Category Archives: Photography

I attended my first-ever PhotoShop World in Las Vegas last week, and all things considered, I would give the event a thumbs-up. After recovering from the shock of the most expensive martini ever, and a corny, but slick keynote, the classes turned out to be worth the price. I attended 7 or 8 classes, where I learned a lot. Much of what I learned was often not even the main topic of the class. I paid close attention to the techniques used by the mostly excellent – sometimes outstanding instructors – and several times heard myself say, “I never knew you could do that! Wait – you can simply drag the drop shadow when you apply it?? Wow! I never knew that!!”

Now, as a result of what I saw at the show, I will definitely be switching to Adobe Lightroom for printing and possibly much more, and I’ll certainly need one of these awesome lighting devices and a couple of these to go with it. Show sponsors should be happy. A couple of other very cool things I saw at the show were the super-quality photo books by Miller, and the mind-blowing aluminum prints from Metal Mural and Image Wizards. I also learned that I can rent virtually any camera gear known to man or woman with a few mouse clicks from borrowlenses.com. Next time I want to play with a $10,000 lens for the weekend, I’ll know where to go. And they’ll FedEx it directly to my door.

So, less than three hours after returning, I was at the grand opening of the new covered arena at Xenophon, trying out new techniques. Getting results like these adds time to my workflow and greatly increases file sizes, but it seems to be worth it. My wife is certainly happy about the glow-y softening technique used in some of the shots above.