Well, it's been a quiet 2 1/2 years in terms of work travel. But this last week of July 2022, I found myself doing exactly that; travelling for work. I was fortunate enough that this first work-related trip was for the Photo Educators Summit (AES) in Seattle, an event I am very passionate about. This was the first time in two years that the AES workshop would be live and in-person.
The AES is an invitation-only, small intimate event, bringing together anywhere from 16 - 20 photo education faculty from across North America. They benefit from a custom-created week of curriculum, delivered primarily by Adobe Principal Digital Imaging Evangelist Julianne Kost, along with other subject matter experts. The small group means lots of individual attention from Julieanne as well as the Teaching Assistants (TAs) like me.
On a personal note, it's a point of pride for me that I've been able to facilitate Canadian participation at two of the events, including this most recent one.
What I was NOT passionate about was what my potential flight experience would be. I arrived at the airport 3 1/2 hours early on Sunday afternoon. Getting past security and customers was a relatively pleasant breeze. However, due to mechanical issues, weather and turbulence created by a constant succession of planes taking off on the same flight path, we still left the ground about 2 hours later than scheduled.
Adobe Care and Well-being
As nervous as I was about my first work trip, my applause and gratitude go to organizers Kathy Scibettta and Bob Rose and the Adobe global security team at the Seattle office. Everything was done to keep us safe and healthy, from supplying PCR and rapid tests, mandatory mask wearing while in the Adobe office, to socially distant, individual work tables in the main lecture room. We were about as 'locked down" as you could be while still having freedom of movement and access. #adobelife, indeed.
Day 1
Photo Walk Prep
In the early afternoon on Monday, Bob Rose, Julieanne Kost, Kathy Scibetta and I did a walking tour of the Seattle area near our hotel, including Space Needle Park and Pike's Market.
During the actual photo walk, our group would be capturing stills and videos for two different projects; an individual triptych project and a group video project. It was the coolest of the hot days ahead, but I managed to get some pretty cool images - including the cover image at the top of this page.
I also managed to injure myself. By not watching where I was going, I scraped the skin off part of my lower left leg. You know that part where the bone is closest to the skin? Yeah, that part. It bleeds a lot. The sacrifices we make for art...
Meet and Greet
The evening reception was at the Hotel Andra Loft Bar/Hot Stove Society, which is not only a great spot to meet up, it also offers a cooking school! All the attendees had been formed into teams and had a blast in our team-building exercise on creating team logos. We were also joined by Lightroom team member, Rikk Flohr. Rikk and I would be the TAs and subject matter experts to help attendees as they worked with both new and familiar software applications, including Adobe Rush, Lightroom Classic, Photoshop, Lightroom Ecosystem (cloud-based), Substance Stager and fun apps like Adobe Capture and Adobe Express. As a member of the education enterprise sales team, I was also there to assist with any enterprise-level questions that arose.
DAY 2
Lightroom Classic Day
Day 2 was an information-packed session, with Julieanne bringing everyone up to speed on what had changed in Lightroom Classic over the past two years, the most exciting update of which had to be the new masking capabilities for Lightroom. This new functionality has brought local adjustments to a completely other level and - I think - is one of the most revolutionary updates to Lightrooom in years.
We were able to enjoy some amazing breakfasts and lunches in the newly renovated Adobe cafeteria, often catching some sun in the courtyard.
Day 3
Adobe Rush
We had a guest speaker from the Rush team (Michelle Gamboa) join us for the morning, to walk all the attendees through the basics of the Rush Mobile interface. As Rush was pretty new to the entire group, I was kept on my toes troubleshooting and supporting the group. After the intro, everyone was given 30 minutes to go out and shoot some footage and then assemble a short 30 - 60 second clip. While there is no repository for the finished practice projects, I must say I was quite impressed by the results from each team.
Photowalk
Space Needle Park, Chihuly Glass Garden and Pike's Market
I got some great shots of the Needle and the Pop Art Museum on our dry run, so for the actual photo walk, I concentrated on the walk over to the park and - of course - the Chihuly Glass Garden exhibit. The garden was fascinating and could easily have been a half-day photo project in and of itself. Our photo walk ended at Pike's Market where we enjoyed a wonderful dinner at Il Bistro. Upon leaving I got my first opportunity to photograph the infamous "gum wall." It's actually more of a "gum alley".
