WOW—what a first day up here in New York. My day started at 10:15 am with a presentation in Nikon’s booth about my photography called “The Power of Color.” (photo above by Raphael “RC” Concepcion).
After my presentation for Nikon, I headed over to the Nik Software booth to unveil the brand new version of their award-winning Photoshop plug-in, Viveza 2. I have to say—it is one absolutely amazing plug-in. They really took Viveza to a whole new level with this update, and it was both an honor, and really exciting, to be the first to show off this amazing new technology.
The Show Floor
I got to check out a few booths this morning. Hoodman showed me a new gadget for photographers who wear glasses, and it was very clever. I saw the Think Tank booth but didn’t get by to do any shopping (that’s for tomorrow). Canon and Leica had big booths, and Canon had a special indoor theater for showing their HD video, that was getting some buzz, along with their 1D Mark IV on display.
Nikon’s booth was massive, and packed to the gils the whole day, with the D3s getting lots of love, and I checked out Epson’s booth and as usually, it was hoppin’ and Westcott had James Schmelzer doing live demos and he had them packed in wall to wall.
So, what was the #1 most-asked question I got all day? Where’s Adobe? Everybody I saw asked the same thing, as Lightroom 3 was just announced, but there was no Adobe booth on the Expo floor (although they did have some sessions on the conference track).
Joe and Me
After a quick look around, I headed back over to Nikon to tape a video interview between myself and Joe McNally. It was basically just a live, free-flowing conversation between Joe and I about the state of photography today, our careers, and where we see things going. It was an awful lot of fun, because it really was totally spontanious, unrehearsed, and sometimes really silly (yes, a lot of it will wind up on the cutting room floor because Joe and I got carried away a few times). I’ll let you guys know when it goes live.
In the afternoon, I did a presentation over at the Bogen Imaging Booth that was a lot of fun, and then I headed down to catch a session by celebrity and portrait photographer Michael Grecco.
A Wild Night in The City
After the show, I went to dinner with my buddies from Louisiana—Matt Lange and Don Page (the guys I shot the Louisiana Tech game last week—-I talked them into coming to New York).
After dinner at Rays Pizza (yum!), a bunch of us went to the wildest show I’ve ever seen—-an off-broadway performance art thingy called “Fuerzabeuta.” RC turned us all onto to this show (it was me, Matt and Don, plus Brad Moore, Joey L, Jeremy Cowart and his buddy Austin, and the whole gang from Peachpit Press. We even ran into Zack Arias at the show), and RC was a hero, because we had an absolute blast—-like nothing I’ve ever seen!
There’s no way I can describe it (it was something like Cirque du soliel would do if one day they said, “OK, now let do something that’s really over the top.”). But it was a blast!!!! Totally weird, but a blast nonetheless (photos by Donald Page).
We ended up at Lindy’s deli, sitting outside on a beautiful night, for their famous cheesecake. What a fun day!
Tomorrow, I’m doing my presentation for Nikon again at 1:15 pm, and then I’m going to catch Sports Illustrated’s Peter Read Miller’s session on sports photography in the afternoon (and during the morning I’m doing a brief stint on a panel as well). I’ll have more details, and more photos tomorrow.
Hope to see you at my Nikon Presentation tomorrow!
