General Photography | 2011 Focus-On-Imaging Exhibition at the Birmingham NEC

Our blog today see’s me at the Focus-On-Imaging exhibition at the NEC in Birmingham. Today’s post also has the first ever video segment on this blog. This first video isn’t that great in all honesty and that is all down to me. I had written an outline on what things to talk about in the video and didn’t consider that I would get through it all of about 45 seconds. I would like to say thank you to Richard Hankins for helping me record it. I had previously mentioned that I was going to the Focus-On-Imaging exhibition and the integration of video to this blog in my February update post. Link below.

Update | 28^th February
Date Posted: Monday 28^th February 2011

The trip to Birmingham took some time and it saw me getting up at 7am to catch a train as I was departing from Victoria Coach Station. As I got to Birmingham I them had to get a train to Birmingham International Airport in order to get to the NEC. So as you can probably tell it wasn’t the easiest journey I have ever undertaken.

As I got to the Focus-On-Imaging exhibition I took in all the activity around. This event was very busy and somewhat crowded. There were certain stands giving talks, software demonstrations and advising on their services and different techniques. It was a great place to go if you wanted to save on some new equipment with stands from the likes of Moo.com [where I get my business cards], Silverprint [where I am likely to source darkroom materials in future] and many more, if you would like to see the 2011 floor plan for Focus click here. I did have a few problems with the event and these are just personal observations of mine.

I found that wherever there was a demonstration there would be a considerable amount of people sitting and taking notice of what was being said and then there were the demonstrations on studio techniques. These stands usually had a basic studio setup with one guy demonstrating and instructing on different techniques that he had used or is currently using. These particular stands were generally surround by about 30-40 grown men [maybe a couple of women] all with their cameras out taking photographs or using their video cameras. At first glance I thought it may have been that the guy in question was a leader in his field or chosen technique, this was until I saw the LCD screen of the camcorders being held high about the crowd. All these men were only surrounding this particular stand because of the women that were modelling for the photographer/demonstrator. Once I had noticed this it became clear and apparent throughout the entire exhibition. Where ever there was a woman sitting and modelling in a talk about studio photography there would be crowd of men gawping and pushing over each other to get a photograph of the model.

Now, I have had heard of this type of behaviour at exhibitions but I was rather embarrassed to witness it myself first hand. Another trend of behaviour that slightly annoyed me at Focus was the way that the majority of men were walking around with their cameras hanging around their necks. And most weren’t even taking photos from what I could see. Any conversations heard in passing where mainly between men or [worse still] men talking at exhibitors telling them what camera equipment they owned. Bragging is a problem in photography, with people going on and on about what equipment they have and so on. I am fully aware that I suffer from it but I’ll never be as bad as some of the people that were there that day. Hopefully.

I am glad to have gone to the exhibition as it gave me a good opportunity to look at what was available [company wise] for photographic equipment that I looking to procure in the near future. And as I said earlier I think that my darkroom equipment will be coming from Silverprint. It was also good for the experience and the photographs that I achieved. It was also good to see my friend Richard Hankins again. Richard also did me a massive favour as he recorded part of the video that I have included at the top of this blog piece, he is also a photographer and if you would like to see more of his work, click here. His photograph is the last out of the ten photographs on this post. All the photographs on this post were taken with Canon EOS 50D digital SLR with the Canon EF 28mm f1.8 lens. The Canon EF 28mm f1.8 is actually my favourite lens for my digital SLR. The video was recorded on a Canon Powershot SX200 in HD [high definition] recording mode and then uploaded to my Vimeo account.

Links from this post;

http://uk.moo.com/

http://www.necgroup.co.uk/

http://vimeo.com/richardanthonymorris

http://www.silverprint.co.uk/

http://www.focus-on-imaging.co.uk/

http://bigpicturephoto.co.uk/index.html