About a year ago, I attended my first Pho­to­shop World con­fer­ence. Not only did I learn a great deal, but I had a blast doing it. So much so that I decided to attend the next one in Orlando ear­lier this year. Once again, I learned a lot and had fun doing it. That was enough to con­vince me to return to the next one in Las Vegas. Guess what? I still learned even more and still had a great time doing it. That says quite a lot about the peo­ple who put on the show, the instruc­tors, and the peo­ple who attend. I’ve been to many dif­fer­ent con­fer­ences in my career, but Pho­to­shop World (PSW) is clearly the best of them all. That means you’re quite likely to see me attend­ing again in Orlando next Spring.

My day job has noth­ing to do with pho­tog­ra­phy or design, so PSW hap­pens on my vaca­tion time. I pay for the con­fer­ence and any asso­ci­ated fees. I pay for my travel. I pay for my meals. I almost paid for my hotel, but didn’t have to do it. You see, I am the Paris Hilton of Pho­to­shop World. By that, I mean that I enjoyed liv­ing a lux­ury lifestyle with­out ever hav­ing done a thing to earn it. How does this hap­pen? I have friends who are degen­er­ate gam­blers. When they heard I was book­ing a hotel room, they told me to can­cel the reser­va­tion and put me in a comped suite at Man­dalay Bay. I spent a cou­ple of days before the con­fer­ence at Encore on my own dime, but my gen­er­ous friends kept me in good shel­ter for the dura­tion of PSW. They also stuffed me dur­ing lunch at Olives over­look­ing the Bel­la­gio Foun­tains and at Nob Hill in MGM grand. It’s a strange feel­ing to be wined and dined with­out any expec­ta­tion. Make me won­der why the hell they like me enough to do all of that, but I’m very grate­ful for it.

Dur­ing my last two vis­its to PSW, I attended a pre-​conference course. This time, I didn’t do it because I wasn’t sure if I would be in town. When I finally decided to come a few days before the con­fer­ence, the pre-​cons were booked up. I’d thought about tak­ing the HDR course with Matt Kloskowski and R.C. Con­cep­cion, but I waited too long. After arriv­ing at Encore on Sun­day evening, I spent the next cou­ple of days out shoot­ing in Las Vegas. When I checked into Man­dalay Bay on Tues­day and walked to the reg­is­tra­tion area, I found R.C. out with part of the HDR pre-​con group and I had a mild case of envy — they were all smil­ing and appeared to be hav­ing fun. As we walked by each other, R.C. sur­prised the hell out of me. He rec­og­nized me, smiled warmly and shook my hand. The rea­son I’m sur­prised is because we really don’t know each other. Per­haps he remem­bers my face from the last PSW, or because we both attended Scott Bourne & Trey Ratcliff’s HDR work­shop in Tampa ear­lier this year. Either way, I was really impressed by the man’s gra­cious wel­come. Seri­ously, the guy is really very cool.

The Forum Party & Tweet-​Up

The folks on the Pho​to​sho​pUser​.com forum got together for a party at Burger Bar in Man­dalay Place, and then there was another party among the Twit­ter users in Man­dalay Bay. It seemed like about 30 folks showed up and finally dis­cov­ered how to talk to each other in per­son, rather than online. This really turned out to be a great thing for me. While I’ve done PSW alone in the past, I found new friends and almost always had some­one from that group to share a con­fer­ence ses­sion with me. Shortly after we set­tled into our tables, we were joined by Scott Kelby, Matt, and R.C.. They pulled up a chair across the table from me and chat­ted with us for a while. I’ll prob­a­bly say this too many times dur­ing the review, but they were really great guys. We had a nice con­ver­sa­tion and they all gave me the same advice — I need to buy Call of Duty for my XBox 360.

After din­ner, we headed to the Tweet-​up and joined an even larger crowd of folks. Nancy Masse @NAPP_News) is the voice of NAPP on Twit­ter and she rounded us all up for the party. I’ve missed this event the last cou­ple of times, either due to being on the Photo Safari with Moose & Joe or because I had a dead­line to edit pho­tos from the Con­cert pre-​con to try and win a prize. One of the advan­tages of not tak­ing a pre-​con is hit­ting the party. Folks setup some stu­dio lights and take pho­tos all night.

