Well I am officially back in Boston, still a bit tired but back none the less. I still have to download a good deal of my photos so new stuff will be slowly trickling on to the interwebs. Above is another shot from the Westcott Shootout Booths in this particular scene the model is made up as a sorted woodland nymph.

On to the brief recap. Monday I went back to Nelson NV with a group of people, including Frank Doorhof, which I ended up just VALing for instead of doing a lot of my own shooting. It was great watching him work and I got a lot out of it. Tuesday was precon day, but I didnt attend any this time around, instead I used the day as a change hotels day checking out of the Encore and into Mandalay Bay. Tuesday night was the forum dinner and tweetup. The forum dinner was great, held again at the Burger Bar, and all of us old friends got reunited and we all made some new friends as well. After that it was tweetup time, it is quickly becoming the must attend social event at Photoshop World, I ran into more old friends. Hobnobbed with the instructors, my buddy Erik Valind again manned the photo shoot area.

Wednesday came and day 1 of the conference. My only really disappointment was the keynote address. The NAPP part was great and fun, it was a fashion theme and they did a spoof on Project Runway and did a fashion show, with a local fashion school actually designing the runway costumes. But the Adobe presentation was well, boring and went on way too long. It could of honestly been done in half the time. They introduced a new technology they are releasing soon called Carousel. It seemed like totally the wrong environment for them to be announce this particular product. It is sort of a photosharing/editing service. It honestly is like part iPhoto part iOS device editing app like Nik’s Snapspeed. It has no integration with Lightroom or Photoshop which EVERYONE at “Photoshop” World uses and no one in my section of the keynote seemed all that interested, everyone just kept looking at each other and asking if Adobe was trying to kill iPhoto and grab that market. What it does do is sync between your desktop and mobile apps, so if you take a photo with your iPhone it will automatically be available on your iPad or desktop Mac. I am talking Apple devices not just because I own them, but because Carousel will be released this month, but Android and Windows versions wont be available till 2012.

If I had to grade the classes out of 100 I would say based on what I went to the Conference would get a 90. The one real disappointment of a class was probably Jeremy Cowart’s class on the state of the photography business. He really just talked about things that happened to him as a new pro to the game, not really talking about the state of the business. But that doesn’t mean Jeremy isn’t a great speaker or shooter. It is just this particular class isn’t exactly what it should of been.

On the beyond my expectations side of things, the classes by Joel Grimes and Dave Black blew me away. Dave is a great sports shooter that is combining lighting with his sports shoots to produce some absolutely amazing work, and Joel is doing some of the best compositing work I have seen in a long time. The last class of the conference was the highlight of the show, at least for me. It was a panel discussion between Jay Maisel and Gregory Heisler about light. They are legends and to listen to the two of them just candidly talk to one another about light for an hour was amazing.

The show ended with its traditional wrap up, where they played highlights from the conference in both still and video form, some instructors got up and shared slideshows and other inspirational speeches, prizes were given and last laughs were one another were had. The other total highlight was like 5 minute standing ovation Joe McNally got during the Art of Photography panel. Joe showed a slideshow of his Faces of Ground Zero project and how he has stayed in touch with a lot of the people formed relationships with them and so on. It brought the room to tears. Thats it for now, stay tuned for lots of photos and see you in DC!

So lets flash back to last Wednesday.  It was Day 1 of Photoshop World in Orlando, the exhibit hall had just opened and I was wandering around the booths checking things out.  As I am making my way down one of the middle aisles I came across a booth.  In this particular booth stood two guys by the names of Paul and Rob.  Paul runs LensProtogo the lens rental shop from Concord MA that I rent all of my glass from when I need some extra reach or something that tilts and shifts.  These guys are great, and with the amount Paul and I have emailed and talked on the phone with one another this was the first time we got to shake hands and meet face to face.  We were talking shop for a bit I was checking out the glass and there on the tripod was a Canon 7D mounted to a Canon EF 800mm f/5.6L the biggest and baddest production lens Canon makes.  I thought nothing of it other then wow and we shook hands again, I went on my way and they went on to talking to more people.

Flash forward a couple of hours and I was in the Westcott booth shooting the models and watching Erik Valind give his talk about establishing re-pore with the model again thinking nothing out of the ordinary.  But later that evening after attending the After Hours Party with my roommates Erik and Krysten and chatting with Hope the model featured here, the creative wheels started spinning and at about 3am I had it!  I looked up from my laptop which was in mid download of the days images and I said “Erik tomorrow I wanna shoot Hope with an 800mm lens!”  Which got a hell yeah response from the other two members of team awesome.  The next afternoon I popped over to the LensProtogo booth said “Paul I wanna borrow the 800 in a little bit to take some portraits.” I got another go for it and later that afternoon I grabbed the lens and slapped my 5D mark II on it and hit the exhibit floor.

