Report From Photoshop World Vegas
Hi Gang: I’m back, and as you might imagine—I had just an amazing time! I met so many great people; I got to teach 4 sessions in the conference tracks, and three on the Expo floor, I had meetings, I went to parties, I got to play with my band, I stayed up way too late, and just had a ball.
Rather than giving you a thousands words, here are some pictures that tell the story better than I can (photos by official PSW photographers Brad Moore, Drew Gurian, and Josh Bradley).
Above: During David Ziser’s “Live Wedding Shoot” Pre-Conference Workshop
Above: The NAPP Photo Safari on location; taught by Joe McNally, Moose Peterson, and Crew.
Above: The proud winner of an Apple iPad, during the “Faux Olympics” during “Photoshop Midnight Madness!” (Our way after-hours session just for fun).
Above: Vanelli gets the crowd going before the doors to Midnight Madness open.
Above: Talking Twitter: Scott Bourne and Rod Harlan during our Twitter class on the Business Track
Above: Hey, isn’t that frequent commenter Mike Reeves there right of center?
Above: Deke McClelland during his “Channels & Masks” workshop
Above: Laurie Excel showing how she uses OnOne Software’s Photoshop plug-ins in her workflow during an Expo Floor presentation.
Above: Rod, Scott & Terry posing with another Midnight Madness Winner! (She won a custom-made NAPP baseball jacket, with two tickets to Photoshop World Orlando in the pocket!).
Above: Larry Becker is choosing contestants for a Midnight Madness game, and she’s yelling “Pick me. Pick me!” He picked her!
Above: Intellectual Property Attorney Ed Greenberg (front) with photographer’s rights advocate Jack Reznicki, (seated) during their class for photographers on how to protect your images (from our new business track).
Above: Amazing wedding photographers Cliff Mautner in one of his classes during his first time teaching at Photoshop World. He totally rocked it!
Joe McNally during his live class on shooting portraits with small off-camera flash. Here he’s taking a portrait of Adobe’s Russell Brown (follow this link to see the results from the shoot above over on Joe’s blog).
Above: Artist Fay Sirkis during her session on Painting with Photoshop CS5.
Above: McNally doing a live demo at the Manfrotto Distribution booth on the Expo Floor.
Above: Web guru Janine Warner during one of her conference sessions.
Above: A group pic of the instructors featured in our after hours “The Art of Digital Photography” roundtable. L to R: Joe McNally, Jay Maisel, Vincent Versace, Julieanne Kost, Moose Peterson, Joe Glyda, Jim DiVitale, and John Paul Caponigro.
Above: One of the way cool photo set-ups created by the creative team at Westcott, so you could just walk up and shoot. I don’t want to spoil it, because I’m doing a special post on Friday just about this, but this was coolest thing on our show floor ever, and attendees were over-the-top loving his (you’re seeing just one small part. More Friday).
Above: Adobe had their best booth ever, with computers running every single version of Photoshop ever (museum style), on the outside of the booth, and on the inside, an intimate presentation area attendees get up close with the people behind the product.
Above: My band, “Big Electric Cat” during the attendee Party at the House of Blues. (that’s Kalebra to my left, Felix Nelson in between on bass, and Scott Stahley back on the drums. You’ll see lead guitar player Tony Llanes in just a moment).
Above: Another booth on the floor that was drawing huge crowds was Dell’s “Photoshop Wars” presentation, where attendees, and instructors, battled it out. Very well done, and loads of fun (plus, Dell gave away lots of Dell monitors!). That’s Corey Barker and Larry Becker above.
Above: There’s Tony, rocking the House of Blues (with Felix on bass behind).
Above: Russell Preston Brown doing a presentation in Wacom’s booth.
Above: Joe Glyda during the free one-on-one Portfolio Reviews (note: a lot of people brought their portfolio on their iPad this year. Cool!).
Above: Veer draws a crowd to their Expo Floor booth.
Above: Soaking it all in during one of the conference sessions.
Above: Peter Bauer during his induction into the Photoshop Hall of Fame
Above: Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayan shares the crowd’s passion for Photoshop during the opening keynote.
