Digital and Visual Literacy with Julieanne Kost
At Penn State University
It was an information-packed three days at Penn State, with the undisputed star of the event, Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom Evangelist Julieanne Kost, sharing tips, tricks, insights and inspiration with faculty, students, staff, as well as me and a couple of my colleagues from Adobe.
Julieanne's casual teaching style lends itself very well to well to groups ranging in experience levels. Indeed, there were many who attended who didn't know tools like Lightroom CC Mobile existed. And even if they knew about the app, many did not realize how powerful an app it is, or its part in a full 360-degree photographic workflow.
By the end of the workshops, this group had learned.
From her keynote address to the engaging lectures and workshops, Julieanne covered a lot of ground. Showcasing her work as a "lens-based artist" (I am definitely stealing that description for my own use) in her keynote address, she shared he process for creating diptychs and composites, and how the texts from books and poems inspired her work.
The daytime lectures and workshops covered the gamut: Lightroom CC Mobile, Lightroom CC and Lightroom Classic CC, Photoshop, Adobe Spark, Adobe Capture, Behance and Adobe Portfolio, visual storytelling, pre-visualization, post-processing, and the importance of creating personal projects - and seeing them through to the end.
Out of the approximately 400 people who attended various sessions throughout the week, I don't think anyone left without learning something new - if not many new things.
Attendees also had a chance to try out their new skills and share the results on Instagram. Check out this link to see the contributions.
Always Experiment
The two images below are the same photo, imagined differently thanks to Lightroom. This was a sunrise shot from my hotel room. The first image is a relatively faithful rendition (or if you've read my project "What is a Photograph?" a performance) of the sunrise. The second one was inspired by the talks that Julieanne gave. The manmade objects in the scene felt almost alien, and definitely industrial, so I played with Hue, Saturation and Luminance to bring out an otherworldly, dystopian feel to the photo.
Always experiment - and I would add to this - learn from the "failures" or accidents.The lower four images are all the results of experimenting with the Long Exposure feature in Lightroom Mobile CC. This tech preview feature stacks multiple captures of the same scene over a timeframe of 1 - 5 seconds, then it looks for the areas with apparent movement, and blends them together to create an image with motion.
Using a mobile device (my iPhone) that really doesn't allow for traditional long exposures, you can create these images handheld, or on a tripod. I think I tripod might be beneficial for better sharpness, but these images were all handheld shots. But notice that there are a couple "accidents". This is typically a result of my trying to take too many different photos too quickly. Creating these final images is very processor intensive; the longer the exposure, the more frames are captured (30/second, I believe), so imagine your poor phone having to to align and blend up to 150 photos into one final image. Sometimes, odd things happen - especially when you are impatient - lol. I have a few example of these accidents, but I have not been able to replicate the results consistently, just yet. Regardless of the occasional error, I think this is an ingenious feature.
The capstone to our event was a visit the the Berkey Creamery on the Penn State campus. There's a rumour that the cream (read, fat) content is so high in this ice cream that it can't be sold anywhere else AS ice cream. I don't know if the rumour is true, but the ice cream was melt-in-your-mouth-delicious. I had caramel apple cinnamon - yummy.
All in all, the Penn State visit was valuable to everyone who attended. To me, personally, it was just what I needed to motivate me to try out new techniques and get some current projects completed.
