Workshops
This in person workshop will be held at the First Baptist Church, 90 North Main St. West Hartford.
The concept of Minimalism in art, architecture and photography will be presented by Stan Tetrault.
Steve Silk will describe and demonstrate the use of a drone in photography.
The creation of small planet images in Photoshop will be described by Meredith Harris.
This in person workshop will be held at the First Baptist Church, 90 North Main St. West Hartford.
This workshop will be a chance to share and discuss our images with other COPS members in an informal setting. We will split into small groups and spend the evening sharing and talking about our images, including giving and receiving feedback on the strong points of the images and potential ways to improve them. This is a great way to learn from each other in a no pressure, non-competitive situation.
Those wishing to take part should bring up to 5 images to be discussed with the group. The pictures can be images on your laptop or prints.
Join us for a fun and enlightening evening.
This in person workshop will be held at the First Baptist Church, 90 North Main St. West Hartford.
Autumn is hands down the best time of year for shooting waterfalls. River flows are back up, the falls are running, and the backdrop of colorful fall foliage makes them ever more scenic. To mark the start of the season, we will host Joe Howard, a North Haven photographer with a passion for waterfalls.
Joe will review all things waterfall. He’ll cover everything from planning and equipment requirements to camera settings, shutter speeds, and post processing. He’ll also share some of his favorite local spots for photographing waterfalls. Joe works at Milford Photo and is developing a YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@WaterfallJoe) devoted to waterfall photography using primarily locations in Connecticut. You can also learn more about Joe, who recently relocated to Connecticut from Missouri, and his work at https://waterfalljoe.com
This in person workshop will be held at the First Baptist Church, 90 North Main St. West Hartford.
Esteemed club members Cindy Gosselin (HonNEC) and Steve Silk, both of Farmington, will present, in person, on the subject of Blending. This workshop will focus on image blending techniques in Photoshop and Lightroom. Cindy Gosselin will demonstrate Photoshop blend modes and their use in creating images comprised of multiple pieces, whether they are textures or pictorial elements such as the moon. Blend modes are one of the key elements, and a crucial step, in refining those combinations to create a subtly manipulated final image.
After Cindy’s presentation, Steve Silk will show us how to perform exposure blending in Lightroom Classic /Adobe Camera Raw to create HDR images which greatly extend the camera’s dynamic range. This is a technique useful to anyone who shoots outdoors, and for those who photograph still life scenes. While the resulting merged images are called HDR, they resemble a regular raw image rather than the kind of crunchy, amped-up scene many of us think is typical with HDR. He will also demonstrate the value of tweaking images before merging them, how to use Lightroom’s masking suite to prepare the initial merge, and to edit the resulting merged raw file.
Though notes on performing the techniques will be available on the COPS website after the workshop, there’s really no substitute for seeing how it’s done in-person, and having the opportunity to ask questions.
NOTE: For UConn basketball fans, assuming that the UConn Men’s basketball team is one of the two teams in the final game of March Madness, Cindy and Steve commit to have their presentations completed no later than 30 minutes before the tipoff of the game so that you can go home to watch it on TV.
This in person workshop will be held at the First Baptist Church, 90 North Main St. West Hartford.
Presented by Lisa and Tom Cuchara, with Cindy Gosselin.
Grab your camera and join us Monday, March 25 to photograph closeup and macro subjects, such as flowers, gears, feathers and more. Following on last month’s wonderful macro program presented by Lisa Cuchara, HonNEC, Lisa and Tom Cuchara, HonNEC, assisted by Cindy Gosselin, HonNEC, will be helping us put what we learned into practice.
BRING YOUR CAMERA to take advantage of the variety of macro and closeup subjects which will be available to photograph. If you have them, Lisa also suggests bringing:
- A tripod
- Cable release
- Macro lens
- Close up filter
- LED light
If you do not have any or all of these items, don’t worry. Come with your camera anyway. There will be plenty to photography, even if you don’t have these items.
This in person workshop will be held at the First Baptist Church, 90 North Main St. West Hartford.
This workshop will provide a chance to share and discuss our images with other COPS members in an informal setting. We will split into small groups and spend the evening sharing and talking about our images, including giving and receiving feedback on the strong points of the images and potential ways to improve them. This is a great way to learn from each other in a no pressure, non-competitive situation.
Those wishing to take part should bring up to 5 images to be discussed with the group. The pictures can be jpeg images (on your laptop) or prints.
Given the predicted icy surfaces for tonight, the abundance of respiratory illnesses, and the number of members expressing concern and/or unable to attend, we have decided to lean towards caution and cancel tonight’s meeting. The Image Sharing and Critique workshop will be rescheduled, so save those images!
This in person workshop will be held at the First Baptist Church, 90 North Main St. West Hartford.
The first workshop of the new year will be a chance to share and discuss our images with other COPS members in an informal setting. We will split into small groups and spend the evening sharing and talking about our images, including giving and receiving feedback on the strong points of the images and potential ways to improve them. This is a great way to learn from each other in a no pressure, non-competitive situation.
Those wishing to take part should bring up to 5 images to be discussed with the group. The pictures can be jpeg images (on your laptop) or prints.
