Black Pearl

I don't actually use Photoshop anywhere near its potential so forgive a simple question: What and why a Mask?

Wow, wow and triple wow. What a brilliant experience and a set of shots you could never hope to take otherwise.

Rourke

Mouse

Gimp is an open source version of Photoshop so would be ideal for what you need.

Create a duplicate layer. Blur the background one. Erase the top one to let the blur show through. You can zoom right into the edges and erase them with a small soft edged brush. If you make a slight mistake you can hit undo. but..... It can take a while if its a tricky outline.

A new forum - A new start - A new POTW - not that there's any pressure or anything. There is no way I can capture the forum in a single shot this week as it really is flying, everyone has pulled together and its getting back to what it was - a place to come and enjoy images, have a laugh and be friends. So what I'm going to do is go back to the very core of the POTW ethos - I'm going to pick an image I love. There are so many great images this week that I'm not going to say this is the best, I'm not going to say its better than any other it is simple the one I want to frame and put on my wall. Picture Of The Week then: See it here.

For you canon shooters: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFcQI68njaQ

Wonder what that will cost and whether Whitburn will get it - I still can't get fibre-optic broadband.

It might be the wrong way up buts its still an A

Lots of info here: http://www.militaryairshows.co.uk/airshowphotographybasics.htm Makes your eyes go funny mind.

Just a bit of a laugh thread so post as many as you like - thought it might be fun to just let it run and see what sort of odd pictures turn up.

Definitely an A.

Kind of. If I know the area I'll go out with a vision in the back of my mind of the sort of image I'm after. I'm not sure I'm dedicated or focused enough to know if the shots I bring back are 'the ones' or 'consolation' shots. It's different if shooting for someone else as their will be a tight brief but for me I'm happy to go with the flow and change the vision as I go a along. Crackin' shot by the way - what/where is it?

A mate of mine swears by his back focus button - actually he swears at cameras that don't have them which is odd as he's ordered a D600 but I digress - as he likes to be able to focus on a landscape at the point of the frame that he chooses then have the focus stay there until he's taken a shot, regardless of how many times he presses the shutter button. I kind of get where you're both coming from but I can't get used to it - different styles of shooting I assume. I would recommend anyone who has the button to give it a try as they may just fall in love with that technique. Look for this button or the one next to it that can be programmed in the way fuzzy explains.

Two weeks it is then - get snapping kiddies...

Grabbed from Facebook so a bit rough but that kind of sums me up.

Time to start fresh with some new TOP TUNES: A mate of mine was 1st AC/Focus Puller on this video.

Until we get bored with A's and go onto B's - or should I just say a week then change it?

Brilliant - and..... Two A's for the price of one:

How about a simple challenge to get things up and running again and get our creative juices flowing. We'll start with the letter A - for fairly obvious reasons - so all you need to do is find something with a large/prominent/obvious A in/on it and take a pic. Get out and about over the next few days, photograph your A's then when we have a few we'll move on....bet you can't guess what to.