Well first thing, when you are walking around a trade show floor full of photographers with an 800mm lens people are going to notice!  I had more photos and video taken of me and more people asked me about the lens, if it was mine, I was spinning in circles.  After a bit Erik started teaching he started his class by grabbing my camera to say that, he is not in fact Joe McNally and he needed to compensate with something.  Funny but at the same time he was trying to demonstrate a point about comfortability with models and the nerves that some can have by either being way too close into personal space or at the opposite end having a giant cannon of a lens be pointed at them.  But we let Hope in on what we were going to do and after Erik was about 15 minutes into his talk I walked about 30 feet from Hope into my position (min focus distance for the 800 is 25 feet!).  I grabbed Krysten, positioned her in front of me and used her shoulder as my monopod!  I delivered instructions to her about stand straight, bend a little, left, right, etc and Erik relayed my instructions to Hope as to her body position, eye direction and so on.  At 800mm and only 30 feet away with the amount of compression on this lens it really is a head shot!  It was a great team effort, and it really goes to show how good collaboration and communication even on a spur of the moment idea is critical in getting the shot.  Oh and that lens rules!  It was like parting the red sea, as soon as people saw me shooting with it the did acrobatics to get out of the way and yet more pictures of me taking pictures.  Thank you Paul and LensProtogo for letting me borrow that bad boy for a couple of hours to create some great pictures, it may not be an everyday portrait lens, but it does one hell of a job!

WOW! Where to start. It was a whirl wind week for sure, lots of long hours with little sleep but it was all worth it. I have to say out of the 5 PSW’s that I have attended this was by far the most fun. I landed on Monday afternoon and met fellow NAPP member MIchelle Hedstrom for a couple of beers in the hotel bar while we waited for NAPP member Will Beem to arrive for dinner. Well in true PSw fashion as soon as Michelle and I stepped outside to meet Will, out of another car popped Will King another friend and NAPP member with a car full of people, so dinner for 3 turned into an expensive dinner for 7 at Capital Grille!

Tuesday was precon day, however this time I chose not to attend a precon instead my good friend Abby and her sister in law landed for the conference and we spent the day at Seaworld. We were all touristy, went to the Shamu show, a really corny but fun Sea Lion show and I even got Abby to ride the Kraken roller coaster with me! Every time Abby screamed I let out the loudest laugh ever it was a good time!

After a long day at Seaworld with Abs and Corinne it was time to buckle down and get to work By that I mean I spent 15 minutes chatting with my buddy RC Conception in the lobby and finally running into my roomies for the week, the incredible Erik Valind and the badass Krysten Marlette the other 2/3 of team awesome!! These two are what truly made it an all around great PSW and we will be doing it again together in Vegas in 5 short months! In fact the planning has already begun!! With that it was off to a get a quick shower then meet other NAPP members for the traditional forum dinner. It was much smaller then usual only about 7 of us, unlike the almost 30 in Vegas and to be honest the food wasn’t that great but as always good conversations. From there we headed out to the the pool for the tweetup party started by NAPP social media Ninja Nancy Masse! Erik and Krysten were already out there as Erik sets up a great lighting station to take tethered pictures of the party goers that are uploaded pretty much instantly to flickr. Artistic Photo Canvas, the great people behind all my canvas prints were also there giving out stuff and offering people great discounts on canvas prints of the pictures taken at the party.

Here is where we also unveiled the start of our week long prank on Vanelli. Those who may not know of him, lets just say the V is the person to know at Photoshop World, he knows everyone and everyone knows him. He is a true legend and I am proud to be able to call him a friend. (as long as he doesn’t call me at 3am!) So to have a little good natured fun I designed a Wanted Poster of Vanelli with the help of a photo Erik had taken at the Vegas tweetup and I put them on T-shirts and magnets. Loads of laughs were had by everyone that knew V.

The Vanelli wanted poster prank was a hit with everyone! – Photo taken by Rob Knight (I think)

Well by the time we packed up all the lighting gear and got it upstairs it was past 1am and while most people would go to bed to get some rest before the start of the conference about 8 of us went across the street to Denny’s for something to eat and had a photo industry bitch session that lasted till almost 3am and by the time we got to bed at almost 4am there were only a few hours till the start of the conference!

