Good Morning Everybody,

Well, we landed in Atlanta last evening after a magnificent drive through the mountains watching one of the most beautiful sunsets ever.  I think the colors lasted for over an hour.  Those kinds of evenings sure make our road trips worth it.

We stayed with my good buddy, Denis Reggie.  Denis is one of the best and most successful wedding photographers I know and we've known each other over 23 years. Mr. Reggie is the person who coined the term "wedding photojournalism" many years ago and has been a major influence in our profession for the past several years.

Plan to catch Denis' programs at all the major conventions this year. He always fires up the crowds and definitely gets you thinking about how to shoot your images and run your business. In fact he will be at Imaging USA next week.  If you want to delve deeper you might want to invest in a few days with Denis at his in studio programs. You can get more info on Denis' upcoming in studio programs right here.

Hope you enjoy the re-read of yesterday's Top 10 most popular posts.  For me it was fun to look back over the posts too. But now on to the really good stuff.  My Technique Tuesday episodes have been favorite posts for quite a while.

Today,

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I was trying to do beta tests of two well know software packages, Adobe’s Lightroom 3 beta and Windows Office 2020 beta . Both are hardly beta versions, they are more consumer tryout. Unlike older beta software programs, they don’'t have direct access back to the developers. You have to go through on-line help, meager user forums or the weird send a smile/frown offered by Microsoft. Which means if you encounter legitimate problems you are pretty much on your own. I fondly remember the days when you could email the developers of the beta version and they would promptly email back. They even seemed to value your feedback. Unfortunately those days have gone for independent beta testers and are both these unsupported consumer previews are annoying the hell out of me.

The thing that is most irritating me about the Lightroom 3 beta is how it has taken over so many tasks like loading photos or any graphic images without asking. It not only popup interrupts unexpectedly, it is slow at even telling you what its trying to do and is so stubborn about constantly refreshing and finding things on its own, I just gave up. So if you want to load a lot of photos be prepared to get very annoyed about images flickering on and off and moving about. I mistakenly aborted one of these session and now my card has stated playing up in my

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Good Afternoon Everybody,

I knew I was getting close but today is the day.  Yep, it’s my 2000th post here at DigitalProTalk.com! That means to date at DigitalProTalk that you can read over 1.4 million words on  Photography, Lighting, Photoshop, Lightroom, Business Building, Sales, and Marketing – and most ALL of it is original content!

You can view over 500 “Image of The Day” posts most with all the EXIF data and back story of each shot.

You can also view over 100 video tutorials on Lighting, Lightroom, Photography, and Photoshop posted over these last 24+ months.

So how many words is that? Well, if you had to read Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” in high school - as I did – and it was a long read totaling over 560,000 words, then DPT to date is well over twice as long.

In those early days, it was tough to get the posts up on a daily basis.  Even today, many times, even when time is short, I always managed to get the posts up many times to the consternation of my blog editor. 

And my blog editor? – Well, a GREAT BIG thanks goes to LaDawn who proofs nearly all the posts, correcting

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Press Release Adobe today announced the Photoshop Camera Raw 5.6, Lightroom 2.6 and DNG Converter 5.6 Release Candidates, available for immediate download on Adobe Labs. The term 'release candidate' means this update is well tested but would benefit from additional community testing to provide the highest quality experience for customers working on a variety of hardware and software

Good Morning Everybody,

We wrapped my Master Class last Friday, packed the bags on Saturday for the last leg of my Digital WakeUp Call tour, and hit the road on Sunday.  Can you believe it - only 10 cities to go! We made the 8 1/2 hour very picturesque drive down to Raleigh, North Carolina yesterday arriving about 8:00 p.m. and we are ready to go again tonight.

I brought the Master Class images with me and hope to get a show posted over the next couple of days.  I'm planning to mix in a little video too - it should be fun.  And speaking of video, be sure to check out tomorrow's post. Yes, it is ready to go and looks very cool.

Hey, enough already - let's get on with today's post.

Come On Down To Mardi Gras In February 5-7, 2010
I got an email from my buddy, Ralph Romaguera, last week about this great idea he is putting together for next year's Mardi Gras celebration in New Orleans.  He wants to put together a float of photography friends every year. 

Ralph has been heavily involved in Mardi Gras for many years in his home town of New Orleans, even being King of the crewe last year. He has informally put together these Mardi Gras extravaganzas for photographers the

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Good Morning Everybody,

I’m at the keyboard early this morning because I know that after we wrap my Master Class today LaDawn and I are just going to
“chill” a bit and enjoy the beautiful fall scenery we are experiencing this year.

I have to say, we have had a great class this week.  Feedback from the class is that everyone really liked the new format.  We will read all the comment sheets from this week’s attendees, gather additional input from the “coaches” at our wrap up meeting early this afternoon. Then we will tweak where necessary, and see if we can make the upcoming Spring Master Class April 26 –30, 2010 - even better. My thanks to everyone who attended this week’s class, my team from the studio, the coaches and assistants that  shared their knowledge and expertise to further enhance the Master Class experience and made it such a good time.

Next week look for a image wrap up of the week too. BTW, don’t you love the picture of the class this time around.  I thought, heck, the class is mostly about lighting so let’s really show all the strobes firing;~)  Our class picture was taken by Jesica Bruzzi from B&H who came by as a consultant for a few days this week. Thanks Jesica for a great shot.

I hope

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Good Afternoon Everybody,

The class is off to a great start and everyone seems to like the new concept – lots of models and lots of coaches.  I have to say, it’s a great way to ramp up the leaning curve for the attendees.

We reviewed images today and the class had some wonderful images to share.

So what else happened yesterday?  Some BIG surprises!!! We got home last night about 8 o’clock in the evening.  The first thing I did was grab the card and load up the images into Lightroom 3 BETA.

I was stoked to see the images I had shot, too.  The images loaded across the screen, the previews gradually populated my entire desktop. There they were – I couldn't wait to peek at my “real” images (not vacation shots) taken with the new Canon7D.

Then surprise of surprises, images looked great on the back of the camera but were a lot darker on my monitor – what gives?  With the 40D what I got on the camera’s LCD, I saw on the monitor. 

Part of the problem may have been that I had the camera’s LCD brightness turned all the way up so we could view the images outside more easily.  I’m hoping that was the only issue and the reason everything appeared so

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