not even a banner graphic

Its photo, as in photos, and opacity, like the opacity of layers in photoshop. You see what I did there. I put them together to suggest a kind of theme for what this blog is about. I see you’re not convinced. An actual fact, photopacity.com was available and I’d run out of ideas for 2 word combinations that suggested a theme of photography, photoshop and disk space. Or something like that.

I’ll start by saying that I’ve never used the sponge or the thing that looks like a pin. Is that dodge? Or burn? I mean, I’ve dodged and burned I think, I’ve just not done it using those tools. Since I first started using photoshop at version 2, which was a glorious port to the Solaris operating system running on what was probably a Sun Sparcstation 1+ or something, I’ve been making it up as I go along. Before layers, you learned pretty quickly that if you didn’t save backup copies of each file every 10 minutes, you might as well just bang your head against a wall at the beginning, to save time later. With layers and layer masks you soon learned that, after peeling your eyes of the screen following a 4-hour hand-trace of a goldfish with a 13 pixel soft brush, all your hand-traced masks are rubbish. By the time I get to grips with CS4, I’ll have learned about 30% of what CS3 can do. Which is 50% of what CS1 could do. And about 300% of what photoshop 2 could do. I think that means I’m using about 10% of photoshop functionality, but, as will hopefully become clear as I blart these incomprehensible gobbets of technobile, I think that’s all I need.

As for digital photography, I can safely say I have almost completely no idea what I’m doing, but I know how to point a camera in the right direction. I sometime take the lens cap off etc…