Beyond Beyond Day 3 : Varied Focal Points

Plodding along with Beyond Beyond Lessons ...  I decided I needed to do the lessons in order because they build on each other.   This one looked at varied focus within a shot and then creating a presentation layout.  For this exercise, I used the portrait setting on my Olympus C770 camera.  It's supposed to give you an in-focus subject with a blurred background.   Though I could have also used the Manual Mode with the Canon S90, it needed a battery recharge when I was ready to shoot, after waiting days for the right light--Sheesh!  I even had cue cards written up about how to use the manual focus, and then I find out the battery is dead at the appropriate time.  Good to have a backup!

 

Here's the print layout in Light Room.  The actual layout was pretty simple to do, with Kim's instructions.  I ran into problems when it came time to print to .jpg.   I had missed the setting in the Print Module for this cue, and was only getting prompts to print to a real printer.    (The joys of learning a new program.)  I had to re-watch the video to sort out what I missed.  One little click, and then it all worked.  I was able to pull it into PSE (There must be an easier way-my method was pretty clumsy.)  where I added the text (Journal Font).  I experimented with adding textures to this one, but it didn't seem to need it ...

It might seem like I haven't been doing anything the last 2 weeks, but let me tell ya : There's been a lot of "getting ready" for this class.   Kim talks about how wonderful Light Room is.  So far, I have been reluctant to spend $149 on LR--but I'm warming up to the idea.  I've been using Picasa to organize my pics and do basic edits.  So far, that's been fine.  But I'm starting to realize that Picasa tends to save .psd files as jpg if you save changes to an entire folder.  Ka-Boom! Then I've lost access to the layers I worked so hard to develop.  Doh!   So I'm warming up to the idea of Light Room.  Fortunately, Adobe is currently offering the free beta version of Light Room 5.  So I downloaded that as a kind of free trial.   But that also required an upgrade to my operating system.  One thing leads to another ...   More Delays.  But now things finally seem to be ready to go full-steam ahead.