Student Successes

DPA is Proud of our Students!

Check out all of our Student Successes Below

Congratulations to Tessa Marshall for winning the Chicago RedEye Photo Challenge with her photograph Summer Skyline!

DPA would like to acknowledge Michael Saft as our December Student of the Month! Check out his gorgeous photographs below taken during Nikhil Bahl's Composition in the Field workshop!

Our Feature Student this month is Father Dan McLaughlin!

Take a look at his some of his extraordinary images.

"Flag Boy"

The photo below was taken about 10 a.m. on a very cold day in November. The cold air provided a day without haze and the sun and blue sky and the white puffy clouds seemed to say: "Please take your best photo of this beautiful scene." I knew I could not gather the view in one photo so I decided to try my first ever panorama photo. I hand-held my camera steady against my body and carefully over-lapped three photos by about 20% since I knew that Photoshop would stitch them together. I made sure to keep the same horizon line in the viewfinder as I moved slightly to the right for each photo. My camera was a Nikon D-80 with the highly rated 18-55 mm 3.5 lens. I was not disappointed when I processed the photo as desired. My brother took the color version of the panorama to a gift shop owner in Gettysburg and she liked it but said that since her store sells antiques, she would like to sell the photo in a Black and White version. I used NIK software Viveza 2.0 to isolate and intensify with contrast and structure every monument, tree, grove of trees, rocks, farm buildings and towers in the panorama. In NIK software, Silver Efex I used several filters and printed the results on different kinds of photo paper and asked interested people to offer an opinion of which one they liked best. The version most liked was the Wet Rocks version on HP satin-matte paper as it looked more like a charcoal pencil drawing which gave one the impression the photo could have been hand-drawn not too long after the famous battle at Gettysburg.

Student Success at Special Discounted Class in New York

Portraits on Prince St. is one of the 6 classes offered through Living Social in New York City through March 2010. Click here to take alook a the the option! Sumit recently attended one of these workshops with Rick Gerrity and came away with some wonderful images!