At the end of the 2010 I would like to take the opportunity to wish all my readers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Looking back to 2010, it was clear that the economy was recovering. I think that most of us had a great year in imaging. I do hear many people telling me how busy they were in 2010 and how good their business was over the last 12 months.
If I look to my own activities, 2010 started with a successful International Solid-State Circuits Conference or ISSCC. After a dramatic edition of 2009 (with strong reduction of participant numbers due to the economic situation), the 2010 edition partly recovered. The number of attendees was not up to the record level of a few years ago, but the negative trend turned into a positive one ! Being the Chair of the International Technical Program Committee (ITPC), my responsibility was to put together the technical program. Of course that is something I was not doing on my own, I got a lot of help of the subcommittee chairs and all technical committee members. It was quite a bit of work, but it was also a great experience. For me, the highlight of the conference was the plenary session. First of all, this was the opening session of the ISSCC and I had the honor chairing the plenary session. Talking in front of 3000 people gives goose bumps, I can assure. But once the plenary session was finished, the conference ran (so to say) by itself. Amazing how such a huge organization with 5 parallel sessions autonomously proceeded. A lot of very important work is done behind the curtains, without these efforts the conference could never be that successful. Thanks to all people involved in the ISSCC2010, it was a great experience working with you and I learned a lot from it !
More conferences were not attended in 2010, but I did visit the Photokina in Cologne and the Vision in Stuttgart (both are not so far away from my home). It was amazing to see how Photokina evolved over the last 2 editions. In 2008 Agfa, Fuji and Kodak, all three still had their own big hall where they exhibited their film business. In the 2010 edition, all three exhibition halls were completely empty. The film industry is completely gone. On the other hand, there were a lot of electronic companies present that were not there in earlier editions. It was clearly visible : the complete photography business has gone digital.
My last visit to the Vision was at least 5 years ago, and actually I have to admit that the 2010 edition was a positive surprise to me. The Vision really looks like an image capturing exhibition and that is my own playground. It was quite funny to meet a lot of people at the booths of the various companies, but also while walking through the aisles many familiar faces showed up. It is also surprising to me that many people recognized me because they followed one or more of my courses, but unfortunately in many cases I did not recognized them. I would like to apologize for that, but over the last years I have had too many participants in my classes to recognize all of them or to remember all those faces.
As far as the Harvest Imaging teaching activities were concerned, the trend of recovering started already in the second half of 2009, and continued in the first half of 2010. Several in-house as well as public courses could be organized. The highlight of my teaching activities was the very first edition of my new course based on the hands-on evaluation of imagers and cameras. I think it will not be a surprise to you if I tell you that I do like teaching very much, but the preparation of a new course is also very motivating. “Teaching is learning twice” and that is fully correct. The preparation of new course material forces me to think everything over and over again before I can put the material onto the sheets and present it in the courses. The teaching and training will continue in 2011, and I plan to run the hands-on evaluation course at least two times in the coming year. I am curious to see whether the participants will remain that enthusiastic about the course.
I wish all of you the very best for 2011, and hope that we will regularly “meet” through this blog. Thanks for visiting the website of Harvest Imaging, see you next year 😉
Albert, 20-12-2010.