May 2005 COBA Meeting

On tap for next week’s COBA meeting are the following topics:

• Infrant ReadyNAS 600 Deal
• Raw Shooter Essentials and Photoshop CS2
• An Annotated Image Library
• Tripod and Tripod Heads

ReadyNAS 600 Deal from Infrant

Hot off the heels of last month’s successful Noise Ninja promotion, we have another great deal for COBA members. We have secured special pricing for the Infrant ReadyNAS 600 — the world’s smallest RAID 5 Network Attached Storage (NAS) appliance — in the following configurations:

• $599: No Drives. You supply your own SATA drives
• $1199: 4x250GB Western Digital RAID Edition drives

The 1TB drive configuration normally retails for $1595 and you cannot purchase the driveless ReadyNAS 600 anywhere! We need at least 10 people to sign up to take advantage of this promotional pricing. If you are looking for a storage solution for your gigabytes of photos, videos, or files, look no further!

Sam Feng, Marketing Manager at Infrant, will be available to discuss the deal and answer any questions you may have about the product. If you are interested in the deal, please email me and/or come to the meeting!

• http://infrant.com/products_ReadyNAS600.htm
• http://www.tow.com/2005/04/04/readynas-600/
• http://www.tow.com/2005/04/14/smugmug-and-readynas-600/
• http://luminous-landscape.com/reviews/accessories/readynas600.shtml

Raw Shooter Essentials and Photoshop CS2

Uwe Steinmueller of Digital Outback Photo (http://www.outbackphoto.com) will be on-hand to demonstrate Pixmantec’s Raw Shooter essentials (RSE) and Adobe Photoshop CS2. Steinmueller calls RSE the “RAW converter to beat if it comes to image quality and workflow.”

There are many new features in Photoshop CS2 that make your life as a digital photographer much easier, including:

• High Dynamic Range (HDR): Merge multiple exposures of a scene to create a an image with incredible dynamic range.
• Lens correction: Don’t have a tilt-shift lens? Want to correct pincushioning or barrel distortion in your images? This filter will become your best friend!
• Spot healing brush: Automatically chooses the sampling area, making it a snap to remove dust spots and blemishes.

More information can be found here:

• http://pixmantec.com/
• http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/

An Annotated Image Library

77,000 images later, I have completed annotating my image library. I will demonstrate the hardware, software, and services that I use to capture, annotate, and catalog my images. Furthermore, I will demonstrate the innovative things one can do when every image has been tagged with metadata such as:

• Location
• City, State, Country
• Event
• People
• Keywords
• And More!

Tripods and Heads

User participation time! Bring your tripods and tripod heads to the meeting. A number of people have been eager to see what other COBA members are using to steady their cameras. After the last presentation, we’ll set up the tripods for a show-and-tell session.