Find me at Cycle Connections as the Spoke to Spoke columnist every month.

Changing Course

I didn't go on about Photoshop because there are so many how-to's out there, I didn't feel it was worth it. And truly, the best way to learn it is to use it. Make mistakes. Do everything over until you like what you see. As long as you don't make the mistake of saving what you did on your original image, things will be fine. Always change file names; add a number or letter to your work, make up your own code so you remember what means what and you'll be ahead of the game.

Today we celebrated my twins' 17th birthday. From the moment you find out you're expecting, you know that your kids will grow up, but you are never prepared for how fast it comes. We find ourselves reminiscing a lot about their early years, their cute moments, their entry into the world.
I think we did ok with them. My son is intensely into his music, constantly playing the piano or his violin or composing. When he's not doing that, he's on every political or economical website, absorbing information, giving his views. Learning. My daughter is a good kid too. She's a typical teenage girl, into her friends, shopping, having fun. She would love to get her license, but we just can't afford the lessons now. And she would rather spend whatever money she has on concerts or clothes than save for anything, no matter how much I try to push her to. She's also very into her dancing, having been doing it since she was three. She wants to continue it in college. She also wants a bunch of piercings, which doesn't set too well with her parents. But I give my views and tell her when she's 18, if she can pay for it, I can't stop her.

We try to teach them consequence, of the effects of choice. I never made every decision for them, even as toddlers. I gave them choices and whatever they chose, whether in what to wear or what to have for lunch, I only made sure they stuck to it. Want the green shirt? Fine, but you are not changing it unless it gets soiled. Want Spaghettios? OK, but I'm not cooking something else later. For the most part, this has stuck with them. They rarely change their minds about anything unless they became better informed. My son wanted to major in Economics, now he's talking Music. That's ok, either way. In the end, I just want them to be happy with their paths in life.

Adsense Makes No Sense

I installed Google Adsense on my site, reevesphotographics, and then here. Because my site has been at a standstill and thus, so have the clicks, I did an email to all my connections, as well as a little Facebook blurb, asking to A) check out my site and don't forget to visit the ads and 2) please forward this email to any friends that might want to purchase my work (I'm a photographer and graphic artist).

Well, I was very successful. I got hits, the ads got hits, my blog is being read....


So Adsense cans me!! WTF???
"Too many clicks." Um, isn't that the idea, guys? I place the ads, most of which, by the way, are in direct competition to me, I up my site stats and we all benefit. Well, some of us do.

Nice work, Google. You get businesses to buy ads, you get us saps to place them, then can us for boosting our sites with YOUR ads so you don't have to pay anything out.

Photoshop for Beginners: Tools Part Deux

The last two selection tools are the crop tool, which looks like..well...a cropping tool and the slice tool.
For editing, the slice tool is useless. Actually, it's pretty useless, period because anything you want to do for web is better served by any other tool than that one. But, I guess someone thinks it's worthwhile because it's always there. Suffice it to say,we won't bother covering it.

The crop tool, however, is very important in editing. Click on the crop tool and you will see in the options bar windows for width, height and resolution. Recommended resolutions are 72 pixels per inch for anything web based and 300 ppi for anything you wish to print. However!!!
You can not make an image that is already lower than 300ppi higher and expect good print results if you are keeping the same measurements. I try to keep in mind ratios; if an image is 16x20 at 72ppi when I open it, I can make it an 8x10 at maybe 150ppi, but no higher. Resolution means clarity and if you attempt to "stretch" your image, it will fall apart. Computers don't know inches, they only know pixels and resolution and "weight", which translates in mb, kb, gb, etc. But your crop tool will crop to just the size you want.

Drag your crop tool across what you want to be your finished photo. Keep in mind matting and framing by leaving a good amount of space around your subject. If it is a portrait, a good rule of thumb is minimum of forehead height from the top of the head to the top of the image. Look at, visualize it with a frame. Another guide is to keep the center mark either below the chin or at the breastbone to determine your center but be careful-the background should be pretty equal on each side. If you aren't sure, use the guide lines covered earlier-drag them out to where you might want your crop to be. Another good reason to use the guidelines is to ensure your image is straight. When you move your mouse to just outside the crop field, you will notice curved arrows. These will allow you to rotate the crop field to make your cropped image as straight as you desire.

When you have dragged your crop tool, you will notice in the Options bar that "Perspective" has shown up. When this option is checked, you can drag the corners of your crop to change the perspective of your image.

Now, just hit enter and your image is cropped!

The next time around, we will look at the brush tools and what they can do to fix or change your images.

