Response to our workshop in Provence has been gratifying.  There are now only a few spots left for this photographic adventure.  If you have been thinking about joining us, don’t leave it much longer.  Email me at workshops@pacificlight.ca, or just call +1-604-307-2451
Still can’t make up your mind?  To help you along, here are my TOP TEN reasons NOT to join a photographic workshop in Provence… and why I think you should ignore them.

1. It’s too expensive

It’s true that travel to Europe is more expensive than a day at the beach. But a little creative planning can significantly reduce your costs. For example, booking a ticket on a regular scheduled airline from your nearest major airport to Marseille probably represents the most expensive way to get there. This is particularly true of your itinerary forces you to change airlines along the way. On the other hand, travel to the major centers in Europe, such as London or Paris, is often available at very competitive prices. "So what?" you say, the workshop is out of Marseille! Well, here’s the deal… air travel within Europe is incredibly cheap by North American standards. Ryan Air (www.ryanair.com), and Easyjet (www.easyjet.com) fly out of the airports around London, to Marseille.  Fares on these airlines are often less than $50 each way.  In Paris, AirFrance considers itself in competition with the railway system, and prices tickets to locations like Marseille very competitively. Choosing to fly into London or Paris for a few days (or more) ahead of time can potentially save you hundreds of dollars. On top of that, you will have the opportunity to see another great destination in Europe and recover from the inevitable jet-lag.

A good travel agent can help you sort through the various options, but just by way of comparison, let’s look at a few examples.

From my home town of Vancouver, Canada, the lowest scheduled airfare currently available (for travel next June) on Expedia or Travelocity is about $CAD 1,600. However, these flights require stops in one of Calgary, Ottawa, or Toronto as well as Frankfurt, and they take between 14 and 22 hours to complete. Another option avoids multiple connections and gets you there in about 14 hours… but costs over $CAD 2,000!!  These fares may drop in the next few months as the airlines sharpen their pencils for the summer travel season.  But they at least serve as an example for now.

In contrast, flying Air Transat (a great charter airline) to Paris direct costs $CAD 1,110, and you arrive in just over 11 hours. Spend a few days in the "City of Lights", then board a $CAD 170 return Air France flight to Marseille, and an hour and half later I’ll be welcoming you to the warmth of southern France. Total cost From Vancouver to Marseille – ($1,110 + $170) $1,280, a savings of $320 to over $700!

Of course if you prefer, the train from Paris (Gare de Lyon) to the TGV station in Aix-en-Provence is a pleasant trip of about three hours, and costs about the same or a bit less than the fight to Marseille. I will pick you up in Aix if this is your preference.

Similar comparisons can be made out of most US cities as well.

2. I’m not good enough as a photographer

I love this one. It’s compete non-sense of course. Photography is a journey, not an Olympic event. We are all at different places along the path of that journey, and there are no medals for first place.  Becoming a better photographer happens only through practicing your craft. In my workshops it’s always a source of pleasure for me to see how quickly photographers improve their craft and their vision when they take the time to immerse themselves in a supportive learning environment with other like minded individuals.  So, if practice is the only way to improve, why not practice in an area that has inspired artists for centuries?

3. I don’t speak the language

Not an issue. It would be difficult to find yourself in a situation where absolutely no one spoke English in any major center in France. Perhaps not so much in smaller rural towns; but even there, a smattering of high school French will help, and most all people I have encountered in my years of travelling to France have been more than willing to help out a confused traveler. Sometimes this was accomplished by a combination of a few words of broken French, combined with a lot of arm waving and pointing, but the outcome was always positive. Many people in Europe are not just bi-lingual, but multi-lingual. This is a necessity forced on them by their close proximity to many different cultures and languages. As a result, and this is something we in North America often fail to appreciate, the seeming unwillingness of some Europeans to speak English to us, arises not from arrogance or contempt, but because they are linguistic purists; if they cannot converse fluently in a language other than their own, they would rather not suffer the embarrassment of trying and speaking poorly. They do however seem to appreciate a visitor’s attempt, however poor, to speak a few words of French.

4. I don’t have the right equipment

Another one I love. If you think this is so, I want to you to write this on a big piece of paper and tape some where you will see it every day:

"The only piece of equipment that really matters is six inches behind the camera".

