Whew! Just got home from Nashville and the PPA (Professional Photographers of American) conference known as Imaging USA. Wow, what a lot of information! This conference is quite intense. Learning sessions start at 7:00am and run to 7:30pm every day. In the evenings, various vendors sponsor events so that you can network with other photographers, then it starts all over again the next day. During the times between seminars, there is the expo where all the big name vendors of photographic gear are showing off their latest and greatest.
This year the Imaging USA had a record number of attendees, over 10,000!! It’s no wonder nearly all learning sessions were nearly booked. The event was held at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel, which is a very impressive venue. It’s huge! At nearly 3000 rooms with 4000 employees, it is really a city under a large glass dome. I tried to take some photos that would capture the scope of the place, but short of an arial photo it’s pretty hard to do. Here are a couple of photos:
A view of the Garden Conservatory area.
Balconies overlooking the garden.
An Orchid in the garden
The hotel is truely a beautiful place. If you get a chance to visit there, I would highly recommend it. Even though we were all there to learn from the seminars, it is difficult for a group of photographers to get together like this and not get kinda crazy and creative. While there I met up with my friend Barabara Mendez (another Fort Wayne photographer), Alvaro Balderas (a photographer from Mexico), Vilma Deckena (another photog from FTW) and Jenny Deselms (another photog from Lander Wyoming) one evening to shoot some fun and challenging photos. We were in a late night situation with nothing but a couple of speedlights and Pocket Wizards. Not the usual studio environment we were used to working in. Below is a time exposure of the general area we were shooting in.
The street scene of Delta Island.
The photo below was taken using a single Canon 550Ex on full power triggered with a Pocket Wizard.
This next photo was captured using a Canon 550EX, full power, gelled, camera right, and a Canon 580EX, 1/16 power, camera left.
It was a fun and late evening, but after spending a couple of days going to seminars and listening to lectures, it was fun to hear the click of a shutter. 🙂
————————————————————————————————————————
Apex Marine has created a cool video using the photos I shot for them this summer. While the start of the video is pretty neat, the last part is pretty cool. Because I was shooting in burst mode during action scenes, they took sequencial shots and strung them together to create motion. Those Art Directors are so crafty. 🙂 Watch it here –
Apex Marine YouTube VideoThanks for reading!!
-Ken.