Scott Diussa, one of the instruc­tors from the con­cert pre-​con was there and we had a nice chat for a while. The man trav­els quite a bit and I got some insight to his world, includ­ing his pas­sion for music and avi­a­tion pho­tog­ra­phy. Sharon Peter­son came over to our table for a while, I think to escape some smoke, and joined the con­ver­sa­tion. I’d never met her before, but I’m glad she joined us — she just seems like a won­der­ful woman. A bit later, Moose Peter­son came along to join her. Do you recall that warned you I’d say too often that peo­ple were really great? Moose didn’t dis­ap­point, either. He politely intro­duced him­self and reached out for a hand­shake — exactly the kind of man my par­ents raised me to respect. I fol­low his blog and train­ing online, so I respect his abil­i­ties very much. It’s com­fort­ing to meet folks who exceed your expec­ta­tions. Scott, Sharon and Moose made great company.

After that, I spent a bit more time just talk­ing with my new­found forum friends. In fact, we closed the place down. Every­thing was cleaned up and carted away before we finally left our lit­tle table for the evening.

The Pho­to­shop World Keynote

Like most con­fer­ences, PSW starts with a keynote ses­sion to set the tone for the con­fer­ence. I bought a Speed Pass, as I’ve done in the past. A Speed Pass allows you to have pre­ferred seat­ing at the Keynote, each of the classes, and the wrap-​up at the end of the con­fer­ence. Not every­one wants to pay extra, but I’ve always been pleased with the oppor­tu­nity to get up front. Unfor­tu­nately, there was a prob­lem. Sev­eral of us with Speed Passes were stand­ing right by the entrance wait­ing for them to call out for our early entry. It never hap­pened, though. They just started let­ting peo­ple in, and that caused some con­fu­sion as to why we didn’t get the ben­e­fit we pur­chased. I asked the NAPP staffer inside why they didn’t call for us and he said they did. I asked other Speed Pass folks and they said that they never heard any­thing until gen­eral entry. Once we got to the seat­ing area, the front was filled.

Once again, I asked a man who was direct­ing seat­ing there about sit­ting in the Speed Pass area and he told me it was full. I men­tioned that there wasn’t any notice, but all he could say was, “Well, I’ve been in here for an hour. This area is full.”

It irked me. Peo­ple make mis­takes and I under­stand that. Clearly, some folks were let in early to fill up those seats, but they weren’t the folks stand­ing by the door. Sev­eral Speed Pass users were with me and they were also kind of irked about it. it. Quite sim­ply, you expect the ben­e­fit you pur­chase. How­ever, that wasn’t really what both­ered me the most. It was the fact that my con­cern was merely dis­missed. Mis­takes hap­pen. A good rule for cus­tomer ser­vice is to acknowl­edge the mis­take and apol­o­gize. I didn’t expect that he could fix the issue at that time, but I was rather non­plussed by being some­what casu­ally dis­missed. It left me with the per­cep­tion that this was my prob­lem, not his.

There are some rea­sons I bring up this issue. It seems com­pletely out of char­ac­ter for the type of cus­tomer ser­vice have always expe­ri­enced from NAPP. This is an orga­ni­za­tion that’s gone out of its way to pro­vide excel­lent cus­tomer ser­vice in the past. Of course, then I real­ized that the per­son who dis­missed me wasn’t a NAPP employee, but was one of the instruc­tors — basi­cally, a free­lancer for the show. Per­haps he hasn’t received the same cus­tomer ser­vice train­ing that the NAPP staff mem­bers receive.

I’d like to stress that this is the only issue I found dur­ing the show, or dur­ing the past three shows. That’s quite impres­sive to me. There were no prob­lems using my Speed Pass later, and I’ve always found NAPP staffers to be really friendly peo­ple. I brought up this issue because I’d like to rec­om­mend some changes for the next PSW:

• Be very clear about where Speed Pass users should enter. If you want them to come to a spe­cific door, let us know in advance. When you announce it’s time for us to enter, be very LOUD about it. There’s a large crowd out­side and you need to ensure you’re heard when you make that announcement.
• Train your instruc­tors and other folks who help so they know how to deal with issues and com­plaints. It’s easy to be nice when things are going well, but these folks need to know that pay­ing con­fer­ence mem­bers also like cour­tesy when things go wrong. A kind smile and apol­ogy for a prob­lem can go a long way toward sooth­ing someone’s feel­ings and, more impor­tantly, pro­tect­ing your brand. You’ve worked hard to build an image. Don’t let some­one else destroy it with a dis­mis­sive atti­tude, par­tic­u­larly at the very start of the event. This is where you set the tone for the whole show. You don’t want that tone to be a neg­a­tive first impression.

