Midnight Madness: Hey look, I won a Football!

Photoshop World Football signed by Scott KelbyThe last few days have been great, crazy fun and incredibly inspiring and informing. I have seen amazing imagery, spoken with amazing photographers and gotten to sponge off of decades of experience of all the instructors in the conference. Folks like Scott Kelby, Rod Harlan, Moose Peterson, Joe McNally, and Corey Barker just to name a few, have been filling my brain with all sorts of Photoshop goodness. A good portion of my day two consisted off video integration and creation within Photoshop and After Effects. There’s so much other stuff you can do now with CS4, and even CS3 – stuff that I had no idea about, and I use these applications quite a bit. I’ve some video projects coming up that will benefit greatly from these classes.

One that really sticks with is using panoramic images in video and animation projects, not because it’s such a revolutionary idea, but because of how somethings were explained and how it has reawakened the desire to do more of this type of work on my own. One thing that struck me, and I guess it’s sort of a duh moment, but you should always shoot in portrait mode to avoid the added distortion you get in landscape. Photoshop can correct for it, but why not just flip your camera 90 degrees and make life easier? Also time-lapse photography, I definitely want to get into this again, and I think the Nikon Coolpix P6000 might be just the little camera to do it.

Last night was a hilarious couple of hours with 200 loud, amped up and over tired fellow attendees who were all at Midnight Madness just to relax, not learn anything and of course, win free stuff! The thing on the right there is what I won, an autographed Photoshop World Football with Scott Kelby’s picture on it. What a blast. People were publicly taunted, shot with a Nerf gun, slapped, hosed off with a Super Soaker, hit in the head with Footballs, and beach balls – plus we got doughnuts!

Yesterday I got out for a couple hours and shot some with my new Lensbaby Composer, and it’s pretty cool, and I have really no idea what I’m doing with it yet – but I will post some stuff on my Flickr account when I get back home this weekend. Fortunately today is kind of a light day, although they are remodeling the Sheraton here, so right now I am being seranated by a jack hammer, and reciprocating saw……

More fun, just about time to get to it!

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