Fancy equipment is nice to have; but developing your vision will help you create far stronger images than newest camera or whiz-bang accessory ever will.

All you need for this workshop is an SLR camera (film or digital) and one or two lenses that will carry you from a reasonable wide-angle to a moderate telephoto, and a tripod. With this I guarantee you will return home with amazing images!

5. I can’t take the time away from work

Time is the one thing that none of us can create more of. Our busy twenty-first century lives seem to leave us with less and less time for the truly important experiences we have always promised ourselves – - – "some day". If you have ever taken a course on time management, you may recall one of the first things you learned: "you have to schedule time to do the things that are important to you."  At the end of our lives, no one will say, "Gee, I wish I had spent more time at the office!"

6. I’ve never been to Europe; it might be difficult to find my way around.

Europe is used to tourists; it’s a significant part of the economy. Airports, Bus and Train Stations are all set up to assist non-native speaking visitors. In all my travels throughout Europe, I have yet to find myself in a situation where I could not find someone willing to help me find where I needed to go. People are people no matter where you travel, and are almost universally willing to help a visitor.

7. I’m an accomplished photographer and I probably won’t learn anything new

After more than 30 years, I think I have only just scratched the surface as an image maker. As a more advanced photographer, you are no doubt looking for new challenges. Provence is such an incredibly image rich environment, I know you will find your inner creativity satisfied in new ways as never before.

8. I’ve heard that pick-pockets are everywhere in Europe; my gear or my wallet is likely to be stolen.

You are no more likely to be the victim of crime in Europe than in any comparable North American city. In fact, violent crime is far less common in Europe than in North America.  In Europe, as in North America, if you simply use common sense and remain aware of your surroundings, you are very unlikely to have any problems.

9. The trip there and back is too long.

Depending on where you are travelling from it can take the better part of a day to get there. At 6’2", getting comfortable on a long plane ride is something at which I have never been very successful. Those inflatable neck cushions available from travel stores can help. It’s also important to drink lots of water – to stay hydrated. An aisle seat is a better choice for a taller person, as it will give you a chance at a bit more leg room.  Breaking the trip up into manageable segments, such as a stopover in Paris or London, as I described in Reason 1 above, can also reduce the wear and tear of trying to accomplish the entire journey in one go.

10. I’ve got lots of time… I’ll go someday (just not right now.)

Much wiser people than I have have the best advice for you on this one:

 

Carpe diem quam minimum credula postero
("Seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the future.")

Horace, Roman poet, 23 BCE

Enjoy yourself.  It’s later than you think. 

Chinese Proverb

Dream as if you’ll live forever.  Live as if you’ll die today.

James Dean

And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count.

It’s the life in your years.

Abraham Lincoln

You will never find time for anything.  If you want time, you must make it. 

Charles Buxton

As you grow older, you’ll find the only things you regret are the things you didn’t do.

Zachary Scott

Most of us spend our lives as if we had another one in the bank.

Ben Irwin

When your life flashes before your eyes, make sure you’ve got

plenty to watch.

Author unknown

Life moves pretty fast.

If you don’t stop to look around once in a while you could miss it.

Ferris Bueller

How did it get so late so soon?

It’s night before it’s afternoon.

December is here before it’s June.

My goodness how the time has flewn.

How did it get so late so soon?

Dr. Seuss

We’re fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance.

Japanese Proverb

"All you have to decide, is what to do with the time

that is given to you"

Gandalf

I hope you will join us in Provence, it’s going to be an amazing trip!

 

Along with all the conflicting approaches to image sharpening, the choice of an appropriate print resolution has more well intentioned but ill informed opinions that just about anything I can think of.  Print resolution is important because we want our prints to display all the fine detail our camera captured.  If your chosen resolution is too low, your print will look like a highway billboard viewed from three feet; if it’s too high you’ll waste ink, and might even end up with a lower quality print.

First off, don’t confuse print resolution with the dot patterns laid down by your printer:  the promotional literature for your printer might proclaim that it can lay down 2880 dots per inch, but this is not the same as print resolution.  Your printer lays down ink dots of varying sizes in complex patterns to achieve the perception of fine detail, using many ink dots to represent a single image pixel.  When we talk about setting print resolution, we’re talking about the numbers and settings in the Image>Image Size dialog in Photoshop.  Choosing the settings in this dialog will be one of the last decisions we make prior to sending an image to our printer (just before we do our final round of sharpening for our specific image size, resolution and output device).