A big rea­son I bought the Speed Pass is because I wanted to shoot the keynote open­ing, and you just can’t do that from the back rows. Since I didn’t get the seat­ing I expected, I fig­ured I was jus­ti­fied in get­ting up to shoot the show from a rea­son­able dis­tance, so I had a lit­tle fun.

Last Spring, the Con­cert Pho­tog­ra­phy pre-​con was a lot of fun. The truth is, I wanted to shoot a band again and this was one of two oppor­tu­ni­ties to do it dur­ing PSW. The theme for the show was a rock event. They opened with a VH1 Where Are They Now video cov­er­ing an old band — NAPP. As you can tell, it was a KISS par­ody with a Pho­to­shop twist. Scott Kelby and Felix Nel­son both played live. Dave Cross and Matt Kloskowski were on stage, but had some stunt dou­bles per­form­ing back­stage (Tony Llanes and Scott Stahley, respec­tively). Not only did they sound great, but the stage was alive with lights and smoke. They had every­thing but explo­sions and it made for a fun song to shoot. I was behind Lau­rie Excel and briefly enter­tained the thought of shoot­ing my own ver­sion of “Where is Laurie’s Hair?”, but I kept focused on the band.

Learn­ing New Stuff

You can’t see every­thing. When you’re sit­ting in a class­room, you’re miss­ing all of the other ses­sions. That’s why they give you a book — lov­ingly referred to as “the phonebook” — filled with course notes for the ses­sions you couldn’t attend. The trick is to decide what you have to see while you’re there. Last Spring, I focused almost entirely on the pho­tog­ra­phy track. There’s plenty of Pho­to­shop train­ing avail­able online, but first-​hand knowl­edge is a good thing. It also had the advan­tage of being in the same room, so I really didn’t have to go any­where to attend the next ses­sion. Zack Aris, Joe McNally, Moose Peter­son — they all came to me!

This time, how­ever, I decided to split things up a bit. I started with Zack Arias talk­ing about Stuff You Need to Know to be a Pho­tog­ra­pher. It was tech­ni­cal, inspir­ing and ter­ri­fy­ing all at the same time. I took copi­ous notes in that ses­sion and almost every other one, so per­haps I’ll share more in a later blog post. Suf­fice it to say he packed a lot of good infor­ma­tion in that first hour.

Next up was Matt Kloskowski with Five Ways to Select Peo­ple. I real­ized I’d never attended one of Matt’s courses in my pre­vi­ous PSW con­fer­ences, so I made up for it this time. I think he was a pre­sen­ter in at least three ses­sions. Poor guy may have seen me in the front row and wor­ried that I was stalk­ing him. I was actu­ally a bit con­cerned about this course, because I suck at selec­tions. Truly, I’m awful. Even when I select some­thing, it seems like there’s a lit­tle ring around the selec­tion after I make some change. No more, though. Matt’s instruc­tions were excel­lent and easy to under­stand. Tech­niques that were pre­vi­ous obscure enough to seem as black magic before now seem rather triv­ial to per­form. That’s a pretty good result for an hour’s worth of training.

The APC HDR WalkShop

I could bore you with a plethora of detail about every­thing I learned in my ses­sions, but I’ll break things up now and talk about some of the events. Wednes­day night was pretty busy for me, as I signed up for an HDR event spon­sored by Artis­tic Photo Can­vas (APC) and lead by Brian Mati­ash.

Quite sim­ply, we loaded about 30 peo­ple into a bus and headed down to Fre­mont Street to spend a cou­ple of hours cap­tur­ing brack­ets for HDR images. Brian shared his knowl­edge and tech­niques with us, and was yet another cool guy to meet. Dur­ing the ride down, Brian posited an idea that con­tra­dicted advice I’ve pre­vi­ously heard about HDR pho­tog­ra­phy, and even heard later dur­ing PSW. I’ve always heard to keep your cam­era in Aper­ture Pri­or­ity Mode while shoot­ing to keep it from chang­ing the depth of field. It seemed to make sense, and that’s what I’ve always done. I heard it from Matt Kloskowski in his HDR course on Kel​by​Train​ing​.com and from Trey Rat­cliff dur­ing his HDR Work­shop in Tampa. It had to be the only way, right?