Photoshop for Beginners 2: Tools

Knowing how to use the tools in Photoshop is paramount to any project you need to work on.
There are a few other guidelines I'll throw into the mix as well to optimize and ease your way through the program. It will be painless, I promise.

The best way to familiarize yourself with anything is to actually use it, so open an image in Photoshop (File/Open) that needs a little attention. Be sure to have the Layers Window open and off to the side. First thing you are going to do is click on the "View" drop menu and click on "Ruler". I make sure this is always opened with each image as I like to see what I'm working with. The other thing I always do is, again, drop the "View" menu and click on "Fit on Screen".

On with the tools. On some of them you will notice a little triangle on the bottom right. This means there is more than one tool to choose from. For example, the Marquee tool may be showing as a rectangle, but click on that triangle and you will see 3 more tools: Elliptical Marquee, Single Row Marquee and Single Column Marquee. Marquee tools, along with the Magic Wand and the Lasso tools, are all for selecting or outlining. Whatever tool you are using, its selection will be whiter than the rest, so you always know what tool is ready to be used.

As I mentioned, the Marquee tool is a selecting tool. When you click on it, you will notice in the bar at the top(just under your menus) is an Options bar for it. Click on the first square, then, with your mouse, click on your image and drag the tool outward. If you were to hold your shift key down while doing so, you would get a perfect square. Having the ruler visible becomes handy because you can then select a measured portion of your image, if you so desire. But there's another reason to have that ruler visible....

You can be precise in your selection when the ruler is visible by clicking on the ruler and dragging a blue line right where you want your selection to be. Try dragging the line to the two inch mark both from the horizontal and vertical rulers. If you don't hit your mark, click on the Move tool, the arrow and plus sign icon, then you can go back and move the lines to where they need to be. Do the same for all four sides. Now, go back to your Rectangle Marquee tool and you will see a little plus sign on your image. Move that to your guidelines until it turns orange. Click and drag and your selection is now precise.

Next to the selection options is the "Feather" option. This softens the line you made with the marquee tool and thus will soften whatever you are planning to do. If you apply a filter, it will blend; the higher the number you put in, the softer and wider the blend. Next is "Style". Normal is totally your control; Fixed Aspect Ratio is the ratio between width and height, ie; 2 width to 1 height will give you a selection that is twice as wide as it is high. Fixed Size is just that and it actually kind of cool if you want to play around with it. Set the sizes and just click on the image. You can click over and over willy nilly and it will keep selecting only that size.
To get rid of your marquee tool, simply hit Ctrl D or go to the Select menu and click on Deselect.

The Magic Wand tool selects similar colored pixels within the image. You can adjust the range of selection by changing the number in Tolerance in the options bar. Play with the different selections to see what they do; the first square is simple selection, the second can be used when you want more than one color selected; the third will subtract an area if you click on it; the fourth is usable within a Marquee tool as it will only select the color within the marquee (intersect with selection). You'll notice three more things, Anti-alias, whic gives a smooth line, Contiguous, which, if checked will only give you a color that runs continously or, if unchecked, will select that color throughout the image.

The last tool for selecting is the Lasso and there are three there. The first lasso, which, not so coincidently looks like a lasso is a freeform tool that you have to continuously drag without clicking except for beginning and ending. That one takes a great deal of practice to master and is best used for things that don't need precision, just general in-the-area selecting. The second choice is the Polygon Lasso, which you use by clicking around your chosen area. The third, the Magnetic Lasso, also clicks around your chosen area, but is also drops itself to similar pixels. It can be a royal pain in the ass sometimes. Lasso options are the same as the other selection tools.

OK, I think that's enough to play with. Keep playing with the selection tools and their options to get a feel for what they are capable of. Remember, it's Ctrl D to deselect and when closing the image, remember NOT to save any changes!! Even if you think you didn't do anything, the computer thinks you did, so just say "No".

Photoshop for Beginners

The next few entries will be about what may be the most popular editing software ever created-Photoshop.
There are enough books, tutorials, blogs, sites and write-ups about Photoshop, but I have discovered that if you don't know your brush from your lasso, you will get lost. I have also noticed and even pointed out to my own teachers and instructors that, more often than not, what is described in 20 steps can be done in less than 10. "Experts" tend to over-explain and that makes people confused, not better informed.
I do not have CS4; I have been quite content with my lowly 7.0 version. Later versions have a few additions, but nothing truly necessary. I have tried the CS4 and was not really impressed, but reviews state that for beginners, it is a better version.
So, let's get familiar with this do-it-all program and kill the mystery behind it.