Your awesome live bloggers! – Me and Krysten just before the start of the keynote

Needless to say the next morning came fast for Krysten and I as we were live blogging the Keynote event from the stage and had to be there by 8am for a 9am start. It went off without a hitch and we killed it and when you get Krysten, Nancy and I together typing away at a furious pace you cant help but have a little fun with it. Thank you to the 300+ people that put up with us for 90 minutes! After what seemed a head spinning 2 hours of morning classes the exhibit hall opened. I have to say over all the show floor was a little disappointing, it was really small compared to past years and there wasn’t really much of interest, not a lot of new products or head turning booths. The highlight of the week was the Westcott shoot out booths at the back of the floor. Amber at FJ Westcott again put together three great days of shoots, models and sets for the attendees to photograph models using Westcott’s new TD6 spiderlites.

Once the days activities were over it was time to get a bite to eat and then head to the Photoshop World After Hours Party, there the internationally renowned Big Electric Cat took the stage. Well its really Scott Kelby, his wife and friends up there jamming for all the attendees. The party was rocking people were having a blast and team awesome was in full effect hanging out with some of the models from earlier in the day! This helped immensely over the next two days as every time time one of us jumped into the booth with model Hope, she would immediately play to us, follow our lead and help us get the shot. Each of the shoot out booths seemed to always be packed with 20 or so photographers and getting a model to stay looking in a particular direction long enough to get the shot proved difficult, but with the connection we established with Hope by hanging out with her outside of the show floor we got much greater success.

Day 2 of the show started literally with a bang! Orlando was in the middle of a thunder and lightning monsoon. Huge winds, tornado warnings and constant down pours made for an interesting day. I got a late wet start to the first class as I tried to wait for the rain to let up a little but it was a lost cause and I sat in on Moose Peterson’s Aviation Photography class. He talked about some great concepts to a type of photography that has always fascinated me. I met up with Abby for a class on Copyright taught by Jack Reznicki and then we went to what turned out to be a really beginners class on Indesign but I still picked up a few tips that will help streamline some work flow. The exhibit hall opened again and you guessed it Krysten and I were at the Westcott booths shooting away. We had another reason though, the other 1/3 of Team Awesome, Erik Valind is a Westcott sponsored pro and we were there for moral support as he gave his first on mic talked to the show floor public and we also served as his VAL’s (voice activated lightstands) helping him adjust the sets as needed.

The afternoons classes on Day 2 got blown off. But with good reason. I introduced Krysten to my friend Will King who is an amazing model photographer and as soon as she saw his portfolio she wanted to put together a shoot right there on the spot. Small world because Will wanted to photograph her as soon as he saw her walking with me earlier in the day. See Krysten has a lot of tattoo work, actually she has less tattooed areas then she does tattooed ones and with that we all threw together a killer concept shoot in the hotel pool during the still ongoing monsoon rains. We even convinced the makeup artists that were busy with the Westcott models to take a little time out to do up Krysten in some great air brushing that made it look like loads of running mascara, perfect for a shoot in the rain. I served as the VAL while Will worked the camera and Krysten froze to death in the pool in the rain, but after all was said and done it was worth it, there were some killer images made that day! Nothing like some spontaneous collaboration between fellow creatives!

After some warming up it was time for yet another “small” bite to eat with my buddy Alan, his wife Nicolle, David and Jason at a rather unique restaurant. More laughs and stories, Alan and Nicolle are both originally from Mass but now live in the Tampa area so it was great trading stories with them. With dinner over it was time to head back to the hotel to hit up midnight madness. Myself, Alan, David and Jason were helping Vanelli set up the pre Midnight Madness activities. V serves as the unofficial “Security” for the event. Really that means he is the groups activity coordinator and game master helping us all have fun with Oreo’s hula hoops and prizes! Midnight Madness (really 10-midnight) is an event where you are guaranteed to learn nothing about Photoshop. But you are gonna have laughs as the instructors make fun of one another and us, by having games for some pretty cool prizes.

Hope dressed in a killer jester costume Day 3 of the Westcott Shootout booths

After another late night, team awesome was feeling a bit run down and none of us made it to our 1st classes. But we all got ready in time for the final mornings exhibit hall where we once again were at the Westcott shootout booths supporting Erik and shooting Hope, who for the final day was made up as a evil looking jester. After the hall closed for the final time, it was time to just relax and soak up a little Florida sun, which was a rare sight that week. We mustered up the strength to make it to the closing ceremonies. It’s a great look back in the form of photos, video and some brief speeches/slideshows from the instructors like inspirational first timers, Jeremy Cowart and sports photographer Dave Black, who literally was in tears and had the audience in tears as well. Team Awesome was well represented on the highlight reels! We were hard to miss and after a long week we had one last meal together before saying goodbye to Krysten who only lived about an hour way and Erik and I crashed hard.

