Back in the day, this painful experience was not digitally delivered but came through a big production called The Slide Show. People hunched in the dark amid the clicking and whirring of a machine that beamed a cone of light onto a screen, wall or sheet. About every fifth slide or so, heads snapped to shoulders — better for upside- down viewing. On and on droned the narrator. “Here’s the Grand Canyon in a rainstorm,” although it looked neither grand nor wet and could have been a close-up of the driveway for all you could tell….. read more

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Article on Shutter Tours in the Seattle Times

30 Reasons I Love Doing Photo Tours in Seattle

This is a post from: Shutter Tours Seattle's unique photography walking tour.

30 Reasons I Love Doing Photo Tours in Seattle

See images at Kristi Lloyd Photography

This is a post from: Shutter Tours Seattle's unique photography walking tour.

Kristi Back from Paris

She has some fantastic photos and describes the crazy cab drivers in Hanoi.

We love it when our customers get a chance to try out some of the skills we were able to teach on our tour.

Check out her blog at http://www.katecunha.blogspot.com/

This is a post from: Shutter Tours Seattle's unique photography walking tour.

Follow Kate on Her World Travels

Thanks to Ryan Bello for getting these shots during the filming of the Q13 segment of our tour that aired on KCPQ FOX 13.

This is a post from: Shutter Tours Seattle's unique photography walking tour.

Behind the Scenes With Shutter Tours

We’ll post the link to the video, once it is online.

Link to the story.

This is a post from: Shutter Tours Seattle's unique photography walking tour.

Shutter Tours on FOX, Channel 13

Review of Shutter Tours on Yelp.com

“Our guide was the informative and enthusiastic Ms. Valentina, who provided guidance on composition, and encouraged to get close, look for patterns, and tell stories with our photos. Along the way she explained a particular concept and then raised her own camera for a shot to show us examples. Her photo book also provided more examples and helped me see each concept more clearly. I see lines and curves where I never paid much attention to them previously. Who knew that Post Alley could be such an alluring subject? ”

Read the complete review on Yelp.com

This is a post from: Shutter Tours Seattle's unique photography walking tour.

Our First Yelp.com review

By Terry Divyak

I used to blog a lot about photography techniques before starting Shutter Tours and thought I’d pull this one out from a post I made earlier this year. This is one of my favorite techniques to create an art like image from a landscape photograph.

When you take our tour, we look for some great textures to add to your arsenal of images to create some fantastic art.

This fine art image can also be purchased via Zenfolio.

I have been driving around my Macbook Pro with my new version of Photoshop CS4, trying to learn all the little nuances hidden under the hood. Somehow I got sidetracked and ended up at istockphoto.com looking at textures. Don’t ask me how, it just happens when one has a period of boredom, followed by flashes of inspiration and then some temporary forms of ADHD. Anyway, so I did a search on textures as I wanted to work with some layers in Photoshop and play around with some images I shot over the weekend in Seattle. Not having any textures at the ready, I found this one of a tuscan wall that I figured would work perfect. Yeah I had to pay for it, but I wanted it now and did not have my Europe images close by and the time to spend hours hunting for a texture. Besides I I started looking at my old Europe CD’s, I’d end up on some other tangent and never accomplish my goal , so I bought it.

Originally I was going to use and image of Post Alley by the Pike Place Market, but felt that the Seattle image would work a lot  better. In the upper left corner, you can see the original texture file as well as the Seattle photo I used.

So, let’s see step by step how I created this.

First, I opened the main file and since it is one I sell for stock, it was already perfectly edited. I then created an empty layer and brought the texture image into this new layer. Make sure you create a new layer and do not do a layer from background.

Now here is where the fun comes in. Since the new layer will be blocking out the background image of the city, we need to adjust the opacity. As you can see in the above image, we click on layer 2, as highlighted in blue. You’ll notice a few dialogue box options we can choose. First, there is the opacity option, which allows us to bring the background image back as we adjust it towards zero. In this case, I set it to 86. Being that the Layer 2 image is a brown tone, it also tone’s the over all image which i was looking for. I then adjusted the fill to 55%. Fill is a different adjustment than opacity, as I understand it and someone correct me if I am wrong,  it reduces only certain pixels, where as opacity adjusts the whole layer.

Next and this is probably the most important thing to do, I started playing with light on layer 2. This is where you can get some really cool effects, but the one I chose was Hard Light. This gave me the perfect combination that I was looking for to create an image that looked both like an old photograph and had the potential, to maybe even look like a painting.

I then created another new layer and this time I used a gradient fill as you can see in the above example. The fill I chose was the third one over, (Red Box). This is another area you can experiment with. Different fills will give it different colors. On this layer I left light to normal, fill at 60% and opacity at 63%.

I then went to the original background copy and brought out some of the whites on the Mt. Rainier and the Space Needle.

And that’s it! This is an easy way to change images that may have been throwaways or bad lighting.

When you are out shooting or just riding the bus to work, if you have a good point and shoot start taking photos of textures on walls, floors, even old books and magazines. Build up your portfolio of textures and then just start playing in Photoshop. The great thing is you can also save your .PSD file as a template and just replace the background image with another and all your layer settings will allow you to change other images fast and easy.

For more inspiration, check out Nitsa’s nonphotography blog, she’s the queen of this technique.

This is a post from: Shutter Tours Seattle's unique photography walking tour.

Playing with Textures in Photoshop CS 4

Seattle Tour Saver Coupon Book

Shutter Tours is happy to be partnering with Seattle TourSaver for the 2010 tourist season. TourSaver can save you hundreds of dollars on tours with 2 for one coupons without restrictions. Our coupon will be good for all dates of our walking tour next year. Subject to space availability.

From their website:

TourSaver is an easy-to-use, travel discount book with 100 buy-one-get-one free, Seattle travel deals, that saves 50% on Seattle travel.

Seattle TourSaver has 100 2-for-1 coupons for Seattle’s top attractions–a smart, hassle-free way to see more and spend less!There’s San Juan Islands and Victoria B.C. deals too.

“If you’re visiting multiple attractions in Seattle, then Seattle TourSaver will likely save you hundreds of dollars.” About.Com

“The $79.95 coupon book can repay your investment countless times over.” The Travel Insider

This is a post from: Shutter Tours Seattle's unique photography walking tour.

Shutter Tours Partnering with Seattle TourSaver

Well, that’s what the headline said anyway. Check out the article, “Gift Ideas: Unusual, Intellectual, and Downright Scary Walking Tou‏rs” on Matador Goods.

Cool website as well for you travelers.

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Shutter Tours listed as an “Intellectual Tour”