Early classes and exhibits visited on Friday

At the Midwest Family History Expo in Kansas City

My first class today was "Taking Your Photos from the Shoebox to the Digital Ear" with Tom Underhill of Limited Edition Publishers and Publisher, senior designer and author of nine books at Creative Continuum.

Tom provided much useful information on scanners and using Photoshop (and Photoshop Elements) for creating better photos for your genealogy and family history projects. I was pleased to be able to get a copy of his book, "Make your photos really ZING!" I want to use my PhotoShop software more effectively. I think this will really help me.

At the Beacon for Bloggers exhibit, we exchanged taking photos of each other. Here, Susan Petersen to a photo of Jenna Mills and me.

Then, I took a photo of Diana Ritchie

Then, Diana took a photo of Susan and I:

My next class was "Family History Books: Editing, Design and Publishing," with Nancy and Biff Barnes of "Stories to Tell," editors specializing in creating family history stories and memoirs. They made a fine presentation highlighting the elements each of us should consider in order to move our "idea" of preparing a family history book to "a published work." Many good ideas to consider.

During the break, I visited some of the other exhibits; here RootsMagic was doing a demo:

and, I visited with the ladies from the Jackson County Genealogical Society.

The next class was "Family Search's Research Wiki, Forums & Blogs," with Tom Peterson from Family Search.

I was especially interested to learn how the Research Wiki worked. I came away with good ideas, and also inspired to possibly helping out sometime with indexing and some other Community Projects that he stressed during his presentation.

A final note for this post: at lunch at the KCI Expo Center, I enjoyed seeing the TWA Museum exhibit; here is one piece of it:

I'll share some more observations on the Midwest Family History Expo tomorrow.

Families are Forever!  ;-)