Posted by Glyn Wade
People, lots of people
The Photography Show is a dangerous place. It is a place where payment cards have problems that can end up with your bank contacting you to see if your card has been stolen…..or cards not working at all. And when your cards do work it will be likely that your bank account will end up empty by the end of the day.
That’s not a problem with anything other than there being so much to spend your money on though; and I don’t just mean the horrendously overpriced food and drinks….and the ridiculous cost of parking. No, they fill the hall with tempting offers, the sly minxes.
Shopping
If I’d been in the market for a drone there were lots of those on offer….well I say offer….you’d need thousands to buy one….and then thousands more to get started flying the damned thing. We were told the latter by a guy at a presentation who was supposed to be SELLING the drones but just droned on (did you see what I did there?) about all the bad points. This included the fines for illegal use of the drones, which he classed as being quite interesting….up to £100, 000 in fines and 10 years in prison.
We didn’t buy one.
The ‘cheap’ drone in flight
Want one? Careful where you fly it!
There were lots of presentations going on throughout the day with a lot of them being free but that was the only one we went to and somehow we were at the show all day. Well, all day once we’d finally got on to the car park. With events ranging from Cheerleading and Hobbycraft through to The Education Show and Comic Con there were a lot of people wanting to park. And a number of the car parks weren’t open so chaos ensued. Luckily I’d hired a monster truck for the day and just squashed everything in my path.
This is the £8500 model
And so to inside where they even had a stall for cannons….or it might have been Canons…..but no-one was interested in their display. There were more people in the Olympus presentation but Claire refused to pop her head in and shout ‘LOSERS’ which would have been very amusing. The more interesting stands were the Nikon one obviously and those selling unique and/or cut price equipment.
We spent….ahem….far too much money and filled the, admittedly, small boot of our Fiat 500…erm I mean our monster truck. Goodies included Claire buying a lens the length of the Mississippi, me buying a tripod that’s actually tall enough for me and some software that’s five years ahead of Adobe. Damn I wasn’t supposed to be telling Adobe that and you can just bet they read everything on here-their spies are everywhere!
Lost and in need of buying a new camera or a bagel…whichever is cheapest
A few other trinkets made up our haul including a product shooting kit for the club. I think we even enticed a new member along too…our work is never done! It was nice to see other members there as well although Chris Hulme managed to avoid us….or did we manage to avoid him….?
We’ll be back there next year but will set off earlier to avoid the chaos and we’ll set a budget of how much to spend…maybe…. I’m hoping for some profit share from work next week and next week is probably better as I could have spent it all on Saturday! If you’re on a budget I would recommend just taking what you can afford to spend but if you’ve just had an inheritance mature from an account (mentioning no names)…go for it!
The BIG lens stand
