With Partner Velocity, Partner Summit, and Cisco Live under our belts, we’re sad to say “goodbye” to this year’s conference season. It was tons of fun getting to meet so many partners in person during the events, and the Cisco Channels team is looking forward to seeing all of you again next year. But before we do, we wanted to share a full recap from Cisco Live! 2012, starting with our favorite photos.

Shoot in color, but think in black and white. In this course, Adobe Photoshop Senior Product Manager Bryan O'Neil Hughes shares his favorite techniques for transforming color photographs into black and white, a technique that provides more creative options than using your camera's black-and-white mode. Learn how to prepare and fine-tune your photographs in Lightroom, and then move them into Photoshop to take advantage of its nondestructive adjustment layers. The course also introduces techniques for using Photoshop to adjust the color of video clips.

Get up and running with the cutting-edge DAW Cubase 7 in this quick one-hour class. Author Pieter Schlosser shows how to use Cubase 7 to create your music, starting with the very first steps: setting up audio and VST connections, utilizing templates, and customizing your Cubase workspace. Then learn how to import audio, set your tempo, and create a click track and markers. The next chapter shows you how to record and edit audio tracks, including how to overdub and loop, as well as apply and edit fades and crossfades. Then, Pieter moves into MIDI recording and editing, covering how to choose sounds, edit performances in the Piano Roll view, and use MIDI controller lanes to enhance the performance. He wraps up the course with a chapter on adding effects, creating aux sends, automating your mix, and exporting the final track.

Take a look into the CSS horizon and explore Flexbox, aka the Flexible Box Layout model, an important part of the evolution of CSS3 layouts. Senior author James Williamson walks through the exciting new capabilities Flexbox offers for controlling layouts—with a fraction of the code previously required. Learn what browsers currently support Flexbox and how to define containers and use properties to control position, size, and display order. Throughout the course, you'll have occasions to test your understanding with engaging, hands-on Challenge exercises.

In this installment of the Lighting with Flash series, photographer and Strobist.com publisher David Hobby demonstrates using strobes to freeze action while capturing the strength and grace of a dancer in motion. After working through the lighting challenges of a dance studio, David sets up a white, seamless background and shoots some test shots, adjusting the flash units to create a white "blow-away" background that will enable the photo to be easily composited. Next, he photographs the dancer, working with her to capture a relaxed expression as she leaps and strikes various poses. After the action shots, David lights and shoots a portrait.