Once upon a time, we budding photographers had to make our way to the back of a decent bookshop to find something that could help us learn and develop our techniques. Some many photo books were just the photos themselves and it wasn’t easy to find the right book with what you were looking for, be it editing or taking. And when you did, by the time the book was published, it was out of date as the next “big” camera breakthrough or software update had just been launched.
As for a book about Photoshop…the early ones were the size of the old phone books and you had to get a new one when a fresh version was launched; knowing that 95% of it was the same as the one you already had!
Around 20 years ago – 14th February 2005 – some people launched this video-sharing thing called YouTube. And all changed after that.
Nowadays, when we want to find out the “how to…” or “where to…”, YouTube will invariably have more than enough people happy to offer you an answer or solution.
For us photographers, we can spend days trawling through the videos of a whole host of both professional and not so professional people who have shared their knowledge. I think most of the professional people I subscribe to did not have any sort of photography career before YouTube! It has given many people a new life and direction; all from a hobby!
For us at Photocraft, we had not tried this sort of evening before. I know many other clubs have regular YouTube nights and the plan for our debut was to try and show variety in both the taking of the image and the editing process.
I am grateful to Alfred, Martin D, David P, David M and Chris R for suggesting many useful and different videos for us to enjoy.
We went from Vietnam (for the street photography) to Kennington (home of the Camera Club in the “glass and bottle” video) and swapped between Lightroom and Photoshop a few times. The various ways we saw to create work was fascinating; the young chap with the cars taken on his phone was altogether different.
We saw quick ways to remove halos, to change camera settings, to remove “anything” in Photoshop, to create better black and white images, to sharpen in an old school stylee and more.
We had accents and delivery styles that made us sit up or cringe. We had some “sponsors” getting in the way and some music in the background – not all of it adding anything to the pictures!
Perhaps the best thing was that we all watched these together and so could react and comment together rather than being at home and just watching on the PC/Mac/TV/insert viewing device of your choice here.
The compiled, full playlist is here:
For those in the hall, as you will recall, we did not watch the videos in the order shown on the playlist. Also, we did not get to see all of the videos. I think all are worth watching as they cover a wide variety of skills and insights. With that in mind, it was good to hear a few members comment that they had not heard of some of the presenters we featured; as it should be really. There is just so much out there.
I hope this is something that those present enjoyed. I think we should do this again, more than once, next season. Please let me have any suggestions for videos or people you think we will benefit from seeing and learning from.
Thank you.
Brilliant blog of time line history of many aspects of photography up to the present
time. Thank you Brian.