Adobe Lightroom Adventure: Practical Non-Lesson #3

Reykholt, Iceland: It's 10 pm and the sky is a brilliant blue and the sun is reflecting off a few high clouds. Obviously the weather is cooperating with our adventure. Yesterday, we left Reykjavik in a blur of action. The entire team and luggage piled into 6 rental cars provided by Hertz and made the 1.5 hour drive across north west Iceland, here to the tiny town of Reykholt, surrounded by farms and near the Langjokull glacier.

We were all were aching to shoot photos and as soon as we arrived and settled everyone scattered like cats after mice. Michael Reichmann and Bill Atkinson jumped in their four wheel drive with their Hasselblad H1's and H2's and headed north, planning on driving until the light got good just before midnight, and then sleeping a few hours in the jeep and waking at 3 am in time for the rising sun and more good light.

I jumped in our van along with Derrick Story, Melissa Gaul, Richard Morgenstein and Maggie Hallahan and headed to the small town of Borgarnes only 25 kilometers away. It took us 2 hours to get there as we stopped every few kilometers to shoot the ever-changing sky and landscape. We were like kids in a candy store tempted by achingly beautiful clouds, bursts of sunlight, and, at moments, delicate drops of rain. We wanted to shove everything into our eyes and minds, and didn't know where to start, or stop.

We returned to the Fosshotel Reykoholt in time for dinner. The simple hotel is newly renovated and a cultural theme hotel based on Norse mythology. Covers of Marvel comics based on the Norse gods Loki and Thor hang in the hallway near my room. None of the other team members arrived for dinner, and the cook, eight months pregnant, was quite upset. She had personally prepared us a traditional Icelandic meal of roast lamb and potatoes and understandably didn't want to see it go to waste. I reached team member John McDermott on his cell phone and John was apologetic. He was hours away with teammate and former United Nations photographer, John Isaac, and they had completely lost track of time, taken by the great light and shooting opportunities. (McDermott is a world traveler--he just returned from shooting the World Cup soccer match--and it takes a lot to impress him, as it does to impress Isaac.) As Bill Atkinson put it the next morning at breakfast after being up most of the night, "Food and sleep are irrelevant here. We'll sleep later, when we are home."

At midnight Melissa Gaul, one of the original Adobe Lightroom team members who started back when the application was code-named Shadowland, presented the latest beta version of Lightroom. Melissa flew to Iceland from her home in Minneapolis and I quickly discovered she, like me, has a Norwegian background. We shared lutefisk and other strange food stories and I was fond of her immediately.

As Melissa gave her impromptu presentation I was taken at the new improvements to the program. I've been on the inside of the Lightroom development for nearly 2 years and I've seen it go through a lot of versions. Frankly, at moments, I felt the product was off-track and I was concerned. But listening to Melissa I was quickly totally back in the fold, and enthusiastic and excited about this new application that promises to elegantly streamline photographers workflow. We listened and questioned Melissa until around 11:30 pm when Derrick Story looked out the conference room window and dropped his jaw. The setting sun was exploding across the horizon and we all grabbed our cameras and ran outside to catch the last rays. Back in the conference room an hour later Melissa continued her demonstration and I filled pages and pages with notes, fully intending to share everything I've learned with you, the readers.

BTW, Derrick is working hard to post images from the adventure. Our Internet connection isn't great here in the countryside but we hope to have something for you to look at soon. Stay tuned!