If you were to open the Image Size dialog, you might see something like this:

This dialog is telling us that if we take the 5281 pixels making up the long side of our image, and spread them 240 to the inch across the page, we have just enough pixels to produce an image about 22 inches on the long side.  Now, if you use the same number of pixels to produce a smaller print, you would obviously end up with more pixels to the inch… go larger and you would end up with fewer to the inch.  And it is here, when we try to pick the appropriate number of pixels for a particular size of image, that all the confusion arises.  Some say that you should always print at 300 ppi, others say to print at 360ppi or some multiple of this (but only when the moon is full and Jupiter aligns with Mars!)

So how many pixels to the inch do you need to create an image that appears sharp and detailed?   Think about this for a minute, and you’ll realize that there isn’t much point in creating a print with detail finer than the human eye can see.  It’s also intuitively obvious that if you hold a print closer you can perceive finer detail than if you hold it farther away.  The "flip-side" of this is that a print that you would naturally view from a greater distance can have a lower resolution than one that you would naturally view close-up, and appear just as sharp.  (This is of course why that highway billboard can get away with golf ball size dots.)

When we view large prints we have a natural tendency to stand back and view them from a greater distance.  For most people a comfortable print viewing distance is something between one and two times the length of the diagonal of the print.  If you combine a comfortable viewing distance with the limits of the average person’s visual acuity, and translate all this into print resolution, you end up with ideal resolution numbers for prints of different sizes.

 

Let’s go back and look at Photoshop’s Image Size dialog:

Notice that the “Resample Image:” box is checked.  When this is so, I can change any of the Pixel Dimensions (Width and Height), the Document Size (Width and Height), or the Resolution.  If I change any one of them, the the number of pixels in our image will change.  When the Resample Image box is checked and we change the Size or Resolution of our image, Photoshop must either make up or remove pixels in our image to match the changes we make in this dialog.

Now, uncheck the “Resample Image” box.  The “Pixel Dimensions” boxes immediately becomes greyed out, and cannot be changed.  If we now change the size of the Document (say, for example I decide to print this image at 10” X 15”).  I am now taking the same number of pixels and spreading them over a smaller image, with the result of course that the number of pixels per inches increases.

“So what?”, you might say.  Well, the difference here is that when the “Resample Image” box is unchecked, Photoshop only sends the original “native” pixels to your printer, without making any up, or taking any away.  And here’s the kicker: it’s always better to send the native pixels to your printer, rather than having Photoshop make any up or take any away.  “Made up” pixels are just Photoshop’s best guess at the pixel information need to fill in the gaps, and will never equal the sharpness and detail of the original pixels in your image.  Your printer does a much better job at deciding how to arrange the pixel information on your print for maximum detail than does Photoshop (this is the opposite of the decision we make with color management, where there is no way we want the printer to mess with the colors in our images!)

So, go back to the table above relating different print sizes to optimal print resolution.  Turns out, with cameras of about 10 Megapixels and above, leaving the “Resample Image” box unchecked and using just the “native pixels” of your image will generally result in a print with resolution that falls within the guidelines of table.  For example, a 12.8 Megapixel Canon 5D (4368 X 2922 pixels) can produce an 8 X 12 print with 364 pixels per inch, and a 16 X 24 @ 180 pixels per inch, using just “native pixels” … both within the guidelines for producing images with all the detail that the average person can discern at a reasonable viewing distance.

Here’s the “Rule of Thumb”:

1. Start by un-checking the the “Resample Image” box when you set your final output size.
2. Set your print size as desired and have a look at the Resolution box, if you are between 180 and 480 pixels per inch at your final print size, you’re good to go!
3. One caution:  don’t be tempted to “push the envelope” beyond 480 ppi: your print will not improve, and most print drivers will have difficulty with this much data, possibly resulting in a less than perfect print.

Can’t get to 180 ppi with the native pixels in your image file?  That’s a topic for another day… and Lesson 3 in my course “The Art of Printing and Selling Your Art”.