Day 4
Gas Works Park
Just a 15-minute walk from the Adobe office is this amazing - and literal - industrial park, the Gas Works Park. The site of an old gasification plant, it has been converted into a park, complete with a playground, an awesome hill to fly a kite and great views of the Seattle skyline. The park also contains remnants of the sole remaining coal gasification plant in the United States. It was bought by the city and opened as a public park in 1975.
This was the location for our second photo walk.
Taking Flight
I had a chance to catch up with a few work friends on Thursday. We enjoyed a great lunch outside (and seeing each other in person for the first time in nearly 3 years!). I knew I would have some free time after lunch as well so, as I was leaving, my friend Ashley suggested I check out Schilling Cider House, which was just a block away from the Adobe Office. I enjoyed a very nice flight of locally made ciders (32 ciders were on tap - 32!!), including Schilling Mountain Mule - a ginger/lime concoction which was like a Moscow Mule version of a cider. Tasty!
Day 5
Morning at the Waterfront
Like all good things, the week came to an end far faster than I imagined. On my last day, I decided I would do a final morning photo walk down by the Great Wheel, while it was still cool. This also gave me a chance to make some more images of the disgusting-yet-fascinating Gum Wall. Truth be told, it is no longer a wall and has become an entire (blech) alleyway, covered in brightly coloured, chewed gum. Needless to say, I was not touching ANY surface in that area.
And, I could not leave Pikes Market without at least a couple of images of the fishmongers and the VERY FIRST Starbucks coffee house.
Substance 3D Overview
Way back on Day 1, over lunch, I let slip that I would be part of an upcoming webinar on one of Adobe's newest digital media offerings, Substance 3D. In fact, I was invited to this webinar thanks to a couple of my photography projects, where I combined my landscape photos with 3D models to create a whole new story element to my images. I shared my case studies with Julieanne, Bob and Kathy. The Adobe team’s interest was piqued and I was asked if I would be comfortable sharing my story (and some of the Substance tools) with our attendees. I jumped at the opportunity.
Well, Friday was the day. We agreed that we'd start with a 15-minute overview, with the understanding there was more time if I needed it and the interest was present. I spoke about why I thought 3D was important to photography and to the professional careers of photographers, and how skilled photographers were ideally suited to take on this skill set as we already have an in-depth knowledge of light, perspective, viewpoint and composition.
From there I shared my case studies with the group and then did a brief demo, showing how easy it was to get started using Adobe Stager - our 2D/3D compositing tool - and how critical it was to get comfortable with tools like Substance 3D Painter, for creating or adding realistic materials and textures to those models.
The initial 15-minute talk went on for about 45 minutes. At the closing dinner that night, several faculty came up to me to personally thank me for the presentation and share how it had opened their eyes to other possibilities for their photography students and students of graphic design.
You can check out those projects at the links below.
Projects & presentations
The culmination of the week were the final presentations. this consisted of two parts, an individual project and a team project. Each faculty member created their own Triptych based on one or more concepts introduced on Day 1:
Got Seattle?
A class assignment designed to help you share your visual experiences in the Emerald City. Teams can choose, but are not limited to any of the four topics:
- Coffee Culture (Coffee Capital of the US ~842 shops)
- Industrial Landscape (Gas Works Park)
- Iconic Soul of Seattle (Pike Place Market)
- Garden of Glass (Chihuly Garden)
Video Project
Work with your team to film multiple short video clips and/or multiple stills taken by each of you. Then, together create an entertaining 20-40 second look at Seattle that you can share on-line.
While I don't have links to the final videos, I can tell you they were all very awesome, made even moreso when you realize that 90% of the faculty had little experience with video and none of them had ever used Adobe Rush prior to this week!
The triptych assignment produced a wonderful variety of final submissions, including (ahem) my own, seen below.
The link below will take you to the other submissions, while it remains live.
Wrap up
Once again AES was an overwhelming success in my view and in the view of every attending faculty I spoke with. Not only was everyone able to interact face-to-face for the first time in years, we got to revel in each other's creativity and in many cases, push our own creative limits in some way, whether that happened to be video, or learning about digital storytelling through Behance and Adobe Express, or seeing into the future of photography with 3D.
I was so happy to participate, help out the Adobe Team and mentor the attendees - and maybe just a little proud that I was asked to present to this group of creative faculty. I loved the fact that I was not only surrounded by dedicated photography educators, but that they were all artists in their own right.
I'm sure that next year's event will be just as inspiring and fulfilling.
Credits:
All photographs by Jim Babbage