Jack Davis training camp
I attended tonight's Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom training class by Jack Davis. It definitely was quite an impressive class -- at the same time in terms of the techniques discussed, the Adobe applications themselves and the nifty business practices of the training company.
First, Jack Davis is a very good presenter and made the three hours fly by. He does have a penchant towards infrared photography and using pictures of his daughter that don't particularly move me but one is allowed a few quirks...
I was amused to find out how the Software Cinema appears to have overcome the profitability challenge of putting on a $30 per person class while traveling all over the country: when you go to the class, you get the opportunity to buy their DVDs at a healthy discount ($99 instead of $125), plus offering a combo of all four Jack Davis "How to Wow" DVDs for a discounted price of $199 for the set. Let's say that the DVD sales at the event were brisk! I actually find it to be brilliant: I doubt that the majority of attendees would have purchased the DVDs otherwise (so no real cannibalizing of existing sales) and the discount is a strong motivator for immediate purchases. Quite the win-win situation.
I suppose that, ultimately, I am most impressed by Adobe themselves: Photoshop CS3 and Lightroom are amazing pieces of software, not only from a functionality point of view but also from a software developer's point of view: the way Adobe is taking the complete imaging suite towards a procedural image editing model (basically, building edits as sequences of instructions that can be edited at any time -- being able to regenerate the final image even if you change the first step) is quite the reinvention of what image editing really means. Or, from my developer's perspective, what any software package means. Combine this with what we have learned about the way Lightroom is written and it leads to interesting questions regarding how desktop applications should be written today. That'll be the subject of a later post, I'm afraid.
Oh, one amusing tidbit was a vivid reminder of how copyright is definitely the make-your-own-bogeyman subject for everybody. There was near-hysterical interest in the explanation of Adobe Camera Raw metadata templates for copyright information and Jack Davis' description of the orphaned works legislation currently being discussed was interestingly fearful. Every medium seems to have its own fancy about what copyright means and why their form of absolutism is right. Whether it is filmmakers, photographers, musicians, documentary makers, or software developers they all absolutely think they are right (and, by extension, that the others are not). In that vein, I found it deliciously ironic that the same photographers that express outrage at the possibility of any loss of control of their work were falling over themselves to license royalty-free music to accompany their slideshows. As ever, everybody else's world can be grey but yours is sharply black-and-white[*].
[*]: Heck, I did it too -- this blog is licensed under a fairly restrictive license (see the bottom of this page for the Creative Commons link). In my defense, it really was more of a default choice on my part: without deeply thinking about all the issues, I found it easier to make the default license restrictive (because people can always contact me to obtain whatever they want to reuse under a more permissive license) than get stuck in some legal limbo because I didn't pick a license.
First, Jack Davis is a very good presenter and made the three hours fly by. He does have a penchant towards infrared photography and using pictures of his daughter that don't particularly move me but one is allowed a few quirks...
I was amused to find out how the Software Cinema appears to have overcome the profitability challenge of putting on a $30 per person class while traveling all over the country: when you go to the class, you get the opportunity to buy their DVDs at a healthy discount ($99 instead of $125), plus offering a combo of all four Jack Davis "How to Wow" DVDs for a discounted price of $199 for the set. Let's say that the DVD sales at the event were brisk! I actually find it to be brilliant: I doubt that the majority of attendees would have purchased the DVDs otherwise (so no real cannibalizing of existing sales) and the discount is a strong motivator for immediate purchases. Quite the win-win situation.
I suppose that, ultimately, I am most impressed by Adobe themselves: Photoshop CS3 and Lightroom are amazing pieces of software, not only from a functionality point of view but also from a software developer's point of view: the way Adobe is taking the complete imaging suite towards a procedural image editing model (basically, building edits as sequences of instructions that can be edited at any time -- being able to regenerate the final image even if you change the first step) is quite the reinvention of what image editing really means. Or, from my developer's perspective, what any software package means. Combine this with what we have learned about the way Lightroom is written and it leads to interesting questions regarding how desktop applications should be written today. That'll be the subject of a later post, I'm afraid.
Oh, one amusing tidbit was a vivid reminder of how copyright is definitely the make-your-own-bogeyman subject for everybody. There was near-hysterical interest in the explanation of Adobe Camera Raw metadata templates for copyright information and Jack Davis' description of the orphaned works legislation currently being discussed was interestingly fearful. Every medium seems to have its own fancy about what copyright means and why their form of absolutism is right. Whether it is filmmakers, photographers, musicians, documentary makers, or software developers they all absolutely think they are right (and, by extension, that the others are not). In that vein, I found it deliciously ironic that the same photographers that express outrage at the possibility of any loss of control of their work were falling over themselves to license royalty-free music to accompany their slideshows. As ever, everybody else's world can be grey but yours is sharply black-and-white[*].
[*]: Heck, I did it too -- this blog is licensed under a fairly restrictive license (see the bottom of this page for the Creative Commons link). In my defense, it really was more of a default choice on my part: without deeply thinking about all the issues, I found it easier to make the default license restrictive (because people can always contact me to obtain whatever they want to reuse under a more permissive license) than get stuck in some legal limbo because I didn't pick a license.
