My GPS Camera Phone

No, no, it’s not a box with me in it.

Fellow photog and all-around cool guy Drew has decided to clean out his collection of fun stuff by giving it away to one lucky winner! Here’s a snippet from the supplier of awesome himself:

This is a box of mysterious stuff that I collected, amassed, was given, begged, borrowed and stole. This is a box of Awesome that I am going to give to one lucky reader. I’ll be revealing a few of the items that are in the box in the next few days. There is a lot of stuff in the box. You can already see that there is a T-Shirt in the box. Are there more? What else is there? How can you win?

The answers to these questions can be discovered by simply entering the contest and waiting for the winner to be announced.

Go on now, why are you still here? The Big Box of Awesome awaits!

In an effort to learn the inner workings of Photoshop, I joined a new Flickr group called Second Shotz. It’s a group run by two great photographers, Chica from Photo Projectz and Drew from The BenSpark. Some members are new to Photoshop, others quite experienced, but none of them are arrogant and condescending. It’s a good group of people willing to learn from each other.

From the group description:

This group has been created to let you take and edit a “Straight out of the Camera” image. Edit it as you see fit and upload it back to the group. Each week a new image will be posted by the moderators. You will have one week to do your best on the image and upload them to the group. The top three images each week will be featured in blog posts on Photo Projectz http://photo-projectz.blogspot.com/ and The BenSpark http://www.benspark.com.

For me, this is more than just playing in Photoshop. It’s about learning Photoshop.

I often find myself balking at having to create anything in Photoshop, leaning toward Illustrator instead. I’ve always been partial to vector (points and lines), but I’m discovering that there’s a whole lot more to raster (pixels) than I give it credit. This group has already helped me learn more in two weeks by simply having fun instead of forcing myself through boring training videos or tutorials with no reward at the end.

I’ve posted a Flickr widget of the group in the sidebar if you’re interested in viewing or joining. There’s already been some great entries and I can guarantee that there’s more to come.