Working in the middle of chaos.

I've recently been posting some images I took in NYC at the 2013 Photo Expo for Samsung. It was a busy Fall. I'd just come off a ten day stint in Berlin for the IFA show (kinda like our CES show only bigger!) and a camera beta test,  and a couple of weeks in Denver being filmed for our Craftsy.com classes (Now rebranded as BluPrint and majority owned by NBCUniversal - A Link? ).

The folks at the public relations firm for Samsung's Galaxy NX launch liked me well enough and hired me to head up to the city and work at their trade show booth taking images with the new camera and the system lenses. We shot for hours each day with two different models and generated about 4,500 files in the three days of the show. All the images were put up on big 4K television screens as we shot so people could see, in real time, how the cameras worked and how the files looked. Occasionally one of the cameras would crash because it was still early software, but we had a technician on tap and he'd fix the issues expediently.

Space is tight at trade shows and our shooting area was tiny. We had a couple of small soft boxes and some inexpensive monolights but little in the way of additional reflectors or light modifiers.

In order to back up enough to use 60mm and 85mm lenses on the APS-C sensor equipped bodies we had to back up right to the intersection of the booth and the public so we ended up, frequently, answering questions from fellow photographers as we were shooting. It was mostly good natured fun with a few exceptions such as the "photo enthusiast" who came by repeatedly to tell us that "pros only use medium format cameras. Digital isn't good enough yet!!!" And this was, of course 2013 when most digital was more than adequate.

On our breaks we'd walk the floor and look at all the cool camera and lens porn or try to beat other equipment reps out of free lunches or dinners (I got invited to the intimate Olympus dinner at a famous, and very good steak house, to get a hands on evening with their new EM-1 camera; and the Panasonic sponsored happy hour was pretty cool...).

The noise levels everywhere were high, high, high. But I when I shot I wore a headset microphone so I could make observations about the cameras and the process to whatever assembled audience was on hand, and also to direct our models. It was a blast to do all this once but it got old quick. By the time I was on a plane and headed home I was deep into writing one of my most read blog pieces ever, "The Graying of Traditional Photography..." But looking back through the photographs this week I can see I had a much better time than I remembered.