Above: Adobe VP John Loiacono, Me (obviously very excited), and Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayan grab a photo op during the opening keynote.
Above: Photoshop Product Manager Bryan Hughes talks to the crowd about NAPP’s involvement in Adobe’s “Just Do It” program that brought loads of tweaks, enhancements, and improvements to existing features in Photoshop CS5.
Above: Adobe’s Worldwide Creative Suite Evangelist Terry White during his live demo during the opening Keynote.
Above: Adobe VP “Johnny L” kicks off Adobe’s keynote presentation.
Above: NAPP’s Creative Director Felix Nelson gets made-up backstage by Make Up Artist Shelley Giard for our KISS parody (he’s got Crop Tools for his eye makeup). I was the Move Tool. Matt was the Clone Stamp, and Dave Cross was the Hand tool.
Above: The doors open for the Opening Keynote, and the crowd gets settled in.
Above: After the opening parody of VH-1’s “Where are they Now?” show, chronicling the history of the fictitious KISS-like band “NAPP” the curtain drops (kabuki style) and boys play “I want to Photoshop All Nite…..and Retouch Every Day!” live! (with song lyrics captioned on screen, as seen here).
Above: The band in mid song. Full Disclosure: (a) Yes, we were really playing live! (b) That’s Felix on the far right on bass and me playing the “Flying V” in the center (c) Although Dave Cross was the lead guitarist in the video, and Matt was the drummer, Dave and Matt don’t really play, so we used a bit of trickery. Thanks to the make-up, we were able to substitute Big Electric Cat drummer Scott Stahley and guitarist Tony Llanes in their place. We made sure the camera guys never did close-ups on either Tony or Scotty, so the crowd just assumed it was Dave and Matt (and we heard that again and again throughout the conference: “Man, I never knew Dave Cross played such an awesome lead guitar!”). ;-)
Above: NPS (Nikon Professional Services) was the official sponsor of our “Real World Concert Photography” Pre-Conference workshop, and the class instructors (L) Scott Diussa and (R) Alan Hess had the crowd judge the best overall image from the live shoot part of the workshop, and then awarded the winner a Nikon D300s and lens!
Above: Senior Portrait artist (and kick butt instructor), James Schmelzer during his “Quality of Light” Workshop.
Above: Richard Harrington during his class on how to shoot and edit video taken with your DSLR.
Above: Checking out the new gear at the Really Right Stuff booth.
Above: Zack Arias during his class on things you need to know to be a professional photographer.
Above: MPIX Rocks! (see his shirt!). MPIX sponsored our live taping of Photoshop User TV on the Expo Floor, and we had Joe Dellasega from MPIX on as our guest, and he gave away loads of cool goodies—and gave a special one-day only discount to everyone watching. (Hey, I just noticed—that’s one of my portraits [football player], hanging in their booth. Sweet!).
Above: During the closing ceremonies I introduced Julie Stephenson, our Conference Director, and the crowd gave her a spontaneous standing ovation. Julie does a truly amazing job, and it shows!
Above: Photographer Michael “MJ” Green was helping out over at the Westcott Photo Shootout.
Above: John Paul Caponigro connects during one of his class presentations.
Above: Ben Willmore during one of his sessions, lit by the light of his laptop.
Above: The Father of Modern Color Correction, Dan Margulis, challenges his students with advanced classes on Lab, CMYK and Curves.
Above: Dave Cross, Canadian at Large, during one of his Expo Floor classes.
Above: Johnny L poses a question we don’t want to know the answer to. :)
Above: Heading back from class. Nothing else to do. Ho hum. Oh wait…this is Vegas!!!!
That’s a quick visual tour of this year’s Photoshop World. Our video team is putting together a video tour of the experience, but they have hours and hours of footage to go through, but I’ll let you know when they get it finished (probably in a week or so).
Thanks to everybody who helped make this a record-breaking show for us in more ways than one. By the way—-if this looks like a lot of fun, you can sign up later this week for next year’s show, coming to Orlando, Florida in late March. Hope I’ll see you there!