Tomorrow, the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP) kicks off their biannual Photoshop World conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. I was thrilled to get a chance this week to chat with Scott Kelby — photographer, teacher, Photoshop pro and founder of NAPP. In this interview, he discusses not only how he manages all his different interests and responsibilities, but also delves into HDR photography, DSLR filmmaking, Photoshop and Lightroom strategies, and what it takes to succeed as a photographer today. I also got some great tips on tackling the wealth of information and excitement Photoshop World has to offer.
Sophia Betz: I want to start out with a little bit of background on how you started NAPP, how you founded the business, and kind of where the idea came from.
Scott Kelby: Well, we originally started doing one-day Photoshop seminars in 1993. And we would go to a town, and I would finish the seminar — at that time I taught them all myself; now we have other people teaching along with me, Matt Kloskowski, Dave Cross, Joe McNally, Bert Monroy, all these other people. But back then, it was just me. So we would come to town, and at the end of the day people would come up to me and go, “Man, this is awesome. We had a great day today. Where do we go to learn more about Photoshop?”… But there really was no central place you could go to learn about Photoshop. So we went to Adobe with the idea of starting a national association of Photoshop professionals. And of course since we’re using the word ‘Photoshop’ we needed their blessing and their support — not financial support, we didn’t ask for that, but we needed their “OK you guys can do your thing.” We laid out our plans, we had everything pretty well, fully developed to launch this magazine, Photoshop User, along with it and all, and they were totally cool with it… And that all worked out better than expected [laughs]. That was about 11 years ago that we launched NAPP — it grew out of our one-day seminars… so people would have a central resource to go to for learning about Photoshop all year long, not just the one day we came to town.
©Scott Kelby
SB: In your work these days, are you more focused on going out and shooting when you’re not doing the seminar circuit, or do you focus more in post — in Photoshop and Lightroom and such? [click to continue…]
Since 2008, Steve Mayes has been the managing director of VII, whose members include photographers such as James Nachtwey and Ed Kashi. In a career spanning over 25 years, Mayes has held a number of high profile positions including group creative director of Getty Images, CEO of Photonica, COO (Americas) for Image Source, creative director of Eyestorm.com, and director of the Image Archive at Art + Commerce. He is a frequent lecturer, writer, and has been Secretary to the Competition Jury of WordPress Photo since 2004.
