Tag: Announcements

Contest Updates

Jason1 Comment

Today I thought it would be appropriate to take a moment and give some contest update announcements.

  1. First off, don’t forgot the OnOne Software Plugin Suite contest that is going on all month.  Share your images over in the Flickr thread (with a theme of “Numbers”) to be eligible.
  2. Second, the winer of the Fotoquote Pro discount is contributing commenter Fred from the comments posted in June.  Fred won the discount code for a copy of Fotoquote Pro – congrats to Fred.
  3. Third, the next contest is also going to be an exciting one because the folks at Wacom have generously offered to let me give away the Bamboo Fun I reviewed a couple weeks ago.  That will be going live next month though, so definitely something to look forward to there!

Last but not least, if there are products you would like to see reviewed, given away as prizes in photo contests and such, just share your product ideas with me here in the comments or via email (you all know it by now – jason AT canonblogger DOT com).

I know, it’s a lame way to self-promote things, but the lucky listeners and readers also ultimately benefit from these types of giveaways, so please let me know what types of things you would like to see in future giveaways.  (Still working on a few ideas myself, but hearing from readers and listeners is the best way to generate content you like, so let’s hear from the audience!)

Happy shooting out there, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow.  I should have the next podcast up and ready for your weekend listening enjoyment too!

News and Nuggets

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Hey all, just a couple notes and bits of maintenance for everyone this Thursday. The first ever contest for the Learning Digital Photography podcast is now underway, so be sure to post your images in the thread over at Flickr in order to participate.Some lucky listener will win a copy of Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom 2.0. You do have to have a Flickr account to post images there, but registration is free (and if you have a Yahoo account, you already can get into Flickr). A couple links to make note of:

In some other maintenance notes, the podcast has gotten a few more reviews at iTunes and Diggs over at Personal Life Media – thanks to those that have shared their thoughts and feedback, your support means a lot and every little bit helps. Here’s the links for those that would like to add to the support:

Last but not least, it became official the other day that I will be in attendance at the Lightroom workshop here in Denver coming up on May 20th Being led by none other than Scott Kelby, of NAPP fame, I’ll be getting even more up to speed on how to use Lightroom as the primary means for my photography work flow. I’ll likely have a few posts worth of material to share with the readership shortly thereafter. (Who knows – I might be able to snag a pic or two out of it too!

So, that’s it for today – sorry for the lateness of the post.  Happy shooting and we’ll see you back here again tomorrow!

Win a copy of Adobe Lightroom 2.0!

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box_lightroom2_150x150

Just last week, I had the distinct honor of interviewing Tom Hogarty, Senior Product Manager for Adobe Lightroom.  Needless to say, I postponed the podcast for a few more days so I could include the interview.  He really gave a good breakdown of the function of Lightroom, what to expect from it, how to incorporate it into your work flow, and what (in general) we can likely expect to see in the future of image processing development.    We spent a good deal of time going over the nuts and bolts, so under the general heading of Software discussions today, I’d like to introduce you to Adobe’s Lightroom.

Lightroom is a very different way of handling your images.  Rather than taking a single image at a time through something like Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom allows you to not only address single image edits, but also manage an entire library of images.  The key here is management, because that’s what Lightroom really does – it takes the idea of asset management and incorporates it into a program so that you don’t even have to think about it!  Rather than belabour the point here though, it would probably be best to encourage everyone to just download the podcast and give it a listen.  Not only do we discuss Lightroom, but we also take a lot of listener questions, both specific to Lightroom and general photography questions too – and, oh yeah, a contest!

That’s right – Adobe was kind enough to donate a copy of Photoshop Lightroom 2.0 to some lucky listener.  At an estimated retail value of almost $300 ($299), this is by and large, the best contest I’ve could ever come up with!   It’s very exciting!  I’d love to share the details here, but if I did that, you wouldn’t listen to the podcast.  So… want to know the details?  Listen to the podcast! In the meantime, here’s the show notes on the things we discussed and where to get the latest and greatest info on the product:

Be sure to stop over at Twitter and start following these folks, because they are the ones who you can really learn a lot from!  Then don’t forget to listen to the podcast for your chance to win a copy of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.0!  Happy Shooting and good luck one and all!