That may of been the end of the conference but it wasnt the end of the fun. Saturday morning a bunch of us got up and had some breakfast together organized by V and after breakfast we headed out to photograph around a section of Orlando called Old Town and the Mopar show that was going on there that day. After a few hours of shooting it was back to the hotel to sit poolside enjoying a warm Saturday afternoon with a couple of other NAPP members while waiting for our flights home. So ends another Photoshop World and I can’t imagine how Team Awesome will be able to top it in Vegas but somehow we will find a way! Thanks to Nancy Masse, Scott Kelby and all the other NAPP members for putting on one of the best conferences out there. TIll next time, Stay Classy Orlando.

Here are some other behind the scenes photos click on the thumbnails to check them out.

You’re bags are packed, you’re ready to go, and you are leaving on a jet plane…ok now that, that is out of the way, you’re getting ready to spend three or four days in O-town with some of the coolest photography and design nerds and geeks (myself included) in the industry.  Maybe this is your first time, maybe you have been once before but you were too shy, didn’t break out of your shell to get the full experience of laughing and having fun with people who you are now proud to call your friends.  This is much more then an industry event and education week, in fact if you have been going long enough, these people do become some of your closest friends.  You start out seeing each other at either the east coast or west coast event, start emailing talking on the phone, then you start hitting both PSW’s every year with them, before you know it you are taking vacations with them!  So here are some tips for surviving a week of Photoshop World and get the most out of it, these are in no particular order and are not limited to 10 like some lists.

1. Make friends with people!  It may sound easy but for some people it can be hard so here are a few helpful tips.  If you are using twitter, start following the #PSW hashtag, talk to people.  Go to the tweetup party on Tuesday night at the Rosen Center Hotel pool.  If you are sitting next to someone in class, standing next to someone on an escalator, or while listening to someone give a demo on the expo floor, just say hi and introduce yourself.  Get your ticket to the After Party, go to midnight madness and if all else fails, the first person you should make friends with….VANELLI!!! Everything else will fall into place and you will find yourself in places you never expected.
2. Bring snacks and water with you, you never know when you will be able to eat.  Unlike the Vegas PSW the conference center in Orlando isn’t directly connected to the hotel it is across the street, so bring a daily survival kit.  In addition to snacks and water, aspirin, chapstick, tissues, all purpose wet wipes, hand sanitizer.  Basics that will make you not have to haul back to your room for something.
3. Comfortable clothing and footwear, sure we will be in Florida (or Vegas for that matter) it will be hot outside, but conference centers are notorious for being freezers, an extra layer never hurt.
4. Go to the Art of Digital Photography, even if you aren’t a photographer, it is one of the most inspiring events at the conference.
5. If you are a designer and not a photographer, attend any class taught by Bert Monroy, Corey Barker and Terry White, they are the greatest and if you wanna learn 3D in Photoshop, Corey is the man.  Also if you are a designer and have no interest in photography, go to the photography classes as well, just because a class is on Portrait Retouching doesn’t mean you wont learn any really cool Photoshop tricks…trust me you will.
6. If you are a photographer, while on the exhibit floor, make sure you stop at the Westcott booths!  In Vegas last fall they set up four really cool shooting booths with their spider lights, every day they had four completely different sets and models for people to photograph, it was cool and I have been told they plan on it being even cooler this year.
7. If you are going by yourself, get your red button for, Dinner with a Stranger, it is another cool way to meet some new people.
8. Go to the closing ceremonies.  While you maybe temped after your last class to just go back to your room and crash, head to the closing event.  There are a ton of give aways, maybe there is someone you met early in the week that you didn’t have a chance to catch up with, find them, give them your business card, bump iPhone’s to exchange contact info, whatever.  Also maybe you will see yourself on the highlight reel in stills or video, it may seem like a huge conference…but there are cameras EVERYWHERE!
9. Have an iPhone or an iPad? Download download the official PSW app from Shawn Welsh, it is a killer app with tons of stuff packed into it, most importantly you can use it to create your class schedule, and it will be updated live throughout the conference.  It also has the Bump app built into it so exchanging info is a breeze.
10. Leave to workbook in your room.  It is big and heavy, just follow along, if you have your head in the book you will most likely miss something, just bring something to jot down notes.  99% of what the instructors are teaching is in the book and they will let you know if it isn’t.
11. Be on the lookout for great deals on the show floor, the guys at Midwest Photo Exchange never disappoint by providing some of the best discounts on stuff I have ever seen and they are a great group of people too.
12. Coffee, Red Bull (RC’s favorite), 5 hour energy, these drinks are your friends.  Sleep is sometimes little to none, especially with all the networking/socializing/partying going on.  There is plenty of time for sleep after the conference is over.

