We just closed up the summer house in Norway, and we are enroute back to San Francisco. It’s been a memorable week, filled with many positive events. First, on Monday, there was Michael Reichmann’s Luminous Landscape piece on the Lightroom Adventure book, which gave the book a strong “thumbs up” and drove the book’s ranking on amazon.com to the mid 100s and made it, for this week at least, a best seller. I’m so impressed with Michael’s dedicated following. When we were in Iceland last summer for the adventure, one of his “fans’ tracked him down there and I witnessed first hand an amazing show of respect and high regard.

Then Alysha Sideman posted a very nice piece on the LR Adventure book on imaginginfo.com. She also boasts a strong readership and several readers wrote directly to me with very insightful Lightroom questions.

On Wednesday, I managed to fit in one more shoot for my Under the Hood: Working RAW project. I photographed Svein Narum, a world famous potter who lives about 12 kilometers from Ulefoss. He works out of an old, former train station, surrounded by picturesque farms. His work is absolutely fantastic! I was blown away by the quality. It was one of the few sunny days we saw this summer and I filled over 9 GB of memory shooting him mix clay, spin and form it in an outdoor work area, and prepare the finished pieces for the kiln. Back at my office in Ulefoss, I quickly transferred the images to a hard drive and then faced the daunting task of packing for the eminent trip home. With every minute precious, I really appreciated the SanDisk Extreme IV CF cards I use, and the Extreme Firewire reader which gave me 40MB/sec download speed. Speeds like that really make a big difference when you are in a hurry.

Right now, we are somewhere high over the Atlantic, near Greenland, I think, and I just prepared some of the Narum shots using Lightroom. I love the look of envy I got from a fellow passenger when I fired up my Mac and launched Lightroom. Earlier I had noticed him staring at the LCD on a point and shoot digital camera, obviously doing some editing of his own.

As you can see, I converted a couple of the images to grayscale, and added a vignette to one.

Next week promises to be interesting as well. I’m leading a series of Lightroom mini-workshops at one of my favorite conferences: the 16th Annual Book Passage Travel Writers & Photographers Conference held at Book Passage in Corte Madera, California. I’ve been involved with the conference for four years now and I’m very impressed with the quality of the attendees. Some of my favorite writers, including Isabel Allende, Tim Cahill, John Flinn, Don George, and Larry Habegger are also teaching, as well as several top notch photographers including Robert Holmes, Jeff Pflueger, and Alison Wright.

So much going on! And isn’t August supposed to be a slow month?