Oh yeah, here’s the teaser link for the contest:  Learning Digital Photography Flickr Group

Another Magazine Article!

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photobbmag

Well, I completely lost track of the week and did not get the weekly podcast recorded in time for publication today.  So, while I could have gone with the alliterative “Forgetful Friday” blog title, I figured that would have been a little too on the nose.  So, instead, I’ll share the exciting news that the latest issue of PhotographyBB magazine has been published.  Dave Seeram, editor-in-chief, announced it a few days ago on the website, so do stop over and download the latest article now. Make sure you take a peek at the article Photography Food for Thought (pgs 19-22), it was the contribution of yours truly to this months issue!  Of course the rest of the magazine is a worthwhile read too.  I particularly enjoyed Dave’s article on Photoshop Retouching.  He’s got a unique balance of technical expertise and translating that skill to the written word. Thanks go out to Dave and the entire publishing crew over at PhotographyBB for another opportunity to share an article with a wider audience than is here at CB!

That’s it for this week.  Happy shooting, have a great weekend, and we’ll see you back here Monday with the belated podcast!

When it rains, it pours!

Jason2 Comments

After my post on Monday, with the Best 8 of 2008, CB saw quite a bit of activity, first from some very generous links back from none other than Scott Kelby and Jeff Revell of Photoshop Insider and Photowalk Pro fame. Then, when I did the piece on Tuesday titled “Is Film Making a Resurgence?” based on several discussions and news events, that also saw a fair number of comments. All this came on the heels of a career switch that has me transitioning from the private to the government sector which means condensing about 6 months of work projects down into two weeks.  This means I missed making a few noteworthy photo-related announcements that are both specific to CB and to the photography community at large.   From a blog visibility perspective, that was totally the worst time to not even make a post for teh day, but there was nothing to be done about it.   I guess the old saying is true:  When it rains, it pours! So, here’s a few announcements and belated photo-related news events to share for the remainder of this week.

From the Canon Blogger news front:

  • Canon Blogger has been picked up by Personal Life Media (the same folks that host Digital Photography Life and Camera Dojo).  This means future podcasts will be uploaded to their service, which will do a number of things for the podcast.  First and foremost, they will optimize the audio quality for the listening audience.  Second, they are also going to fix some podcast feed issues that I didn’t even know I had so that the show comes up better in your favorite feeds like iTunes and the like.  We’re also going to update the graphics to give the CB podcast a little bit of a sexier and professional look.  It’s quite exciting to see that there has been enough interest to warrant this kind of leap forward.  It does mean this week will be the second in succession with no show, but as we flesh out the details and get all the archived content uploaded, we can move forward with new shows!
  • Due in part to the holiday schedule, and to the subsequent flurry of personal and professional activity, the What’s This series and the Thursday Thoughts Series took a brief hiatus this week.  Yesterday was just insane at work, so I didn’t even get a chance to post to the blog saying I wouldn’t have time to post, so Wednesday was both figuratively and literally a No Blog Wednesday!  I should be back to a regular and more predictable schedule with those next week.
  • As you may recall from my last podcast of 2008, I announced that Think Tank had generously donated their new StreetWalker bag to CB for a review.  I have been putting it through its own paces over the last couple weeks and am now working on the finishing touches of my first official product review.  That should be coming out some time next week.