Across the top of your screen when you first open Photoshop, you will see your drop menus: File, Edit, Image, Layer, Select, Filter, View, Window, Help.
File: This works just like any other program File selections. Let's try clicking on "New". This will open a window showing Name(which starts as Untitled, so you can give it any name you want or leave it), Preset sizes drop menu, Mode and Contents.
Preset Sizes: Self-explanatory, really. Once you decide on your size, you can adjust the numbers. For example, if you want a blank at 10x10 inches, simply chose "8x10" and change the number 8 to 10. You'll notice there are also choices for pixels, points, cm, mm, pica and, in the top drop choice, column. Points and pica are generally used for type and are converted anyway to the size you choose, so unless you're a Photoshop expert, fugeddaboudit.

Your mode choices given are RGB, Grayscale, Bitmap, CMYK and Lab Color. RGB is generally for web, but is the most common choice of image. CMYK is for print and many online print services require this mode. Bitmap is also web-based and are pixel based and resolution dependent. This simply means that the number of pixels per inch dictates the clarity of the image; a 72ppi(or, as shown in Photoshop, dpi) is much more pixellated than one at 300ppi(dpi) because those 72 dots per inch obviously take up less space than the 300 dots per inch. So, If you are looking to print what you are doing, don't choose Bitmap and do choose a resolution of 300dpi.
Grayscale has no color memory, so only choose it if you are working in Black and White.
Your last choice on the new file is "Contents", where you will see "white", "background color" or "transparent" as your choices.

We will jump over to "Windows" because without anything going on, you won't need the other menus right now. You should always have "Layers" checked, which will give you a window showing all the layers you may be working on. You will notice that if you have chosen "Transparent" as your file content, it shows as "layer 1", but choosing "white" or
"background color" shows as "background". A transparency remains its own layer and anything you do becomes a separate layer unto it. You can draw on it, color it in and move it around. If you were to choose the other options, anything you do to them becomes part of them and can't be moved around; they are locked. In other words, backgrounds are like paper, transparency is like a table you place paper on.
Hope that's clear!! Get it? Clear! Transparency!
I slay me....

Before we get to your other menu options, we need to look at the tools in Photoshop. There are many and some you will use almost religiously and some not at all. I never use the slice tool for example, a lapse that will probably never get me my ACE (Adobe Certified Expert), but so be it.

From left to right starting at the top we have our marquee tools, move tool, lasso tools, magic wand, crop, slice, healing, brush, clone and stamp, history brushes, erasers, bucket and gradient, blur, sharpen and smudge, dodge, burn and sponge, path and direction selections, Type, pen and point, shapes, notes and annotations, dropper with sampler and measure, hand, magnifier. The tools that show a little triangle on their box are the ones that, as listed, are more than one tool per box. Photoshop decided at some point in time which were the most important and/or used most often and placed those first both as the default shown and in descending order.

Below the tools are the foreground and background colors, quickmask, screen modes and export to Image Ready.

Open an image(File, Open), start playing with the tools and see what they do. Each tool, when selected, opens a taskbar of choices just under your menu selections. By playing around, selecting from the taskbar, you can do all kinds of really cool things to your image. Just always be sure that if you want to save what you've done, rename the image before closing it. Once it's saved, whatever you have done can not be undone.
Next time, we'll actually play with some of the more used tools and see what they can do.

Make easy money off the internet!!

The internet is full of them-people who claim they make enough money to live on and then some by getting money off the web. I think they are actually making more money selling their How-to books, but they would never claim that, of course.

The idea isn't all that difficult to figure out, but it is difficult to make even a fraction of what they are claiming. The premise? Have a website and run ads on it, then get paid for each click on those ads. The planning takes a little more time and effort, however.

First, you would need at least ten websites. Yes, ten. Why? Because a single website simply won't generate enough traffic and therefore, enough clicks, to earn anything even remotely substantial. A website can be a single page, but it still has to be something worth seeking out.
If all you want to highlight is the mating cycle of emus, you're not going to be raking in the big bucks anytime soon.

Second, you need to find the ads. Google has Adsense, which places ads on your site wherever you designate spaces for them and then ads placed are related to whatever it is your site is about. There is a slight downside to this as someone may have an ad whose merchandise or service is better than yours. There's an "oops". But that should be of no concern as you are looking to make money off those ads, right? And therein lies the rub.

If no one is visiting your site, no one is making clicks onto ads and you won't make any money.
Google makes it very clear that you can't go clicking on them yourself all the time; they will discontinue your Adsense agreement if that is found to be the case. So, what is a lowly one-site owner to do?