Not so. Brian cor­rectly pointed out that shoot­ing in Aper­ture Pri­or­ity affects how you meter the scene. To make sure you meter the right por­tion of your scene to get the mid­dle expo­sure cor­rect, you need to set it in man­ual mode. My imme­di­ate con­cern was that the Auto-​Exposure Brack­et­ing would change the expo­sure by affect­ing my aper­ture and/​or shut­ter speed. Appar­ently, that isn’t so. Brack­et­ing in Man­ual Mode only changes your shut­ter speed, not your aper­ture. Effec­tively, it con­trols the +/​-​expo­sures in the same way as Aper­ture Pri­or­ity mode — by chang­ing the shut­ter speed. You don’t lose con­trol over your depth of field and you gain more con­trol over your expo­sure by shoot­ing in Man­ual. Who knew? Brian knew, and that was just one of the lessons he shared with the group.

We broke up and walked around Fre­mont, appar­ently con­found­ing the local busi­ness own­ers and vis­i­tors alike. Imag­ine 30 folks with cam­eras on tripods sud­denly show­ing up in your area. On the down­side, it took us a while to spread out enough to get some images with­out another pho­tog­ra­pher and tri­pod in your scene. I think we all screwed up some com­po­si­tions for each other until we just moved far enough away.

Another thing we all shared was the ques­tions from peo­ple around us. The secu­rity guy from one of the local nudie bars came up and asked me what was going on with all the cam­era, as did a few other ven­dors. A num­ber of vis­i­tors asked the same ques­tion, which was then fol­lowed by ques­tions about which cam­era they should buy. One guy asked me which aper­ture he should buy. I could only think to tell him “Apple.” He didn’t get it.

The folks at APC were great hosts. They passed out t-​shirts and dis­count cards for a future pur­chase, as well as hold­ing a nice time at Bor­der Grill after we got back for some free drinks and appe­tiz­ers. APC is a pretty small com­pany based in Florida, but they work on a grand scale. I had recently received my first can­vas from them and appre­ci­ated their qual­ity and cus­tomer ser­vice. Run­ning their busi­ness and attend­ing PSW pushed them pretty hard, but they did it all in great style. There were plenty of great exam­ples of their work in the expo hall and that’s what earned my trust to give them a try. I’m def­i­nitely a sat­is­fied cus­tomer and will return, so the HDR event was just icing on the cake for me. Try them out with your own images and see what I mean.

The PSW After-​Hours Party

This turned out to be a very long first day. I’m tired, I’m sweaty and I’ve been lug­ging around heavy cam­era gear all day. Still, I’m not going to miss this party. It had already started before our bus returned from Fre­mont Street, so I hur­ried up to my room after the APC cock­tails to shower and change before hit­ting the party. Once I arrived at the House of Blues, the band was up and play­ing, the crowd was lov­ing it and I imme­di­ately pulled out my cam­era and worked my way to the front of the room to start shooting.

One of the cool things about this party is that it’s all open for pho­tog­ra­phers. You don’t have to beg for access if you have a ticket. Come in the door and shoot as much as you want. The band is into it as much as the pho­tog­ra­phers. They gave us all plenty of great moments to cap­ture. More impor­tant than that was the fact that they’re just great play­ers. I’m not just say­ing that because I’m kind of snob­bish about musi­cians. It’s not because I’m great — I haven’t picked up my gui­tar in nearly four years. How­ever, my brother Don truly is great. He’s more than great, he’s phe­nom­e­nal. Grow­ing up around him gave me an appre­ci­a­tion for the real thing. Scott Kelby and his band­mates deliv­ered. They also brought up Scott Diussa, one of the instruc­tors for the con­cert pre-​con, to play gui­tar. That’s him rip­ping through the notes in the image above.

It seems like I was sweat­ing again in no time, but I didn’t care. There was a cool band in front of me and I had access to shoot. Front of the stage, the left or right, side-​stage, from the back of the room over the crowd — I got it all. Hun­dreds of live con­cert images are just beg­ging to see which ones I’ll pick. It’s an embar­rass­ment of riches and I wish I could shoot like this all the time.

