Well, not quite 'live' as it's midnight here, but you know what I mean...

The second day of the largest photography trade show is over, with another four gruelling days to go. As I'm helping man a stand and giving a series of talks on panoramas, I've not had as much chance to visit the other seven halls as I would have liked, but there's time yet.

One of the big news items is, of course, Adobe Creative Suite 4 and there are tons of people carrying their CS4 bags after visiting Adobe's enormous stand. From a panoramic point of view PSCS4 is big news, with it's live retouching within virtual panoramas, allowing you to touch up image problems simply by panning around on screen as if you were looking at a QTVR file, then painting away. I'm hoping to actually see it in action at some stage, talk schedule permitting.

On the printing side, Durst are demonstrating their 30" Theta minilab, the largest digital minilab in the world. Just like your regular minilab that you might see in the high street it cuts images automatically, as quick and easily accessible colour corrections (via a custom keypad next to the main keyboard) etc. The IVRPA has built up a good relationship with Durst over the years, and they used the machine to print up all the entries in our panoramic print competition, which has been drawing a lot of attention from passing visitors, and is featured in the guided tours of Photokina.

Aperture-wise, I've been shooting panoramas and using Aperture and Aperture Assistant for dividing images into groups for each panorama, exporting images from each Album into a Finder folder of the same name, then using specialist stitching software to create the spherical panoramas. These then get bought back into Aperture for cataloguing, geotagging and metadata entry.

You can see my efforts here, and all the panoramas here.

Off to get some sleep (after uploading some more panoramas),

Ian