I’ve been long-contemplating the Adobe Certified Expert exam as a way to stand out from the morass of entry-level photo assistants and so-called digital retouchers (many of whom don’t seem to know what a layer is).

I’ve been dawdling for a while, and Adobe has released the CS3 suite while I weighed pros and cons, giving rise to a new set of choices. Should I take the CS2 exam, which I feel I’m ready for, or gear up for the CS3 exam? I’m tempted to do the former, and then work to familiarize myself with CS3, and take their recertification test, particularly after my father bought me Photoshop CS3: Up To Speed.

I’ve found two websites that offer what appear to be useful exam aids for someone already familiar with the program. uCertify offers both a CS2 exam and a discount on pre-orders for the CS3 “Prep Kit.” While Exam Aids offers a very similar seeming product that also appears well-designed.

The uCertify program looks like it’ll be the winner for me, primarily because of the discount I could get on the CS3 aid, doubly important as I want to take both exams.

I discovered the truly breathing-taking work of Dave Nitsche through the course he is offering at The Picture Perfect School of Photography, which is titled Conceptual Photography.

The course Dave is offering is precisely the sort of subject matter which I feel does not get taught in traditional art colleges. While most courses focus on “nuts and bolts,” there is a dearth of much-needed courses on what I think of as “hammers and wrenches.” I taught myself many of the fundamentals of picture-taking long before I started actively pursuing a career and education in photography, and have always been surprised at how little attention is given to image designing in these curricula.

While it’s always been troubling to me that so few art schools focus on the business of being an artist, I understand the dynamics which cause that lack. Less comprehensible to me, with my background in technical theater, why art schools never focus on the design and pre-design stages of art making. When I made this argument to a friend of mine, he pointed out a series of DVDs by Ian McCaig, published by Gnomon Workshop. The four discs in the Visual Storytelling series are truly amazing, and incredibly useful teach-by-example lectures which focus entirely on how to flesh out stories in your head, and can easily be generalized to almost any visual field.

Two particular resources which I keep reminding myself to check out more thoroughly are the oft-discussed Inkjet Mall and Inkjet Art websites (unrelated) which offer a wide variety of papers, inks, and related material.

Inkjet Mall, for example, offers workshops, DVDs and books on high-end digital printing, as well as very reasonably priced Custom Printer Profiling. Just print out their targets according to the directions, and mail the results to them; they’ll email you the customized profiles for your printer/paper combo. Having just profiled my own printer in Verser’s Fashion Photography course, I can tell you from first hand experience just how valuable a custom profile is. My home prints went from completely unusable to better than the Epson 4800s at school, which use the profiles from the various companies.

Let me repeat that. A custom-profiled $400 all-in-one printer/scanner/fax will yield better photos than a $2500 printer using the profiles downloaded from the web.

Inkjet Art offers customized paper sample packages that have been thoughtfully categorized by the feel of the end visual product. Instead of buying a variety of sampler packs based on the company who produces each, I can buy the InkjetArt Canvas Sampler or compare all their Luster papers with one, reasonably priced order. Of particular interest to me is #11, Dual Sided Photo sampler. I’ve been hunting those puppies down with keen appeal lately. They also offer a wide variety of canvas photo papers.