Quick Hit Monday: Interview Over At Jason Moore's Blog, Shooting Lightning, NIK's Silver Efex Pro & Lots of Thanks You's

Good Morning Everybody,
We hit the road again early this morning this time heading for the great Southwest. We are looking forward to seeing the photographers in Phoenix, Tucson, El Paso, and Albuquerque this week.

It's interesting that many of the national lecture tours miss the last three cities just listed. LaDawn and I want to spend a little time in this part of the country since we haven't been there yet ourselves. So we figured, "Let's add these locations to the Tour and grab the opportunity to visit ( if only so briefly) the Southwest this time around." I'll let you know if the photographers in that part of the world are any different - just kidding.

I forgot to mention last Friday, that we had about 30 visitors from Canada join the party. I got a chance to visit with a few of our northern neighbors. Peter West has a nice post with pics on his blog about the program. You can check it out right here.

Hey gang, I've got a few quick hits for you today, so let's get to it...

Quick Hit Monday:

Jason Moore Interviews
If you haven't checked out Jason Moore's site lately, you really should. He really does have a lot of nice stuff going on. For one, he has been doing this series of profiles on many of the famous faces around the web like Scott Kelby, David Hobby (Strobist), Joey Lawrence, and many more. Here is the link to main Profile page - very interesting reading.

Anyway, he just started his series of interviews with famous faces in the Photoshop community. His latest was with Photoshop Hall of Famer, John Nack, from Adobe [link ]. Well, he contacted me a few weeks ago about doing an interview with him - I was honored and said, "Yes." I hadn't realized I had scheduled it on the Saturday right before Easter in the middle of the tour, but no problem, we both found time Saturday for a nice chat. You can check out my interview right here. Thanks, Jason.

NIK Software Is Happening In Lightroom
That's right - Viveza (one of my favorites), Color Efex Pro, and now Silver Efex Pro all work seamlessly in Lightroom. This is way cool. I knew Viveza was working in Lightroom, then at Photoshop World in Boston a few weeks ago, Janice Wendt, Nik's resident leading authority and NIK ambassador, guru, and all around nice lady gave me the head's up that Color Efex Pro was going live that day. Now I see that Silver Efex Pro is also operational in Lightroom.

What's cool about this folks is that the trip to Photoshop for the NIK plug-ins isn't necessary when working in Lightroom. From the menu bar, just hit Photo-> Edit In -> your three choices of the NIK products.

What happens is that the NIK apps just pop up in Lightroom the way they do in Photoshop saving tons of time without having to use Photoshop as an intermediate step. High Fives to NIK for a great solution!! Here is the link to NIK. You can download the Lightroom plug-ins under each product listing. Just hit Download, add your email address and you will get to a screen that looks like this - then just download away.

Just Perfect For Photographing Lightning
OK, I know that's not on everybody's list of things to do. But for the geek squad, of which I'm a charter member, this is like really cool. I was doing my weekend cruise of newshound extraordinaire, The Imaging Insider [link] and came across the story on this Lighting trigger. What's it do - it fires your camera at the instant of a lightning strike so you can get the shot - very cool for you storm chasers out there.

You can find it reviewed over at Photocrati.com who gave it rave reviews [link]. Here is the link to the company that makes this device right here. They also have have several images made with their device which are quite interesting. BTW - they also gave my tour, DWC, and nice "thumbs up" too [link]. Thanks guys.

Thank You, Thank You , Thank You
My thanks to Matt Kloskowski at Lightroom Killer Tips [link] and to R.C Concepcion at Layers Magazine.com [link] for their very kind remarks about my Digital WakeUp Call Tour. I got a chance to visit with R.C and several other NAPP cognoscenti, but Matt slipped away before I could say HI. BTW, Matt has a nice little tutorial on Lightroom's Adjustment brush right here in case you missed it last week. Anyway, thanks to everyone for the glowing tour reviews.

Hey gang, on that note, I'm out of here. The plane leaves in 90 minutes and I hear Phoenix calling. See everyone in Phoenix tomorrow. Adios, -David