MAXimum Effort

Never before have I been so excited to learn and attend an event. This past week, I had the privilege of attending the Adobe Max conference, which is a three-day event with over 350 sessions and over 50 hours of creative content geared towards creativity, inspiration, and education.

Of course, the event is hosted within Adobe, so every session highlights a particular Adobe product or multiple products. In effect, you could view the conference as a giant advertisement for Adobe; but even if that is the only thing you were able to gather from it, I would honestly still deem the time you spent watching those sessions worthwhile. Adobe products are incredible, and they are only improving.

Let’s focus on the actual content of the sessions I attended, though. I scheduled about 35 sessions over three days, and although I didn’t get to see all of them, I still took 15 pages of incredibly valuable notes and learned so much.

Through these sessions, I learned about photography, the power of AI, techniques in mobile editing, stop motion, workflows in color grading, prop design for films, how to film on a phone, variable fonts, editing workflows, and so much more. In addition to this, I had the privilege of seeing and hearing the stories, inspirations, and advice people like Taika Waititi, Wes Anderson, Naomi Watts, and Zendaya have to offer when it comes to creating films and being creative in general.

Those three days have been three of the most educational and eye-opening days of my life. It was incredible to see the talents and skills of various people and also find creativity and inspiration in the work that was shared. It was an experience like no other, and I hope to attend the conference again next year, which will hopefully be in person.

Utilizing the knowledge I acquired from the Max conference, I decided to do a little experimenting. Thus, I took a few photos of freshly baked homemade bread and graded them in Adobe Lightroom.

While taking the photos, I used only the natural light that was filtering through my kitchen window. I loved the way it emphasized the color of the bread, and I had a lot of fun playing around with different angles to see what looked good and what did not. For example, I took a backlit photo of the loaf (pictured below) and even graded it, but I was not pleased with the final product; the sun and lens flare became too harsh. In this sense, I am starting to train my eyes to identify what I like to see in photos, which is a great first step.

In addition to my experiments with bread, I had two more interviews this week. They were both incredibly helpful, and I learned quite a bit about both cinematography and video editing. I also received wonderful advice on what I can begin doing now to improve my skills.

One piece of advice was to learn Adobe Premiere Pro, which I will certainly do, especially after seeing what it is capable of during the Adobe Max conference. Another suggestion was to look for the requirements for job opportunities I would be interested in to get a feel for pay rates and see what I may be asked to do in the future. Other advice included creating videos and taking photos constantly and being more active on social media accounts such as Instagram and LinkedIn. I haven’t researched job listings on LinkedIn yet, but I have been creating videos and taking photos and posting them as much as possible, especially in the past few days, and I hope to keep it up.

In the next week, I will schedule more interviews, experiment with Adobe Premiere Pro, research video editor jobs, and keep creating content. With any endeavor in the creative field, it seems like consistency is key.