Falling In Love with PhotoShop All Over Again

At 9:48 this morning, I turned the page of my Sierra Club desk calendar and let out a shriek.

I generally work here at my desk at night, write my journal entry for the day, piddle around playing solitaire, and if it's a Sunday night, turn over the page to see what is scheduled for the upcoming week.

But last night our internet connection went out. I had no internet at all until about 7 a.m. this morning, so I never turned over that page until 9:48.

There it was on Monday morning--the day I'd been looking forward to for a year! Today was the day of the NAPP Photoshop seminar. You may recall that a month or so ago, I went in to Sacramento for the seminar and spent half an hour racing around the convention center trying to find the damn thing, ending up calling NAPP and being told that it had been rescheduled.

Today was the day it had been rescheduled for...and it was scheduled to start at 10 a.m. I leaped up from my desk, grabbed my purse and my car keys, yelled upstairs to Walt that I was leaving and he would have to feed the puppies in the middle of the day, and I got on the road. I had 20 minutes more of my audio book but I left the iPod at home. I forgot to bring my cell phone. I was flying blind without electronic accompaniment.

The drive in was glorious. It had rained yesterday, so the air was beautifully clear, the sky a brilliant blue and the autumn color on the trees was breathtaking. But I didn't have much time to appreciate it because I was in a hurry.

The Convention Center is huge and I hoped that the seminar was going to be held in the same place it was last time (over the years I've been attending, it's been held in 3 different areas of the building). The escalator, nicely decorated for the holidays, was empty, but I took a chance that I had the right place. I did.

As it turned out, I only missed about 15 minutes of the seminar and I am so glad that I turned the page on my calendar.

NAPP has two different kind of workshops that it brings to Sacramento. One year it is an "artistic" seminar with techniques for creating art with PhotoShop. I learn a lot at those seminars and get energized by them, but it's the seminars, like this year's, which talk about the things that I do with the program--manipulating photos, creating things like logos and titles and that sort of thing. Today's seminar was just chock full of wonderful things I hadn't learned before.

When we broke for lunch I decided to go to Au Bon Pain, across the street, but found out it had closed, so I chose a Wolfgang Puck stand in the convention center itself. The line was very long and people were unhappy because they wanted to get back for a new product demonstration, but I realized that the product was (a) something I couldn't afford, (b) something I wouldn't use much, if at all, and (c) something I'd seen a demonstration of last year. So I opted to sit outside the convention center surrounded by glass fronted buildings and gorgeous trees in full fall color and enjoy Puck's butternut squash soup and herb bread.

The afternoon session didn't have as much that applied to me, since I don't do 3-D or work with HDR (high dynamic range) images, but it was still fascinating watching various creations come together. I came home all inspired, and will probably forget 90% of what I learned--but maybe some of it stuck (and, of course, I have the workbook that came with the seminar).

I'm already looking to next year's seminar.