For the last two years I’ve had the opportunity to visit Las Vegas for Photoshop World.  This is basically a conference for photographers that provides training and “networking” opportunities with people with similar interests.

I don’t know the ratio’s but I suspect that a vast majority of the attendees are professional photographers – I suspect that most hobbyist’s can’t justify the cost to attend, but it’s really worth it.

Like any big conference there are a number of training courses that follow different “tracks”.  So you can follow the “Graphic Designer” track, or the “Photography” track or “Lighting” track etc., I’m sure you get the idea.  Of course you don’t have to stick to the track you can swap throughout the day.

The training is really fantastic, you can attend a course to learn a new technique or process fix a picture – this is really good if you fancy a new type of genre but don’t know how to start.  For example, I’m mainly a landscape photographer with a bit of portrait thrown in.  If for example I fancied trying weddings or commercial product shooting I could attend a class to find out more.  You can also attend classes that provide you with general inspiration and hear from your favorite professional – those are great too.

Of course there are parties in the evening and dinners you can attend etc., so you can pretty much tie up your whole day from around 8am until midnight.  All the time you are attending with other keen photographers so you learn a LOAD just talking to people.

Another upside (or downside for Lisa) is that there is a product fair there so you can checkout the latest gear and even buy new “stuff”.  But it’s a bit like being a kid in a candy store you can go nuts so I always give myself an allowance and never spend more.

The conference lasts 3 days, and before the conference there is the chance to attend a “pre-conference” event (for some more money of course).

This year in a pre-conference I signed up to learn from Joe McNally.  Now for most of you, you won’t know who Joe is so I’ll give you a few details.  Joe is an internationally acclaimed photographer whose career has spanned 30 years and included assignments in over 50 countries. He has shot cover stories for TIME, Newsweek, Fortune, New York, Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, and Men’s Journal.  His work is, well, amazing.  Here’s a link to his site if you want to check it out: link.

Anyway, Joe was running a course on portrait photography and I thought why not.  I should say here I had no idea of what to expect.

So it turned out that Joe had arranged for us to shoot performers from the Las Vegas Cirque Du Soleil shows.  It was absolutely fantastic.  There were around 6 different performers and they were all dressed in costume and we got the chance to shoot them really up close for 5 hours.

It was an opportunity I’ll never get again and we had a blast.  I got the chance to learn loads from Joe and capture some amazing pictures.

Here are some of my favorite shots, hopefully you like them too.

If you ever visit my blog, you will know that it’s been a while since I’ve posted a new entry.

The reason for this is that I’ve been a little busy lately 🙂 Work has been manic (well it’s always manic so that’s a terrible excuse) but then I’ve just moved house – probably one of the most stressful thing’s I’ve ever done! Yes I’ve moved before, but for some reason this one took its toll (maybe it’s because I’ve also hit 50 and it hurts more – who knows).

So I’ve been a busy boy. I’m writing this posting on a Sunday night, just after we unpacked our last box, so we are feeling pretty good right now.

Anyway even though I’ve been up to a lot of stuff, I still had time to take the camera out. Back in July (yes it’s been that long) we went to Disney in California for a week. We stayed at the Paradise Pier Hotel and hit the parks each day.

It’s actually been a while since we’ve visited Disneyland, we normally go to Florida, but we decided to go somewhere closer (and cheaper) as we were about to move. Staying in a Disney hotel was fantastic, we could literally walk out of the hotel directly into either Disneyland or Disney California Adventure and of course we were right by Downtown Disney too.

The hotel had a couple of super posh restaurants – too nice for us – so we ate most nights in Downtown Disney. We did get to enjoy the Concierge Service though, which entailed going to this private room each night were we got free drinks and “nibbles”.

The kids had a blast, we went on all the cool rides – thankfully Abi is now old enough to not want to go on the really baby ones and the weather was fantastic.

Most nights found us in “Earl of Sandwich” (James favorite) or Tortilla Jo’s (Lisa’s favorite) where they served the best tableside made Guacamole I’ve ever had.

As a keen photog I of course took my camera, but this time did a little experiment. I’ve been carrying around my D4 DSLR and some heavy glass for a while now. Let me tell you it definitely takes some amazing pictures, but my god it’s heavy! Now I’ve been reading a lot about people getting rid of their expensive DSLRs and replacing them with small mirrorless cameras. So as an experiment I took with me a small Fujifilm x20 compact mirrorless camera. Some day’s I took out the D4, others just the x20. Here’s the question, can you tell which image came from which camera?

Remember the D4 and 28-300mm lens costs $7,000. The x20 cost $400.

Here are some of the pictures from the trip.

I’ve been pretty bad over the last month or two and not posted that much on my blog.  I could tell you that I’ve been super busy at work (which is true) but the reality is I just needed a break.

Having said that the time eventually come around where I really missed going out with the camera and taking some pictures.  This is where I am now and I’m itching to go to the Olympic State Park for a day and see what I can shoot.  But that takes some organization so in the interim I hit Redmond for the Saturday Exotics Car show.

This week was “British Car Week” and there were loads of great cars to see.  To make things even better (or worse depending on your point of view) it was a brilliantly sunny day.  So while it was fun walking around in shorts taking pictures, I wasn’t alone!  Also really direct sunlight in the middle of the day doesn’t produce the most flattering pictures.

But I went for it anyway.

I really love the cars at these events but the people just get in the way.  I’m sure you know what I mean, I get all ready for that awesome shot, position myself at the right angle for a great composition, and some fat old dude and his wife walk in front of me and stop.  Very frustrating.