Model Tableaus and Expos

Every con­fer­ence needs an expo hall for ven­dors to show their wares. If you go, here’s a tip. Some of them will drop prices on Fri­day to clear out inven­tory. Even if they don’t, there are often show spe­cials to save you money com­pared to reg­u­lar prices. I like to buy my Hood­man CF cards at this show because I save $50 apiece and this show was no dif­fer­ent. I love these cards. The first rea­son is because they’ve never had a reported case of cor­rup­tion, so I trust that my images are safe. The sec­ond rea­son is that they’re fast — 675x fast. Dur­ing PSW this trip, I filled up three 16 GB Hood­man cards and one of my old Kingston 133x 8 GB cards. When it came time to down­load images from the CF cards into Aper­ture on my iMac, it took longer to down­load the one 8GB Kingston card than all three of the Hood­man cards com­bined! That’s some seri­ous speed. I’m using the Hood­man FireWire CF card reader for all of my down­loads, so the only vari­able to affect per­for­mance was the card itself. When I was shoot­ing the keynote and band at the after-​hours party, I never once had to stop and wait for my buffer to empty out before I could shoot again while using my Hood­man cards. I won’t buy any­thing else. I just wish I could afford the 32 GB versions.

One of the big draws at the Expo Hall is a set of tableaus pro­vided by West­cott. They con­tract with a local mod­el­ing agency and bring in some really great scenes to sup­port the lovely mod­els. They do this to show off their TD5 Spi­der­lites. Hon­estly, I’m not a fan of those lights, but it makes sense to use con­tin­u­ous light­ing in this kind of cir­cum­stance. Could you imag­ine try­ing to pass around a Pock­etWiz­ard to use strobes in this kind of crowd?

That’s the crowd on a light period. Imag­ine the scene with three times as many pho­tog­ra­phers, and many of them don’t want to leave once they work their way up to the front of the pack. I’ll write a sep­a­rate post on my expe­ri­ence with this sit­u­a­tion, the lights, and deal­ing with the ven­dor rep. For now, suf­fice it to say that my only other neg­a­tive expe­ri­ence hap­pened with the ven­dor and I will NEVER give any of my busi­ness to West­cott again.

The mod­els, how­ever, were lovely and did their very best to accom­mo­date the crowd. As I showed yes­ter­day, peo­ple went home with some really cool pho­tos from this part of the expo hall.

Wrap­ping it Up

I am not a man who wins at games of chance or con­tests. I don’t expect to win any­more. That’s why I’m sur­prised that I won a num­ber of things at PSW. Here’s the list:

• I played video poker and won $5. You may not think that’s much, but I had to cash out once I got $5 ahead just so I could leave happy. I count this as a win.
• I won a DVD from Zack Arias (One Light). To win, I had to ask Vanelli what was in his shorts.
• I won a DVD cov­er­ing retouch­ing tech­niques from David Cuer­don at his excel­lent ses­sion on Fash­ion Por­traits. That was because I remem­bered that Shift+ cycled through var­i­ous Blend modes in Photoshop.
• I won an APC print of a photo that Alan Hess took of Scott Kelby dur­ing the first con­cert pre-​con. You had to be present to win. I was, but the per­son they drew before me wasn’t. Per­haps I’ll mount that one here in my home office so I can imag­ine Scott Kelby ques­tion­ing my deci­sions when I process images. “You’re going to use Pin­light blend mode on that shot? Seriously?”

Despite my long-​winded account of the event, I left out a ton of stuff. My plan is to go into a bit more detail of spe­cific por­tions of the con­fer­ence in other posts this week. What I hope you can take away from my review of PSW is that it’s really a great event full of nice peo­ple and great infor­ma­tion. Yes, I had a cou­ple of quirks, but that’s it. Just two things. Cer­tainly noth­ing to ruin my expe­ri­ence or take away from all the good things I encoun­tered. When you con­sider all the com­plex­ity of putting on a con­fer­ence for thou­sands of peo­ple, I’m amazed that NAPP con­tin­ues to pro­duce such an excel­lent expe­ri­ence twice a year. I wish I could be around this group of peo­ple all year long. Next Spring will be here before you know it, though. See you in Orlando.