Join Raymond for this three-day workshop as he teaches you how to transform everyday subjects into the mysterious, the enchanting,  the bizarre. On the first morning he will present his own artwork to suggest how you can open up your internal world and allow it to affect the way you perceive ordinary external subjects. On field trips during the first afternoon and second morning you will learn how to photograph the commonplace in imaginative fashion, creating your own personal, artistic images in-camera. On the second afternoon you will be introduced to computer laboratory instruction on downloading and editing processes for selecting your best images. During the third day you will be treated to  individualized, hands-on experience with his original style of down-home Photoshop wizardry: RGB color tweaking; selective saturation and de-saturation; selective color; and inverting and equalizing. You will experiment with the filter gallery including artistic, brush strokes, texture, blur, distort, and stylize techniques. You will explore the tool palette: the clone stamp; spot and healing brushes; magic wand; the lassos; burn, dodge, and sponge; paint bucket; and smudge and brush tools, among others.

The ultimate goal of mastering these techniques, tools and filters is the creation and enrichment of your artistic images. You will complete this workshop knowing how to compose fine (or funky!) artistic images in-camera, get them safely into the computer, recognize the best frames, and then apply Photoshop to the point where your extraordinary and surreal vision of color and light pops off the screen and out into orbit!

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Biography

RAYMOND GEHMAN has worked for National Geographic Society since 1986. With three cover photographs and numerous books and articles, he has been on assignment in Yellowstone, Wyoming’s Bighorn Country, Florida’s Sanibel Island Gulf Coast, the Canadian Rockies, the rain forests of Belize, Icelandic glaciers and icebergs, deep, dark Polish forests, and rural China during the People’s Republic 50th anniversary celebration. He has documented grizzly bears, the vanishing prairie dog and wetlands, the ecology of fire, the aftermath of hurricanes, hot pools, and nocturnal Apache ceremonial dancers. Previously, he studied fine arts photography at Northern Virginia Community College and earned a degree in photojournalism from the renowned School of Journalism at the University of Missouri, Columbia. He worked for 11 years as a newspaper photojournalist in Montana and Virginia. Recently he has concentrated on more personal digital artwork, turning the ordinary into the extraordinary by shooting everything from apples to oranges, flowers to flying light domes, and glass globes to transcendent trucks, and transforming these subjects into dazzling impressionistic imagery. In 2010 his work will be exhibited from Virginia to Houston to Colorado.

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