Hi all, in the interest of learning and growing as a photographer, I want to help you all become greater photographers yourselves! The prize will be a limited edition, signed premium print from yours truly!

Now for the details, I want to see a themed photo from you as well as a quick blurb on your vision and what gear/settings you used. This theme is completely up to your interpretation!

Use my blog entries as well as other resources you may have access to, whether it be people, books, internet articles or other means. It’s wide open to everyone and anyone!

Theme: The color Red.

Please email dan@thinkdan.ca and I will post the entries on my blog. Once these are up I will then judge by a panel of personal photographer buddies.

Contest entry deadline is September 1st at 11:00pm.

Photo must be taken between the dates of July 28 and September 1st.

Final judging to be completed and announced September 15th.

If you have any questions, please email me!

Keep shooting,
Dan

Some photos from my trip at the high river rodeo! It was very exciting and I will go next year for sure!

I took my 55-200mm and 35mm prime for this one. Both had polarizers and I touched up the exposure in Photoshop and cropped a bit to finish.

Check out my Flickr Photostream

Like many people, I taught myself how to use most of Adobe’s great tools such as InDesign, Photoshop, etc. But what most people don’t know is the fast shortcuts and tricks used to improve the workflow or insert that special character you use so frequently. Of course you can find all these in the keyboard short cuts menu, but some are not listed and all are so useful that I thought I would share this with you.

I am on a Mac so it will be different for you PC users and sorry, I do not have the equivalents for you.

W              Preview Mode 
I used this key all the time to get a quick peek at what the document will look like in a finished size with the guides and bleeds taken off.

Alt + “-“         En Dash

Alt + Shift + “-“     Em Dash

Alt + “8”        Bullet
Have you made a bulleted list in your document only to have it disappear when you create a PDF or print your document? I always have done mine manually. It is kind of a pain, but at least you know it works.

Apple + “8”        Make Compound Path
Select a few objects and hit apple + “8” and you can make several object contain the same image! Pretty useful when I was trying to match each frame in a sequence.

Create your master items on their own layer

InDesign has a bit of a fault when it comes to using masters. When you put all your information on the master, it tends to be hidden on your current pages by being arranged at the back! I found this very annoying, so what I did to compensate, is I created a “master” layer where I put all my master things on and made sure that layer was always on top of the document. Then, I just worked on layers below the master layer. See the diagram for a quick explanation.

These are just a few of the quick and easy things that make my work process fast and productive. Try it and let me know how it goes!

“Yo Dan! I like all your photos on thinkdan and flickr… I’m really interested in getting into photography.
What kind of camera should I look into getting?”

-DC

Thanks for emailing DC! I use a Nikon DSLR which is much more than a point and shoot. I would suggest starting with a basic setup like a nikon D5000, D60 or even a D40 and go from there. I would then take some classes or get some books and just shoot. The best way to learn is by doing.

Does this help? Oh and Canon makes a good basic DSLR too. It’s called the Rebel. Can’t go wrong with that one.

Dan

Dan's Kit. Click to flickr.

Some good starting cameras:

• Canon XSi Kit
  
• Nikon D60 Kit

Good books to read:

• Creative Nature & Outdoor Photography
• Designing a Photograph
• Photographic Composition

—

Now that have sent that to him, I need to point out that there is no reason to blame quality of photos on cameras. Yes, they can malfunction, but that happens 1% of the time with the reliability of cameras these days.