In the rest of the news:

  • Fellow blogger and photographer, Jason D. Moore made a bit of a splash the other day when he announced a new interview series he is doing that is leading off with an impressive list of folks including John Nack, (if you don’t know who John Nack is, welcome to the world photography and Photoshop – he’s the cheif  Product Manager for Adobe Photoshop !),  Larry Becker (of NAPP notariety), Jeff Revell, (Photowalk Pro) and several other notables.
  • Photo-restoration as a craft gets a jolt!  Fellow NAPP members Mitz and Janine both have some excellent posts on what it takes to be effective with photo restoration work.  While I knew from my own amateur efforts that it’s not easy (and definitely a craft that takes time to develop), these two bring awareness to the next level with the thoughts they share on their blogs.  Definitely worth reading when you have time.  Mitz can be found here, and Janine can be found here.

Well, is that enough content for one blog post?  I hope so…sorry if things went on for a while.  More tk!  So, until tomorrow, happy shooting – hope all your shots are good ones!

Top 100 of 2008 Honors!

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For the interim posts between Christmas and New Year, I am not going to be introducing much in the way of new content, but while traveling recently, I got word that CanonBlogger receieved accolades as one of the top 100 blogs for 2008.  Thanks so much for the recognition!  In looking at the other sites mentioned, I would also highly recommend the entire list of other blogs as many are in my daily read list.  Be sure to stop over and see the others honored this year:

Top 100 Blogs of 2008

Feedback and More Fodder

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First off, I’d like to thank everyone who has been taking the time to share their thoughts and feedback both in the comments and via email – it’s always fun to get the insights of others. A few people had mentioned some loose threads though that I’d not tugged on in a while, so I thought I’d give an update as to the activities and status of those projects. (As an aside, I am probably becoming famous for starting projects and never finishing them – I do eventually, it’s just that I keep adding more projects so the others start to fade as new ones come into focus.)

1st – The How-to’s of Website design: I did take a leave of absence on this primarily because there is an area that I am not as fluent on that I was hoping to find some help in the form of a second contributing author, and that has not come to fruition yet. So, if anyone is interested in co-authoring a book on the subject, feel free to let me know!

2nd – The Online Photography Test: The Basic test is complete, and the Advanced test is about 90% complete. I’d like to get some ideas and more feedback before taking that phase to completion, so again, if anyone has some suggestions on good questions for an advanced online photography test, I am all virtual ears! As for the Expert Test – I am nowhere near getting ready to even put that one out there. I am of the old school variety in that I don’t think it’s right for someone to pose a question for others to answer if they cannot provide some basis of an answer themselves. (The idea is that how can one teach or offer knowledge if one does not have that knowledge themselves.) Although higher education and high schools are rife with examples of this – I, in good conscience, cannot pretend to be an expert when I have so much more to learn on the subject of photography.

3rd – The Weekly “What’s This?” series saw an abrupt halt a few weeks ago, and I never came forth with the answer. The last shot was this:

What’s This?

And the answer is: the grill from the front of our microwave. Unfortunately, we are no longer in the house, so I can’t capture a full version of the appliance to show you a zoomed out perspective. But anyway, thanks for those that waited patiently to discover the answer. I should have a new “What’s This?” back up and running tomorrow.

Finally, as I endeavor to get back into a steady routine of tutorials and regular writings, I have a video tutorial put together for this week. Since I did get a few questions from people who asked if I could show the method for achieving a panorama rather than just writing the methodology out, here is the “outtro” for how to post process a series into panoramas. Since the podpress plugin is still misbehaving, I’ tried an alternative means for feeding things for the time being, but that doesn’t seem to work either.  So, I am going to have to go another week with a link to both the Flash and the Quicktime!  Sorry again for the continued inconvenience.

I’m not adjusting the iTunes feed just yet as I have confidence that the podpress developer will have an update coming sooner rather than later, but if people wish to add the secondary feed to their readers, that will be in play until the original feed comes back online. I am posting it to the podpress feed link too though as a test to see if it comes back online, so if you subscribe to the original feed and it shows up, let me know. Otherwise, continue to visit the blog (which is preferable anyway) to catch the flash version. Hope you all enjoy it!

I’ll be back tomorrow with a Wednesday Walk around the Web, and a new installment of “What’s This?”! Until then, happy shooting, and watch those apertures!