Anyway I took a LOAD of pictures of both Brit cars and others and decided to post my favorites here today.

In the British section they had everything from old Triumphs, Lotus, Minis, Jaguars, Aston Martins, Morgans, Bentleys and even a couple of McLarens.  They were really beautiful and if I had a spare couple of hundred thousand dollars I know what I’d spend it on.  (Actually that’s crap coz if had that much money lying around Lisa would grab it – but you know what I mean).

Hope you like the pictures.

It’s that time of year again – time to visit the Tulip Festival up in Skagit Valley.   So out came the camera and I set up a road trip with a couple of friends from work (Chris Pearson and Eric Bie).  The plan was to drive up to Mount Vernon to get some tulip shots, then head out to La Conner for lunch, and finally check out Deception Pass for some scenic shots of the bridge and beaches.

Now I’ve been going up to the festival for the last few years so none of this is that new.  Last year I went early April and none of the tulips were out – big disappointment.  So I had to go back towards the end of the month to get the good flower shots.  So this year we decided to wait until the third week of April until we went.  As you would expect this year it was different and the flowers bloomed early.  So we got there today and found a LOAD of empty fields.

There are really two places to go, one is Roozen Gaarde which is run by the Roozen family who have been growing tulips since the 1700’s, the other is Tulip Town where another family (the DeGoede’s) also have a huge history in tulip growing.  Both families stem from Holland which is perceived as the home of the tulip. As the tulips were pretty much gone we hit Tulip Town first and were lucky to find some there.

Now I have hundreds of tulip pictures already, so rather than shoot the same thing over and over again I chose to be a bit picky and just shoot something different.  As it was a little wet early this morning it wasn’t too busy there so we got some nice shots.  Unfortunately though the sky was pretty crappy so most of my shots were low down capturing the flowers.

Anyway we got some great pictures and decided to head out before it started to rain again, so we went back to the car with a ridiculous amount of mud on our shoes (the car is a right state) and drove over to La Conner.  La Conner is a great little town located on the water front just off Skagit Bay.  We found somewhere to eat and grabbed a burger.  Then it was off to Deception Pass.

Deception Pass has this huge bridge that’s really popular for photographers and it’s basically located in a state park.  The park has loads of trails and beaches and we thought it might be nice for some pictures.  The beach we went to had a great view of the bridge and was a beach I hadn’t been to before and I was really pleased with the shots I got.  After that it was time to go home.

We left this morning at 9am and got home around 5pm.  In all I took a pretty low 200 pictures and got less than 20 I really liked (and I would class that as a successful day out).  Some of the shots I liked are below.

A couple of weeks ago the family decided to have a long weekend in Portland.  Now I’ve been there before on business but only really for the day and then I didn’t see anything of the city so this was a new location for me as well as the rest of the family.

We drove down to the city as it’s only really about two and a half hours from Seattle and Lisa got us a lovely suite in the middle of the city.

One of the primary reasons for the trip was that Lisa is really into crafting and has pretty much decked out the bonus room in our house as her craft room.  She has two large tables full of cutting tools, knives, tape and paper and is always busy creating cool stuff.  Well this weekend Portland was the home of a large crafting expo.  So the plan was for Lisa and Abi to hit the Expo for the day and for James and me to go out and check out the city.

Portland has a pretty good public transport system with bus and tram stops everywhere and the time tables were great.  So James and I hit the road on foot and headed out to see what we could find (with the camera of course).  The girls went off to their expo and brought, well what looked to like paper and glitter but they enjoyed it.

James and I decided to get some shots of the city and I captured the famous “Portland Sign” along with the large paddle-boat on the river.  They have a really old town hall too so I shot that as well.  Then we decided to head out to the Japanese gardens.  The trip there was fun but kind of a disaster.  We got a city map and it showed that the tram service took us to the gardens and as we were by city hall and a tram stop we took that.  However the map was a little out of proportion once you got out of the city as when we arrived at the last tram drop off (which was at the zoo) we found out it was another three mile walk to the gardens.  For those who know me that wasn’t going to happen!  Not to be dejected we got a tram home and grabbed the car!  Anyway we went to the gardens and they were really nice.  Not much was in bloom but we got some nice pictures.

After the gardens it was back to the hotel to meet the girls.

For those of you who don’t know Portland is famous for a place called Voodoo Donuts.  Which is rather unsurprisingly a donut shop.  What is odd is that it’s open twenty-four hours a day and there is ALWAYS a line of people outside waiting to get their donut fix.  I found this odd as while the donuts were nice, I didn’t think they were really anything that special.  Still, we went (of course) and I got some shots of that too.

One the way home Lisa found us a cool waterfall to visit called the Multnomah Falls which was really big! This thing was over six hundred feet high and very impressive.

So, what did we think of Portland?

Well we had a great time that’s for sure.  Shopping is tax free so that’s good and there are some really great sites to check out.  As a city they seem to be obsessed with food trucks, they are everywhere and while it sounds kind-a cool, most look pretty dirty and for me uninviting.

We did however have some great food (there are some nice restaurants there) and the kids had fun.

Rather surprisingly I found the city pretty dirty.  We found a lot of graffiti, and there are a lot of homeless people in the city, so that wasn’t too nice.  But that said I’ll definitely go back again, probably next time not with the family so I can get more pictures.  So well worth a visit.

Here are some of the shots from the trip: