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I’m off to Hartford, Connecticut today to teach my Photoshop CS3 Power Tour tomorrow, but until then, here’s some tasty Monday News Nuggets (now with more antioxidants and fiber):

  • I came up with a great idea for a t-shirt that’s a play on the popular bumper stickers and shirts worn by skateboaders, which reads “Skateboading is not a crime.” You can find these online all over, so I just had to mock-up one for us tripod-using photographers just for fun (UPDATE: I mentioned this morning that had thought of setting up a CafePress.com site where you could actually buy the real shirt, but then I thought….ya know, I should probably get back to writing my book. Luckily, one of my readers, Rob Jones, took the challenge and created the shirt design, and it’s now available at CafePress.com [here's the direct link]. He priced it at Cafe’s base price, so he’s not making any money off the deal [though Cafe is making a killing]. Anyway, I just ordered mine! Thanks Rob for making this available to tripod terrorists everywhere!).
  • Also, I can see from some of the reader comments posted last week to my Tripod Terror Alert, that some folks may have thought I was actually upset by the encounter, but I totally was not. Surprised? Yes. Perplexed? Absolutely. Mad? Not at all. I didn’t complain to the hotel, or get rude with the guard, ask for his supervisor, etc.., I just thought it was an interesting commentary on our times (and people’s reaction to those menacing tripods), and I just wanted to share it with you guys. In fact, once the elevator doors closed, the first thing I said to Matt and RC was, “This is SO going on my blog.”
  • One of my readers posted a comment with a plug for his blog, ProPhotoLife.com, so I went and checked it out, and it’s pretty darn good. Lots of good teaching, tutorials, and other stuff worth checking out (so, why dontcha check it out). Here’s the link.
  • I finagled my kids into going to our studio this past week for a secret photo shoot as a surprise for my wife for Mother’s Day. Getting a toddler and a preteen to pose for portrait shoot is…well…it was tricky (to say the least), and I knew I would only get this one shot at it. That’s when I had a “Moment of truth.” It hit when I was reaching in my camera bag to choose a memory card. I opened my card case where I saw three different brands of high-speed cards to choose from, but at that moment Lou Schmidt’s phrase from last Thursday, “zero in-field failures” starting going through my head, and I grabbed a Hoodman RAW card. There was no way I could take a chance of losing these shots, and in the past I’ve been right there when friends, other pro photographers, and even one of my Santa Fe Workshop students saw one of their memory cards go bad, and they lost all their shots forever. Knowing that the RAWs have never failed, I immediately grabbed a RAW card. Now I get it. (By the way, my wife absolutely loved the shots, but I’m not sure she even noticed the lighting, or composition, or background, or anything else, but just for this once—I didn’t care). :)
  • Digital Photography School did a piece called “9 Hot Photoshop Books” where the author was asked by a friend to recommend some Photoshop books, and so he asked 10 of his photography buddies which books they’d recommend. I was honored to learn that three of my books made their list. Thank you guys! (Check out their full list of recommendations right here.)

That’s it for today, folks. I hope to meet some of you in person up in Hartford tomorrow at my seminar—make sure you come up and say “hi” if you read the blog. Here’s wishing you the kind of Monday that feels like a Friday! :)