The third Kunstrausch Art Festival will be held on July 17-18, 2010 in three villages: Katzelnbogen, Berndroth and Ergeshausen. Approximately 75 artists will take part. The artists will be exhibiting their art, for the most part, in village residents’ barns, gardens, empty rooms garages and the like. I will be in Ergeshausen in Ortsstraße 10 – one of five artists at this particular location.

Here’s hoping for good weather and many visitors.

I started out wanting to do the art festival route. But unfortunately, here in Germany, photography is not considered art so that door is closed, locked and the key hidden. So, I found myself doing exhibitions. It started out slow but picked up speed the last couple of years. I enjoy talking with people about what I see behind the viewfinder and how I achieved what I did through my post digital processing.

But, I found myself having to draw the line between exhibiting at an establishment and being used as a cheap (and uninsured) way to decorate an office. I exhibited – or should I say furnished – a heilpraktikerschule (an alternative medicine non-medical school) in Frankfurt for nine months. In those nine months, nothing was done by the school to publicize the exhibition…no sign in the lobby, no website mention…nothing. Since I had a large solo exhibition coming up the end of the year, I made my intent known to the head of the school – along with the group that I was exhibiting with – that I would be picking up my photographs to exhibit elsewhere. Since no one else came forward to fill the space, the hallway where my photos resided for nine months remained bare.

Six months later, it’s still being talked about. We explained my reasons for not wanting to exhibit there again – the frames were filthy dirty, the glass streaked and greasy. They clearly had not seen a dust rag in nine months and it took – no kidding – half a roll of paper towels to get them thoroughly clean. Not to mention the fact that they were the nicest frames that I have and had museums glass – alone, I paid upwards of 200 Euro each. That was around 1600 Euro worth of frames hanging there – uninsured. And, since I seemed to be the only one publicizing the fact that I have photos on exhibit there, I saw – and still see – no reason to return.

As I said, I do enjoy exhibiting my photos and will continue to do so. I currently have one exhibition running and have four more scheduled through the end of the year. But my office decoration days are over.

I’d been anxiously awaiting the new Bibble since seeing it at Photokina 2008. It especially has the one feature that I wanted – the ability to see two versions of your photo – the original and the one you’re working on. I received the email that it was available and logged into my account to take advantage of the upgrade pricing. Being in Germany, I was immediately transferred to a German company to fulfill my order. I would have no problem with that except for one thing: the software is only available for purchase in German. Even trying to upgrade using a proxy failed to work with a European credit card. Yes, I could purchase the software in German, but my preference is my mother tongue – English.

Two emails to Bibble support have so far been unanswered.

The good news is that they finally classified my “complex architectural issue” officially as a bug. The bad news is that they released the new version of ACDSee without fixing it.  I do wonder why they tout the program as a pro program when they don’t listen to the problems that the pro’s have with it?

Since I’ve used ACDSee for many years, I decided to give it one last chance. I guess you could call me a glutton for punishment…or maybe someone who finds it hard to give up a program that they’ve liked and used for many years.

Soon after opening Photoshop CS4 – and still having ACDSee version 3 open – Photoshop started closing unexpectedly citing DEP (Data Excecution Prevention) problems. As this has not happened before, and ACDSee is the only program that I had recently installed, I figured it was the issue. I rebooted my server and tried again – same issue. This happened a total of three times before I uninstalled ACDSee.

I’ve been working intensively with Photohop for four days now since uninstalling ACDSee and haven’t had CS4 close since. I’ve posted on their forum this latest bug and will be interested to see if I get any response (I never did when I asked if the program supported rendering by gpu). It will probably be called another “complex architectural issue”.

Call if what you want, but I still say it’s a

BUG!