CNPA 2025 Convention
Unlock Your Creative Potential with Award Winning Photographers in Our Hands-On Workshops!Morning & Afternoon Workshops AvailableLimited SeatingMembers: $100 Per PersonNon-Members: $125 Per PersonCancellation Deadline: January 6, 2025Reserve Your Spot Today-- Scroll for more details --
Thursday, February 6, 2025 | 8:00 am – 12:00 pmMorning Workshop:Ian Plant: Creative FocusIn this workshop, Ian will discuss and demonstrate techniques for using focus creatively in photography. He'll show you how to achieve what he calls "deep focus" where everything in the photo is tack sharp (which is especially common with landscape photography), discussing depth of field and hyperfocal distance, and demonstrating focus stacking both in the field and in the digital darkroom. He will also demonstrate Photoshop blending techniques when working with specific scene types that make focus stacking difficult. Ian will also discuss creative use of selective focus (which is especially common with wildlife photography), demonstrating field and digital techniques for blurring backgrounds.
Thursday, February 6, 2025 | 8:00 am – 12:00 pmMorning Workshop:Bill Fortney: Macro PhotographyLegendary photographer, Bill Fortney will discuss the most important fundamentals to start enjoying the exciting world of close-up photography better known as "macro photography". Important concepts such as the depth-of-field, magnification, and processing techniques plus necessary equipment for getting tack sharp results will be covered in this workshop. The complex genre of macro photography will be made "simpler" in this workshop.
Thursday, February 6, 2025 | 1:00 PM – 5:00 PMAfternoon Workshop:Ian Plant: Image Processing with PurposeIn this workshop, Ian Plant will demonstrate his own personal digital darkroom workflow, but with a twist. He's not going to show you a bunch of fancy digital tools, but rather he is going to show you a basic workflow that is more focused on the "why" rather than the "how." Digital processing, like every step of the creative process, should be done with intent and purpose. A sharper lens won't help you make better photos, but a sharper creative vision will; similarly, digital processing techniques won't help you make better images if you don't know what to do with them. Most importantly, they won't help you if you don't know what it is that you want to do with them. In this workshop, Ian will share his surprisingly simple and basic processing workflow, which is focused entirely on subtly enhancing and optimizing the creative potential of each photo he takes. His discussion will be focused on what he hopes to accomplish with every step along the way, and how his choices affect composition and mood, which in turn affect how the viewer reacts to the final finished photo. |
Thursday, February 6, 2025 | 1:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Afternoon Workshop:
Dave Kelly: Things No One Tells You in Lightroom!
Lightroom Classic or Lightroom are the best post-production software programs available to the photographer today. When it comes to bringing out detail in an image itis easier and faster than Photoshop. However, it can be a difficult, often confusing program to learn. There are several reasons for this. First, there is not a lot of good instruction out there on how to learn Lightroom, but there is a lot of misinformation and incomplete information in video tutorials and articles. There are also a lot of hidden menus. For example, in the Library module, since the first version of Lightroom years ago, the very smart people at Adobe have had in place a procedure for organizing your images during the import process. None of the Lightroom experts seem to want to teach this. Also, since the beginning, Lightroom has had a way to reorganize your catalog. It doesn’t matter where the images are located on your computer. They can be in folders or collections on your computer’s hard drive or external hard drives, Lightroom knows where they are and can show you how to quickly reorganize them.
In the Develop module, as camera sensors have improved, when recording a RAW file, it’s been reported the sensors are capturing anywhere from eleven to fourteen stops. However, when we get our exposure in the camera with the shutter speed, f-stop and ISO sensitivity, we are limited to a dynamic range from dark to light of five stops. But, just because our camera can only show us five stops, doesn’t mean the detail in the other six or eight stops isn’t there. It is and what this means is the image has a much wider dynamic range and color gamut. Lightroom has kept up, each new version brings more tools and procedures to bring out the detail in those extra stops. So, now, we can recover all the detail in burned out highlights or lost detail in the shadows in any image. We can increase the saturation or luminance in colors. This workshop will show you how to organize and reorganize your images as well as how to bring out more detail in your images using the little-known features present in Lightroom.