How far ahead do I look?

I love going fast. I drive fast down winding roads (never over the speed limit of course!) I ride my bike fast, my moto-x bike fast. It's a rush. I've learned that to better navigate the fast, twisty roads and trails you have to find the "sweet spot" in the road ahead where you focus your eyes. Race car drivers do this. When you look at the road or trail just in front of you, you have less time to react to changes in the path. You're line tends to twitch and the entry or exit in a tight turn can be over-shot. When you soften your eyes and focus slightly ahead of where you would normally look, you find that your line becomes smoother, and naturally follows the curves. Your close-range peripheral vision handles keeping you on the road or trail, even if it doesn't seem like it should work that way. Try it yourself...focus a bit further ahead on the road, relax your eyes. Notice how your movements become smoother, and you follow the curves much better without having to over-correct.

As I was driving my favorite winding road home from work tonight, I realized that this technique worked for driving, biking, running, motorcycling, etc. It also works for my life path. If I focus right in front of myself, I tend to find myself over-correcting and using a lot of energy to stay on task or on track. I lose sight of where I'm really going or what really needs to be done for longer term success. I get stuck on busy work and side-tracked easily. When I focus too far in the future, I let important things slip through the cracks. I'm not paying attention to what needs to be done in the here and now. It's like I'm dreaming, but not taking action to make those dreams come true. But when I'm looking just far enough ahead, with my peripheral vision allowing me to handle just the things that are really important right in front of me, I feel I'm the most productive, effective, and ultimately - happy.

It was an interesting a-ha for me and I thought I'd share.

5 Inexpensive Gifts Every Photographer will love

Scott Bourne, who is an amazing photographer, educator, and industry insider has a really informative blog called PhotoFocus. Scott has one of the largest audiences of photographers in the industry, and for good reason - he knows his stuff and shares good info! Today he profiled a few of his top picks for inexpensive gifts for photographers...and guess what? He picked our Lightroom Presets as one of his top 5! 

I always love "Top #" lists. It makes things simple. I'm going to follow Scott's lead and create my own top list for photo gadgets. I've already got my top Mac apps and iPhone apps in my past blog posts, but now we need photo gadgets...stay tuned. Come to think of it, I need to update my iPhone apps, I have some new favorites...hmmm

Whirlwinds of change...

What a day. I'm just feeling very overwhelmed right now. Anybody ever feel that way? Of course you do :-) We're in the middle of launching a brand new Dashboard™ for Photoshop®, which is totally gonna rock. You can add and control your own Photoshop actions now - including adding your own keywords, descriptions, and favorite tags. We're also in the midst of building kumu, our new studio management software. This is really going to be great. It's fun, easy to use, powerful, and full of valuable resources and information to help photographers manage their businesses.

I'm also getting ready to launch Photographers Ignite. We're still working on a logo, but you can get an un-official sneak peak at the website now to see what it's all about. I'm really quite excited about this too. If you ever wanted to speak at WPPI, then check it out!

So many other things to catch up on, but I won't bore you. I've been traveling so much that I haven't had time to catch up with all those emails and tasks on my ever growing task list. Heading to Hawaii for Thanksgiving, so that kinda makes up for it, right :-)

Kubota's Digital Bootcamp November 2009

A bunch of images that the Oregon Digital Bootcamp class took, after being encouraged to compete with Vicki & Jed Taufer's workshop class - who happened to be doing the same thing in Illinois at the same time!

See the full gallery on posterous

Laying Down Game at Bootcamp!

Here were a couple of great entries from Bootcampers who opted to play the Laying Down Game while at Bootcamp.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Posted via email from Kevin Kubota