Conferences, Reenactments, and NVIDIA

Jeff Harmon is joined at the roundtable by Brent Bergherm, Brian McGuckin, and Connor Hibbs to talk about the Out of Chicago conference, shooting reenactments, and a crazy new technology coming from NVIDIA that photographers should be excited about.

Topic 1: Conferences

Brian talks about his experience attending the Out of Chicago conference with Nick Page.  Out of Chicago has a pretty similar format to the Create Photography Retreat.  Held in Chicago every year, the format was one where there were several tracks of classes to attend along with rooms setup with different types of shooting opportunities and groups going out into the city to do different types of shoots. Check out light painting done by www.ericpare.com

The retreat in 2019 is in Las Vegas March 28 through March 30th.  Ticket prices are a ridiculously low $387. Go and check it out at https://createphotographyretreat.com  and we hope to see you there!

Topic 2: Reenactments

Jeff is also super jealous that you and good friend of the show Mark Morris recently got to do a workshop centered around battle reenactments.

Jeff saw Mark post on Facebook that he learned he really needed the full 10 frames per second of his Canon 7DM2 camera to capture the cannons firing.  Not canon cameras here, like war cannons being used in the reenactment. He had some really cool shots.

Attendees of the workshop got a fire hose of lighting technique thrown at them.  At one point after Connor had finished some teaching the participants were provided one of Connor's photos and they had to re-create it without Connor assisting.  He was very impressed because they were able to replicate the photo without help and did it without needing to do some work in Photoshop that Connor had done.  So fun to see photographers learn and progress towards mastering their photography.

The thing Connor learned as he hosted a workshop in a location he wasn't very familiar with was that no matter how many emails and phone calls were made ahead of time some of the logistics don't work as expected.  There was a challenge getting tickets to the reenactment where there were told numerous times by an organizer they had to wait to purchase them when they were there and it turned out they could have purchased them ahead of time

Topic 3: NVIDIA

Developed by researchers at NVIDIA, MIT, and Aalto University, really different from any other noise-reduction system.

“Without ever being shown what a noise-free image looks like, this AI can remove artifacts, noise, grain, and automatically enhance your photos.”

This is revolutionary because they can get these incredible results WITHOUT needing a clean image, which all of the other machine learning solutions require

Adobe is very well positioned to become a tremendous partner here.  This is place where the Creative Cloud could be an important help. Adobe is pretty uniquely positioned to get this NVIDIA tech into their data centers and then offer a new option in Photoshop and/or Lightroom to send a noisy photo up to their cloud for processing and in a few seconds you get back a photo much better for use than the noise reduction built into the software running on your computer.