Behind-the-Scenes at the B&H Photo Lightroom 5 Summit Yesterday in NYC
What an amazing day!!!! Over 1,500 photographers (capacity) at the B&H Photo event in person — literally thousands more watching the live stream from literally all over the world — Adobe was there, including the new Lightroom Product manager Sharad Mangalick, who was answering questions all day, one-on-one from attendees at the event — and I’m training alongside Adobe Evangelist Julieanne Kost and The Photoshop Diva herself, Katrin Eismann. What a blast! :)
Lots of learning. Lots of laughs. Lots of Lighting. Lots of Lightroom. Canon was there. Sony was there. Elinchrom, Square Space and Westcott, too (among others). That’s (L to R above): Yours truly, Katrin, and Julieanne during the opening session showing off some cool Lightroom 5 stuff.
I’ll tell the rest in the captions, but all morning we shared Lightroom tips, new features, news techniques, and so on. Then after lunch I did a live shoot, and then passed the images off to Katrin & Julieanne to do some retouching and finishing effects (they wound up doing a Twilight effect).
Above: We had a team put together to work with our model for the shoot. Here’s a shot from backstage with makeup artist Cassi Renee and hair stylist Eric Williams. The shoot was styled by Sophia Batson (not shown here, and darn if I could even find a shot with Sophia in the frame, but she is truly awesome! Fourth time I’ve worked with Sophia — she is wonderful to work with it and very talented).
Above: Our staging area was a small empty meeting room right next to the ballroom where the class was taking place, and at lunch time we did a quick test shoot to test the lighting, and go over with the model what we’d be doing on stage in about 30 minutes from then. That’s photographer David Teng helping us out as 2nd assistant and behind me is photographer Jason Joseph who was our third assistant on the shoot. By the way: I did have breakfast available for the entire crew (anyone that watched last week’s episode of “The Grid” will know why).
I’m shooting a Canon 5D Mark III here (Canon was the major sponsor of the event, so they gave me the Mark III to use for the live shoot. Sweet camera!)
Above: Here’s an over-the-shoulder view of our model Caroline, who did a really terrific job! After a few test shots, we broke everything down; moved it out to the stage for the live shoot in front of the class.
Above: Ya know what’s stressful? Doing a live shoot in front of 1,500 New York photographers. Oh yeah, want to take it up a notch? Standing in the back of the room — Joe McNally. Cue the sweat!
Above: Here’s a Lightroom grid of some of the shot from the live shoot in front of the class.
Above: Lightroom 5 has a feature (which I showed earlier in the day) that lets you visualize any type of cover design, brochure cover, photo book cover , etc., as an overlay right within Lightroom, so I took one of the images; did the retouching myself (more of a straight-up fashion retouch), and did the cover mock-up you see here.
Above: Here’s the un-cropped shot used on the cover, just so you can see it without all the text.
Above: Here’s the view from backstage (behind the seamless, Julieanne and Katrin wait patiently for the shoot part to conclude and then I hand them a hard drive with the images on it for them to “do their thing”). Just one light — an Elinchrom BRX 500 strobe with an Elinchrom Rotalux 53″ Midi Octa Softbox, and David is holding a 5-in-1 Westcott reflector to kick a little light back into her eyes. We’re shooting tethered directly into Lightroom 5, and my live shooting rig uses a utility bar from Manfrotto mounted on a tripod, and then the platform itself and orange USB cable are from Tethertools.com
Above: I’m including another backstage shot so you can see the shooting rig, and lighting set-up a little clearer.
It was a Lightroom love-fest!
Everybody I talked with was over-the-top in love with Lightroom, and there was a great vibe going all day. If you missed the live event, B&H Photo will be posting the entire summit online for free so you can go and watch it any time (as soon as its posted, I’ll post a link here, and over on my Facebook and Twitter accounts).
A big thanks to David Brommer from B&H Photo who put this entire event together (you rocked it, dude!). Plus, thanks to all the wonderful crew at B&H Photo, including our dear friend Manny Steigman (best guy ever!). They did an awesome job!
Also, it was a honor to share the stage with both Katrin and Julieanne who not only put up with my lame jokes, but who both taught me some new Lightroom tricks as well, which is always sweet! Thanks to all our fantastic sponsors, and to everybody who came down to the Javits Center yesterday, and who watched the streamed live event at home. We’re all lucky to be using and learning Lightroom together, and we’re very fortunate to have a partner like B&H Photo who values education like they do, and who makes live events like this possible.
Cheers, and hope to see you all again soon!
-Scott