It's been a full day here at the granddaddy of all photo shows, Photokina, held every two years in Cologne, Germany. The day started with a nice surprise: A double page spread in the Photokina Show Daily.pdf on the Adobe Lightroom Tasmania Adventure. Thank you Fred Shippey for a nice plug! Fred is old old friend and tech editor for my Shooting Digital book. He also was my dinner partner tonight and here he is "flashing" in front of his hotel. His show blog can be found here.

There was quite a crowd at the Adobe booth this morning, waiting for the official release of CS 4. Then the live video feed came in from the US in English and the mostly German audience quickly got bored and started to drift away. The Adobe German organizers were quick on their feet and they cut the feed and thrust Adobe Lightroom's product manager Tom Hogarty and Photoshop's product manager Bryan O'Neil Hughes up on the stage. Tom gave a great demo of Lightroom 2.1 and Bryan gave the crowd what they wanted to know about CS4 and the show was saved.

i spent most of the afternoon trying to find the press room and getting lost in the process. Of course, getting lost isn't always bad. I managed to bump into the Rocky Nook booth, and meet Gerhard Rossbach, the publisher. Rocky Nook is distributed by O'Reilly and is doing some really find "niche" digital photography books such as Practical HDRI by Jack Howard.

Finally found the press room, and a free internet connection so I could download the final PDF of my new Lightroom 2 Adventure book. It shipped to the printer today and it looks great. Applause! And champagne. (I'm not partial or anything.) My hat goes off to many O'Reilly people who made it all happen. Especially Ron Bilodeau, Chris Meredith, and Sue Willing who really had their hands full these last few days.

I feel like a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders. I'm going to sleep like a baby tonight. And take another crack at the show in the morning. The Panasonic booth looked particularly interesting and I really want to check out the new Leica medium format camera everyone is raving about.. More tomorrow.