Step One : Collect Underpants
June 17th, 2006,I took the practice test for the Adobe Certified Expert (ACE) / Photoshop CS2 exam this afternoon. I got something like a 71% without any studying.
A lot of people argue that ACE certification is useless, as it covers a huge range of PS/CS2 functionality that the average photographer doesn’t need. “It impresses only the easily impressed,” they say, which seems sort of self-contradictory. I mean, either it’s useless because it’s harder than it needs to be or it’s useless because it’s too easy. It can’t be both.
At any rate, my interest in taking the test is twofold. First, the vainglorious desire to be able to add a few letters to the end of my name, and nifty logos to attach to my business cards and websites. Second, more pressing, is the need to give myself some kind of milestone achievement, to clearly demark, with pomp and circumstance, that I am good at what I do, that I take it seriously, that I know stuff above the level of “I’ve been putzing around with this program for years.”
Plus, I have to recertify with 90 days of any major upgrade release, so it’ll help keep me current.
In other news, I’ve begun the first tenative steps on a project that’s been long on my mind, while also finding an interesting new direction to take the Emphasis Mine project (formerly called the Projection Work). There’s also a few new pieces for Archetyped! that are gelling into something I may even photograph soon. I just archived the material from the first three images - 7 gigs of photos to come up with three images!
My, my, Dorothy. This certainly doesn’t look like Kansas, anymore.