That’s my list.  It may only number 12 but there is a lot more then 12 things in there, and I know I have forgotten some, just remember to have fun, I mean come on it is photography and Photoshop, we make money getting to take pictures and play with a really expensive digital set of crayons!  When you run into Vanelli and trust me you will, call him sandbag…he will know what it means!

Lastly if you can’t make it to Orlando for Photoshop World, well shame on you!  But seriously if you can’t make it, myself and my good friend Krysten Marlette will be live blogging the Keynote Address with the one and only NAPP ninja Nancy Masse! it should be barrel of laughs!!

Reminder tomorrow the Kelby Training is bringing the Maximum Photoshop Tour to Boston with Dave Cross, the foreign man from a foreign land!  Today is the last day to sign up for the class and seating is extremely limited!  It is going to be a great day of instruction, so if you don’t have a  lot to do tomorrow, bored at the office or just feel like playing hookie, why not join me in some great learning.  Here is the link for signup The photo above used LOTS of techniques and tricks learned along the way from Dave and the rest of the Photoshop Guys, its $99 for non-NAPP members and its $79 for NAPP members so there really isn’t any excuses with the value you are getting.  And if you aren’t a  NAPP member well shame on you, and sign up while you are there!

That’s right, next Wednesday November 10th Dave Cross is bringing the Maximum Photoshop Tour to the Boston Convention Center in Southie!  If you want to learn how to be more efficient with smart objects, make better selections, and use Adobe Bridge to its fullest potential, Dave is your man.  Plus he’s Canadian and have you ever met a bad Canadian Photoshop instructor?  I know I sure haven’t.  But seriously, if you are looking to improve the more tedious and time consuming parts of your photoshop workflow Dave is the guy to teach it to you.  I know I will be there, what about you?!?!?  Check out the details here, it’s only $99 for non-NAPP members and its $79 for NAPP members, how can you pass up on this bargain!

It’s a pretty straight forward process, set up your flickr account (if you dont have one) enter your flickr settings into the Lightroom publish feature and authorize and you are ready to rock and roll.  There are plenty of tutorials on the web that show you this including here at the NAPP Lightroom Learning Center.  But that isn’t the tip.

When you publish you have the options to publish with no file name, which will upload the photo with a blank title and caption.  You can upload with file name, which will do exactly that, but with no caption.  The third choice is to upload with IPTC data, if there is no IPTC it will use the file name, and here is where the tip comes in.

The photo below I published using the with filename setting.  As you can see it published with the file name.  In the beta version it also included the file extension with the filename and that was super annoying.  While this seems to be fixed in the shipping version it’s still annoying to see an image title like this.

Enter IPTC.  What is IPTC you ask?  It stands for International Press Telecommunications Council.  Long name huh?  What it really means in plain english is metadata, and it’s a standard in the world of press.  To be honest with you, prior to LR3 the only metadata entry I really did was copyright, which was a preset, and keywording.  This new version is really changing the amount of time I spend working on metadata for my photos.  Below is a screen cap of were you can find it.

In the metadata tab there are tons of fields that you can fill out, but for the purposes of using the flickr publish feature in LR3 you only need to concentrate on the Title and Caption shown in the red box.  It may sound like a pain, but its really going to streamline how you publish your photography to flickr.  Check out the flickr stream for the White House and look at the more properties section of the photo, they have to fill out every field when publishing a photo.  Imagine that is your job just typing metadata all day!!! WOW boring.  Below is what the uploaded photo looks like on flickr with all the appropriate IPTC metadata entered.

One final tidbit.  You can also uncheck the option so that if you retitle something in flickr it won’t change when you republish the photo from Lightroom.  Hope that helps you streamline your work a little.  Now get out there and take some photos!

There was NO HDR processing in this image. It was made with one single click in the following manner. Canon 5D mark II on a Gitzo 3541 LS tripod and a Canon EF 15mm fisheye lens. The camera was set to bulb exposure and a Canon cable release was used. It was a 31 second exposure at f/4. During that 31 seconds I took a Canon 430 EX speedlite and with the test fire button, aimed it at the different branches of the tree and fired the flash 6 or 7 times.

In Lightroom I set the correct white balance which turned the sky that purplish color. I then used a technique that Scott Kelby refers to as extended processing, where in Lightroom you crank up the Fill Light, Recovery and Clarity Sliders really high and then add back some shadow with the black slider. I tweaked the tone curve a little and that’s basically it. Finished.

I hope that gives you some ideas to try.

Jeff

That is all for now, although I have been neglecting the blog a lot, gonna try to so some catch up posts soon to get back on track.