Beg.

Ok, not beg really, but get people you know to promote your site. Being in a dormant state for several weeks, I decided to send out an email to all my friends asking them to look at my site(www.reevesphotographics.com), click on the ads and then pass it along. In just fourteen hours, my balance went up by almost $13.oo. WooHoo! I made almost a dollar an hour! But there's another rub to the whole "Make money off the internet" plan.

Google and most other companies will not just send you checks willynilly. You have to meet minimum balances first. In Google's Adsense, that would be $100. If what has been written is to be believed, those internet moguls would have to be pulling in over $500 a week. At about 20 cents a click, give or take, that's a lot of clicking. Two thousand, five hundred clicks to my estimation. Do we really click that much?

Now that you have your site, you placed ads in it, what's next? Shameless self-promotion, that's what. I place my site name everywhere possible, even in places that don't allow www's by simply saying "reevesphotographics.com" somewhere. Sneaky, eh? You can place it that way in online bios, blogs, storylines like they have in Classmates-anywhere people might be reading what you say but where linking sites is not permitted. Afterall, you didn't really link the site, you simply "mentioned" it.

Everyone wants to make extra cash without trying, but the thought of making it off the internet while out playing golf is unrealistic. These internet entrepeneurs do work at what they do, but if they told you that, they wouldn't be selling all those books, now would they? By the way, I'm still $33 short of that first check, so if you wouldn't mind.....

Hot for Teacher

I Googled “New Jersey Coach Charged with Assault” with the thought that one or two articles about recent news items might come up. Wow, was I wrong!! Jersey City, Princeton, Morristown, Burlington County, North Brunswick, Woodbridge all have had teachers and coaches charged with some form of sexual assault on students in just the past year. I have to wonder what is going on and is this something new we have to concern ourselves with?

When news started coming out about Catholic priests and the rampant sexual abuse of altar boys, our trust in the people we had entrusted our children to became seriously eroded. Citizens demanded the heads of those priests accused of such gross improprieties while the Church tried to downplay the severity and, indeed, denied many of the charges leveled. Some of the accused “retired”, some faced their accusers in a court of law and were shown no mercy, being sentenced for their crimes anywhere from nine to twenty five years.

Now we are facing a new group of “predators”-teachers. In England, the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers stated that teachers should not be prosecuted for having affairs with students. In Washington state, the teachers’ union there presented themselves as a “friend of the court” in a case where a teacher was charged after having sex with an 18 year old student. And this is the fine line that I am about to cross.

Last year a teacher in North Brunswick was caught by police in a “sexual act” with a 17 year old local high school student. The teacher, charged with sexual assault, was 32. He recently was sentenced to three years in jail-for what amounts to having an affair. Had the girl not been a student, even if she was 16, this would not have been an issue. The legal age of consent in New Jersey is 16, which is the average age across the US. Only seven states list 18 as their age of consent. However, most states have some sort of statute within their laws that disallow that age of consent when persons have “supervisory or disciplinary authority” over their “victim”. It would also have to include supervisors or managers in the work sector too, but unless charges are brought in civil court regarding sexual harassment on the job, rarely if ever has a boss been charged and jailed for an in-office affair.

There is no doubt that there are perverted predators; many of the teachers and coaches that have been charged with sexual crimes have been accused by children and have conducted their abuse over a period of years. But what about teachers like the young man from North Brunswick? Is he a sexual predator or just someone who got caught up in the heat of passion with someone who, as more than one student in the school put it, “knew what she was doing”?

For the rest of their lives, those that are convicted, regardless of time served, will have to register under Megan’s Law as sex offenders. There are 3 tiers under which they must register, with tier 3 being the worst as most likely to re-offend. Tier two offenders present a moderate risk of re-offense while tier one present a small to moderate risk of re-offense. The vast majority of registered offenders fall under tier two, which runs the gamut from flashers to child endangerment. It is not out of the realm of possibilities that the young North Brunswick man will be a tier 2.

My personal feeling on this issue is that cases such as those that involve age of consent students should warrant a closer look by authorities. Was the student a willing participant of recent stature? What were mitigating circumstances? Who made the first advance and what steps or measures had the accused taken, if any, to divert the situation?

The abuse of children is a travesty and sexual abuse can mar a child the rest of his or her life. But when laws are in place that give age of consent, but make exceptions to the law that are so ambiguous as to allow charges to be leveled against anyone who is considered in a “position of authority”, those laws need to be looked at very, very closely. There are adults whose lives are at stake as well and I think that we as a nation of paranoid parents, forget that.