Various Things

Another Monday, another week. Some things to note:

• Epson has announced its Print Academy for 2008/2009, a travelling road show that hits 15 US and Canadian cities and features live and video spots by some of the best photographers and printmakers around. I'll be attending the Toronto show on March 21st. There are two tracks: one for advanced amateurs and another for working pros. There are lots of good presenters in the program, although it is unclear how many will be "live" versus video. Some of the names include: John Shaw, Bruce Dale, Greg Gorman, Jay Meisel and Michael Reichmann.
• I was a little perturbed recently when Adobe announced Photoshop CS4 despite John Nack's remonstrations in his blog that the launch was not imminent. Surprise! It came out before the rumored launch date of October 1st. Based on Nack's denials, I'd finally decided to upgrade my version of Photoshop from CS2 to CS3 a couple of weeks before the announcement of CS4. My disappointment was doubled when it turned out that the widely demonstrated feature where a Lightroom file can be seamlessly opened as a layer object in Photoshop CS3 turned out to be bogus due to a bug that seems to be taking a long time to fix. That feature was one of the things that turned the tide in my decision to upgrade. I went on to the Adobe site and searched for some way of getting credit for my CS3 upgrade towards a CS4 purchase and there is such a credit plan -- but you have to have purchased CS3 after the announcement of CS4 to qualify. Undaunted, I pursued a customer service agent and she happily let me return my version of CS3 despite it being slightly over the 30 day mark. So, I ripped out my CS3 version and went back to CS2. As soon as my Visa card is credited, I'll be ording CS4 which has lots of goodies in it. Who knows, maybe the Lightroom to CS4 photo transfer will work as well.
  
• We had a great hike this week-end in Algonquin Park and saw the fall colours at their peak. I'll post a more detailed description of this once I get a few minutes to develop the pictures.
• I'm looking forward to the 10th of October when I'll be jetting off to California for a long week-end photo workshop with Alain Briot. We'll be taking photos of the Sierra Nevadas, Mono Lake and the Bristlecone pines. Stay tuned for more on this.