This in person workshop will be presented by Jim Brodey at the First Baptist Church, 90 North Main St. West Hartford.
During this workshop we will explore three programs to generate images from text prompts. There are a good number of programs to do this, but we will focus on Firefly, Midjourney and DALL-E 3. We will compare images that have been previously created using these programs and will generate new images from prompts during the meeting. Club members are encouraged to participate. Anyone who has “played” with these programs can offer input. If members have particular prompts that they would like to try, we can generate images using those prompts during the meeting (subject to available bandwidth). We will also discuss including one’s own photographs into the prompt and then asking the program to add to it or modify it. The field of artificial intelligence and generative image making is developing rapidly. In the past month all three of the programs mentioned above have made significant changes. Hopefully people will get excited about this field and the art that can be created.
For those interested, an excellent group of videos focused on setting up and using Midjourney can be found at this link. (Firefly and DALL-E 3 are a bit less complex.)
This in person meeting is dedicated to smart phone photography.
An overview of using phones for photography, including some tips and tricks, will be presented by Steve Silk and Meredith Harris.
Gert Perry will provide an overview of Snapseed for photo editing on a cellphone. The Snapseed App is available for iPhones and for Android phones. Snapseed is very user friendly and has 29 Tools and Filters. You can choose from “Looks” (where the photo is totally manipulated by the app) and/or “Tools” (where editing is done item by item, like with Photoshop). As Gert says, “All you need to begin work with it are three items: a digital image, the free Snapseed app, and a finger to edit with!” Gert will show a 15-minute tutorial by History Ben with her comments interspersed as she pauses the video. We also encourage members to share your favorite photography apps for smart phones.
The workshop will be in person at the First Baptist Church, 90 North Main St. West Hartford.
This will be a chance to share and discuss your images with other COPS members in an informal setting.
The workshop will be in person at the First Baptist Church, 90 North Main St. West Hartford.
Arthur Vaughan, HonNEC, NECCC Print Competition Director, will be presenting the “Best of NECCC Prints” on Monday, March 13 at 7:15 PM. Award winning color and monochrome prints from the 2022 New England Camera Club Council (NECCC) conference and the NECCC Interclub Prints of the Year will be shown, with insightful live commentary from Art, an experienced and accomplished photographer and print maker. Enjoy outstanding prints from landscapes to portraits, wildlife to still life, creative and beyond. Art is coming from North Andover, MA to present to us. Please join us for this always popular program.
The workshop will be in person at the First Baptist Church, 90 North Main St. West Hartford. If inclement weather forces a change, a MailChimp notice will be sent by 3 PM that day.
The workshop will be in person at the First Baptist Church, 90 North Main St. West Hartford.
Beat the winter photography blues at the February Workshop where we will demonstrate how to set up and shoot a variety of indoor projects. This will be a hands-on workshop, so bring your camera. You will have the opportunity to
photograph crystal balls, water droplets, oil and water abstracts, and light-pad still lifes.
What to bring:
Camera with general lens
Tripod (if you have one)
Macro lens (if you have one)
Come even if you don’t have a tripod or macro lens. You will still have photo opportunities.
Click on an item below to download instructions for:
Lens ball photography
Light box photography
Oil and water abstract photography
Water drop photography
Frozen flowers – we didn’t do this, but give it a try!
The workshop will be in person at the First Baptist Church, 90 North Main St. West Hartford.
We are pleased to kick off 2023 with a workshop presentation by Steve Silk of the new masking adjustments available in Lightroom (and Photoshop Camera Raw). The last two big updates of Lightroom included easy-to-use masking tools to provide a wide range of control over every aspect of your image. From enhancing the sky to brightening the whites of the eyes in a portrait, what were once complicated, time-consuming techniques are now literally as easy as pushing a button. We’ll review the use of these game-changing tools and show how you can use them to enhance photos, no matter what kinds of picture you like to take. Although the presentation will be from Lightroom, the new tools are also available in Camera Raw in Photoshop, so Photoshop users will also find this workshop beneficial.
The workshop will be in person at the First Baptist Church, 90 North Main St. West Hartford.
The November 14 workshop will be a chance to share and discuss your images with other COPS members in an informal setting. We will split into small groups and spend the evening sharing and talking about our images, including giving and receiving feedback on the strong points of the images and potential ways to improve them. This is a great way to learn from each other in a no pressure, non-competitive situation. Groups will be moderated by Gert Perry, Pam Hastings and Steve Silk.
Those wishing to take part should bring up to 5 images to be discussed with the group. The pictures can be digital images (on your laptop) or prints. If you would like to share digital images, but do not have a laptop, contact one of the moderators by Thursday Nov. 10 to discuss alternatives. You are welcome to come without images to listen to the discussion, but we hope you will bring a few. Join us for a fun and enlightening evening.
Last season, Steve Potashner prepared a workshop for Charter Oak describing how to use post-processing to:
1 – Change the background on an image
2 – Use exposure blending to fix dynamic range issues
He was unavoidably unable to present the workshop last winter, but he is making the materials from the workshop available. Steve’s step-by-step instructions for these processes, as well as images to practice on, can be found on Google Drive by clicking here.
