Digital Darkroom Workshop at Palm Beach

We received a request from the Palm Beach Workshops to create an "Introduction to Digital Photography" workshop. It would be the Workshop's first digital course. I was the instructor, Jay Kelbey was my assistant, and if I remember correctly, Katrin Eismann assisted us with the program. Jay and I packed a good portion of the L309 lab to ship to West Palm Beach for the workshop. And then reassembled it there in a large classroom. After a good day and a half chasing down all the issues we were ready. It was quite successful based on the reviews. I would do another class a few years later and a course at the Sante Fe Workshops as well.

Persuasion

The manager of Instructional Operations approached me and asked me if I would design some Persuasion templates for the group. I'd shown him a presentation on Hard Copy output that I had designed for Thermal Printing for which I had designed a division look for the templates, so I guess it was my own fault. I didn't mind the challenge of designing the templates but the second part of the request was that I begin teaching classes on using PowerPoint to everyone on the staff. Internally, I was becoming known as the Macintosh Wizard and the Digital Photography Guru throughout the company and felt my talents were being wasted.

Moving to Marketing Technical Support

As a result, I was not particularly happy working in Instructional Operations, I really liked the people I worked with, many were photographers like me. However, I was not accustomed to being micromanaged. Previous supervisors had just turned me loose to work on things I knew were important. Training field personnel had become a bit tiresome. I missed the interactions like I'd had at the Palm Beach Workshops and when we had a few visits by college photography students.That was always fun. I'd been hired with the promise of working at CCI with customers/photographers. That was never going to happen now. I felt I'd been played in a bait and switchn scheme and told my supervisor I wanted to move on to something more challenging.

Marketing Technical Support was the PPD's field support organization. They were looking for a technical specialist with Macintosh applications experience to support the XL7700 and XL7720 printers. Few people could fill that role better than myself, so I was told I'd be able to escape Instructional Operations and return to the technical side the following spring. Still with PPD but working with friends from the EPD days. It was a great team of people to work with.