Rich Seiling Teaches B&W Printmaking Workshop

Join WCI Founder Rich Seiling for a week in Yosemite to hone your craft with his latest workshops B&W Printmaking: Classic Fine Art Aesthetics- Digital Tools, presented by The Ansel Adams Gallery.

B&W photography provides a deeply expressive means for personal communication. Using the vocabulary of tone, density, contrast, boldness, and subtlety to render light and physical subjects onto a print, B&W provides photographers with a language that is unique to this medium.

This workshop is designed to unlock your potential to express yourself through B&W prints made with digital tools.

Our primary focus will be unlocking the mysteries of Photoshop through demonstrations and hands-on learning with your files. You'll learn which tools to use, and how to use them to achieve the classic aesthetics of B&W landscape photography. The classic aesthetic is characterized by prints with full tonal scales from rich blacks, tactile middle values, and delicate highlights.

Seiling will teach the same workflows and tools he uses both personally, and at West Coast Imaging to make prints that capture the magic of B&W photography.

Sessions are scheduled for June 2-6 and September 15-19, 2010. The workshop is held in Yosemite on the grounds of the Ansel Adams Gallery, using the darkroom that Ansel Adams built for his workshops.

The complete workshop description and additional information is available at the Ansel Adams Gallery Website. You can also e-mail or call them at 888-361-7622. We expect these workshops to book out quickly as they are limited to eight students per session, so call them and sign up today.

El Niño Strengthens in November 2009

El Niño events typically create frequent and heavy snowstorms in the Sierra Nevada, which give extra opportunities to create photographs of the unique beauty of a snowy day in Yosemite. It would be interesting to see how may of Ansel Adams' beautiful snow photographs were taken in El Niño years. Fresh snow is a fleeting event in Yosemite, so get in before the storm, hunker down, and be ready for when the storm breaks. Snow starts melting as soon as the sun hits it, so the conditions that created classics like Ansel's Oak Tree and Snow Storm typically only last an hour or two!

Check out the visual from Nasa's Earth Observatory!

Testing the NEC P221W Monitor

We just bought a NEC P221W monitor for $391 from Amazon. It's supposed to cover 96% of AdobeRGB. We'll be testing it side by side with our $1,400 NEC LCD2690WUXi, and will tell you how it compares.