This has been the most exciting weekend of 2006, by far. There was no better way of spending it then with over 100 like minded professionals and top shooters from around the world. Friday’s sessions were great. We went to the T.K. Gregg Rec center where Todd Bennett taught us how to properly light a high school gym using Nikon SB 800’s, something with our paper actually has. He also showed us how how to light them using Pocket Wizards. One of the most interesting discussions was led by Spokesman-Reivew’s Colin Mulvany. Colin is Spokesman’s Video Journalist working on different multimedia stories daily. He discussed the future of photojournalism, which is going to be multimedia on the internet. His videos provides insight that regular vj’s at TV stations don’t usually give viewers. One of the most moving multimedia pieces I’ve seen came from the mountain workshops dvd that we watched in the morning. You can see this Multimedia piece here.

Speakers also included Ami Vitale and Vincent Laforet. They both gave a lot of insight about their careers as photojournalist and gave a lot of young shooters advice. Saturday evening was a portfolio critique which I skipped supper for. I was there from 8:00pm to 3:00am waiting to get my portfolio critiqued. I got some good reviews, and a lot of people liked the colors in my photos. One thing that I would like to be able to include in the future is some multimedia pieces. One of the biggest problems that I saw was younger pj’s were including two or three of the exact same photos which if they cut out, could cut their portfolios in half. Other than that, I was truly inspired by the amount of great work there, and being around all these people gave me new inspiration for my work and renergized me.

Until next time…