As many of you have figured out, we stopped our monthly flicker photo blog challenge, much to my dismay. Flickr’s desire to dumb itself down, into little more than a mobile app proved to be the death rattle for our monthly project which was going really well, bringing in hundreds of submissions for our monthly contests. C’est la vie.
Well, with these lemons, I’d like to make lemonade because lemonade is awesome, especially if you only use half the recommended sugar and watch your unsuspecting friends, and young children drink it.
I’ve been in conversation with my friends at Alien Skin Software, and have had the great fortune to be both a contributor to their blog, and a beta tester for many of their programs over the years, the newest of which is the yet to be released, Exposure update. As a long time fan of Exposure, I’m excited to see the final version. With this new project, I’d like to gauge interest in having a retouching tutorial, where by I process and retouch submitted images using Exposure, which may then be shared with many, many thousands of viewers here and through the Alien Skin blog. Come on in for more details, and my hope for this collaboration…
Photography can be a lot of things to a lot of people, and I really love what it has provided me over the years. I enjoy most all facets of photography, and admittedly enjoy networking with other like minded photographers and photography related companies to further grow the reach of my, and my collaborative cohorts imagery.
This won’t be for everyone, but if you’re interested in seeing how I might approach post processing or retouching one of your images, which can help get that image in front of a larger audience through the site here, and via Alien Skin, I’d love to chat.
I’m looking for photographers of all walks of life, who would be willing to share an image with me solely for the purpose of doing these post processing and retouching articles, not so that I can sell off your images and retire from the royalties. They’d be used in a step by step tutorial post, where I’d explain how, what and why I was doing what I’m doing. The hope is that we can all follow along to learn how to achieve some fun results. For these, I’d be using Alien Skin Exposure, which you can downloaded the full trial for free, and if wanted, can be purchased for 10% off at anytime using the discount code “tysonrobichaud”.
The before and after images would be shared here, and potentially on a recurring blog post via Alien Skin’s website as well. I’ll link to your website, blog, flickr page, neighbor’s facebook timeline, (or nothing) whatever you’d like. That way people will be able to find you as well. I’d then love to send you the finished product as I’d processed it.
Because I do love community collaboration, I’d also love to hear your thoughts on any other way we can make this fun.
So, what do you say? If you’re interested, or would like to have an image retouched for free, email me through the CONTACT ME page (click here).
I hope to be able to fold this all into some fun promotions and giveaways in the coming months as well to help fill the void left by our monthly challenges… I’m still pissed at Flickr for their shenanigans.
I’d love to connect via the socials. Find me on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Instagram. If you would like to receive email notifications as I post new articles, please feel free to add your email address at the top right of the page here as well.
Thanks everyone. I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes.
Happy shooting!
Tyson
Tyson Robichaud Photo-blography 
I’m curious. In what ways has Flickr dumbed itself down? I post photos there, but don’t really use other features, so I’ve probably missed what you’re talking about
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Hi Dan,
Flickr has long been the largest and most well rounded community for group based discussions. It took me a little while to figure it out, but when joining groups, and visiting the conversation threads, it was, for years, the busiest place on the web for any gear or technique based inquiries, discussions, et al. With their recent movement toward trying to be an instagram competitor, they’ve largely buried the community aspects, and while still somewhat active, they’ve fallen off substantially. Just as people start to find their way back to them (which is honestly the single best aspect of Flickr in my opinion) they further redesign the site. There are plenty of places to store images, there are plenty of sites to build up a bit of a portfolio, allowing one to divide images into projects or events, there are plenty of forums, but there are no other sites that have been able to be so good at being all three. 500px is close, but it is a bit more elitist in my experience, making it harder for the average photographer to feel comfortable posing a question or the like.
It’s really too bad, and while I understand the need to revamp to stay up with the times, I just can’t figure out why they took the best part of flickr, and essentially ignored it.
Oh well, we evolve or we die I guess 🙂
Thanks Dan.
t
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Ah, well I use Facebook for community discussion on photography. If you were to set up a mirrorless group I’d certainly sign up….
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Thanks Dan. I’ll keep it in mind, but if you ever find yourself over on Flickr, check out the groups. TONS of good info there.
A few I frequent, and find useful:
TRP Group: https://www.flickr.com/groups/1342580@N24/
Micro 4/3 Group:
Oly OMD group:
Sony a7 series group:
Travel Light Photography:
I’ve personally joined nearly 200 groups, and either admin or mod about a half dozen. There are groups for most any lens, camera, software, technique or general inquiry you could think of there, and up until a few months ago, were very well attended. Now, most of the active groups are bubbling to the top of the feed, but there are still a lot of active threads.
Cheers,
t
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I think this idea of you retouching images through Alien skin exposure is quite interesting…it really sounds fun to me and I would be willing to send you an image or 2….and while we are on Alien skin do you ever use Blow Up 3…is it any good…and how does it compare to Resize ? I think that is an on 1 product….I am new to instagram…and still do not know what I am doing on it…but in social media…it is all about pictures…maybe we could incorporate instagram somehow into a monthly challenge…but like I say i am not all that familiar with that and it could be totally undoable and insane . Be well
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Hi Sven,
I’d love to have you submit an image! It will certainly be a bit of a challenge for me as well, as AS Exposure is becoming more powerful with each release, and while I use AS Exp on most every image I run through Photoshop, I often use other techniques and plugins to fine tune my images.
As for instagram, it is a wonderful bit of social media in my opinion. In fact, it is my favorite social media platform because I can visit it, spend two minutes, like pictures and be done. It’s nowhere near the commitment or time suck that FB is. Where it makes me a little leery though, is because of it’s affiliation with FB, I would never host any kind of tutorial type stuff on there due to the horrible rights grab TOS they have in place. I use it, and I enjoy it, but I’ll do everything I can to keep my stuff away from it in any serious way, and I’d not feel comfortable sharing other people’s photography through FB or its affiliates. I’ll link articles to FB, and occasionally share some of my own small images, but that’s about it. This was and is where Flickr is so much better if looking to host collaborative photographic projects or the like. We as photographers have the ability to control the usage, and while it is impossible to secure your images if and when you put them up on line, there are at least some comforts knowing that if you post on Flickr, you still can control the rights, entirely, in a legal sense anyway. On FB, anything posted is open game for them, or anyone really. They can use it for promotion without permission, and depending on where we are with their TOS, they’ve been able to sell images for profit and anything posted on FB falls into that trap. BS as far as I’m concerned.
Thanks for the read, Sven. I hope all is well!
Cheers,
Tyson
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You know Sven, I skipped over the BlowUp question. I’ve not personally tried it myself, but I have heard good things about it. I rarely print that large, but I do actually have a project where I’m going to have to print a 2.5m tall by 3m wide image for a tradeshow here soon, so… Might need to ask the AS folks 🙂
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Tyson,
I’d love to send you one or more of my images. You know I’m just a beginner and it would be interesting to me to see what you could do with them. You describing the steps along the way in the post processing would be very instructive to me. Let me know what you think. By FM or otherwise. If you don’t think what I’ve posted is good enough I wont take offence! 🙂
Billy
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Oh, you’re being modest 🙂 Pick an image and email it to me. If you do have the ability to send a RAW file, all the better, but whatever works. I’ll try my best to work through them all, and may present a short list to AS for their choice on the blog. We’ll see 😉
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This is great idea. I’ll see if I can dig out a favourite RAW of mine and send it over to you. Would be interesting to see what you do with them if you pick mine. I mean, your images blow me away, would be really cool to see a before and after process. Great idea bud
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