Heartily agree with Ed Renstrom about the old school joys of curling up with a thick, glossy paper magazine in spite of all the PCS achieves on-line. It's always gratifying to see a finished International Meet issue received so warmly by the readership, even though it's rarely detailed here or elsewhere exactly how much how much work goes into distilling all the imagery and other raw material that ultimately winds up on the printed page. While I don't know how many photos Steve Lichtman, Steve Loftin and other issue contributors took themselves, the simple fact this year's meet was two days longer than average (counting Tuesday's "Early Bird" tours and the Sunday invitation exhibit at the Milwaukee Masterpiece Concours) found me heading home with more than FOUR THOUSAND high-res digital photos that needed to be sorted into individual entrant and/or daily tour folders. Just in case something went awry with my cameras or memory cards, or I experienced a break-in or a meteor strike on the two-day drive home, I made sure Walt & Brady got flash drives containing my Tuesday-Saturday shots by the time they left Milwaukee midday Sunday; to get the file transfers done, I had to stay up until 2 or 2:30 in the morning at least two nights that week! As I had no trouble filling it, I was truly-grateful for the three months Walt allotted me to weed out my favorite images (gotten down, against all odds, to several dozen daily semi-finalists); retitle these JPEGs to summarize the subject matter for captioning; and make basic enhancements like cropping, shadow balancing and horizon leveling, after which Brady was snail-mailed finalized sets of flash drives and photo CDs.
Transcribing what was ultimately a two-and-half-inch thick stack of daily tour & entrant notes - the essential prelude to the coherent, reasonably-concise "Cream City Chronicle" you wound up reading in TPC - was, of course, an epic project in itself, entailing multiple spell checks of every single place and car owner name plus the incorporation of background material from numerous guidebooks and websites concerning the attractions we visited. As a result, it took me an average of two to three days to transcribe each day's worth of notes! Though my hand-written notes used to go in the recycling bin once their content material was distilled into a single Microsoft Word file, I decided to mail this year's original Milwaukee notebooks to Brady so he could put them in the PCS archives, as future generations of members might be intrigued to see what the departure point for International Meet issue of TPC looks like. Is it overkill? Arguably yes, but it does give the folks who missed Milwaukee a fully-detailed sense of what it was like to be there, and remind the people that made it exactly why Such A Good Time Was Had By All. Hopefully, it's also potent incentive for people who have never attended a PCS International to join us in Rochester this August, Houston in 2015 or Gettysburg in 2016.
