Then I got a fateful call from , a former teacher and close acquaintance. He had taken over as education director at the in Camden, Maine--where working professionals in photography, design, and illustration could learn about making the transition into the digital age--and he wanted me to come up to run the computers and help with the curriculum.

Photoshop 2.0 was a core part of the operation. We had it installed on 100 Mac IIfx systems, and it was the hub through which images--whether they were created de novo on computers, captured through the Kodak DCS100 camera, or scanned from images--were processed. Every student learned to use the program if they didn't know it already.

Fortunately, Yale had been an early and enthusiastic adopter of computer-aided typography, layout, and imaging, so I had cut my teeth on Photoshop 1.0. While I'd used computers since 1979, and was familiar with Apple II drawing programs and MacPaint, I'd never encountered anything as intuitive and simple as Photoshop for creating and adjusting images. The first time I used its nonlinear Levels tool, I didn't quite hear angels trumpeting, but it was close. I've been using it ever since.

Working at the Kodak Center meant working in Photoshop--a lot. For example, I remember one project in which photographer Greg Heisler returned to the center to assemble a magazine Man of the Year cover of Ted Turner. He imagined a glowing sphere of TV screens, each with a separate CNN image, cracked open to reveal Turner's face coming out. He had shot a conventional portrait of Turner, but he'd also captured hundreds of stills from CNN footage and turned them into slides.