Back from Focus

Over the last few years, I've been progressively staying longer at Focus on Imaging. It started with do it one day, 4 flights and hanging around in aiports. Next, it was one overnight, then this year, I stayed 2 nights. I arrived into the hall about 3pm on Monday, and by closing, I'd done most of the things on my list. That list? Look at the new Elinchrom Ranger Quadra system, get the Drew Gardner DVD, look at Portrait Albums and frames. I was also meeting Lightroom Author and fellow Lightroom Help Mod Richard Earney. One other person I met was Jonathan Bailey, Associate Publisher at GMC.So with that done, I was essentially free for the next 2 days! As well as meeting Richard, I also met Rod Wynne-Powell and John Beardsworth. John seems very straight and serious on the web, so it was a delight to find him a gentle giant. As the show ended, he offered to drive me to my hotel. After a while of getting lost, I turned on data roaming on the iPhone and got us there in the end. From there we found a great little pub for food and a pint. After the food we moved to let the local darts contingent have our table!Tuesday and Wednesday were spent doing generally looking about and taking in seminars, something that's not possible on a single day trip. I saw quite a few interesting ones including those from Damian McGuillicuddy (a few times!), Doug Gordon, Joe Cornish, Duncan McEwan, Paul Gallagher, Chris Burfoot and Adam Duckworth. Quite a mix there between people and landscape, my 2 main photographic interests.I also managed to meet Dublin art nude photographer Ciaran Whyte, someone else I know from online forums. It's always good to put faces to names and Ciaran was no exception.From a networking point of view, it was great to meet Mark and Debbie Cleghorn. Mark is with the same publisher as me, so it was great to get advice and help from them both. I also met with Mike McNamee and will be starting a new article for Professional Imagemaker on Lightroom addons. Just before leaving I was also talking to Brian Kruse from onOne software. 4 of their 6 plugins are now usable with Lightroom via round trip, similar to the current Aperture plugin system.By Wednesday afternoon, I was pretty bored and spent a bit of time talking with some of the models at the SWPP stand, both socially and for getting contacts for future work. All in all though, it was great, but next year I'll only be doing 2 days.