Focus On Imaging 2009
Focus On Imaging is Europe’s biggest annual imaging show, held in the NEC Arena in Birmingham, England. I haven’t had the opportunity to attend it in the past, but this time I tagged along with a few other photographers from my camera club on the Tuesday and Wednesday. Actually to be more exact, I tagged along with what seemed like 200 other photographers from various camera clubs around Ireland – the plane was full of us.
The show itself was on a scale I’ve never experienced before, so I spent the first few hours simply wandering around aimlessly. To be honest, the layout was very haphazard and it was nigh on impossible to walk around it in any structured way. Whilst I think the two days were more than enough, if not even a little OTT to cover everything, I think one day would be quite tight.
So what were the highlights? Well I picked up a new SB900 flash 
which was about the only thing I spent money on. Apart from that I met up with a number of photographers and models from a UK modelling community website called Net-Model. That was a lot of fun, especially meeting and chatting with John Barone (incredible photographer) and Hannah, whom I’ll be working with next week.
I also met Anita De Bauch, who will be shooting with me later in March. Have to admit, it was a bit embarrassing though 
I went across, shook her hand and kissed her on the cheek to say hello. It wasn’t until I saw the horror on her face that I realised she hadn’t caught my name, so effectively she was assaulted by a complete stranger!
Gadget wise, it was nice to hold the D3x (feels the very same as my D3) and play with some of the Canon zooms. Sigma also had their 1000m f4 which was interesting (and no doubt completely useless to most people). I drooled quite a bit over the Prophoto stand and watched some live talks on studio lighting.
In terms of the live talks, I really enjoyed the talk that self portrait artist Miss Aniela gave on the Microsoft stand as well as a talk on B&W printing that Epson gave. So all in all an interesting two days
No worries dude, at least you weren’t lurking around the corner or pretending to read a magazine while surreptitously photographing my butt ;P
Yeah.. there was a bit/lot of GWC action going on. I’m SO glad I didn’t bring my camera as I simply wouldn’t like to be associated with that sort of behaviour. Instead I’d much rather jump on strangers