A trip to the 2010 Imaging Expo

Today was Day Two of the 2010 Imaging Expo in Nashville, and it was very nice! It was far larger than I would have expected for Nashville, easily rivaling events like Macworld in (San Fran or New York), and I spent about two hours walking the show floor. I’m budgeting my money right now, so I didn’t spend a lot of time chatting with people in every single booth as I don’t like to waste people’s time unless I am a serious prospect, but just looking around was informative and a good way to kill a chunk of my afternoon. There were many good companies there, but I did come away with a short list of my own personal “best of show” exhibitors and interesting sights.

First up as you walk in, the Professional Photographers of America have a large info booth set up where they were handing out info pages extolling the “value of membership”, “certification pays”, and a couple other topics.  I admit I wasn’t sure I saw any reason to join them, but since they seem to have ties with insurance programs tailored to photographers I guess it won’t hurt me to check it out on the web.  I have in the past checked out their “certification” program, and I am sorry to say I see absolutely no merit in it what so ever.  Members or PPA staff are welcome to try to change my mind, but these days passing an exam doesn’t prove you are a photographer… photographs do.  Yes, any monkey with a digital SLR can call themselves a “pro”, but being a pro is not about passing an exam, it is about delivering the goods.  Conversely, I don’t think many of history’s best photographers would have passed the PPA exam, and I think we can all agree Ansel Adams was not too bad at snapping a pic now and then.

Along similar lines, the TN PPA had a small table in the back staffed with some friendly people who were aggressively stopping anyone with a TN city on their expo bagde.  I’m not a real big “joiner”, and extremely suspicious of photo industry organizations as I don’t typically see a practical use for them, but I signed up for their newsletter and took a pack of information from them which I will follow up on later.

Dury’s had a fairly large booth and appeared to be doing hand-over-fist business, to the point where it was pretty much impossible to get close enough to the booth to just peruse the gear and see what show specials they might have been running.  Still, I picked up one of their show catalogs, and it is always nice to see a local photo business doing well.  Maybe some time I will swing by their store and see what they have.

The first really worthwhile place to grab swag was the Kodak booth, where on one of the four sides they had sample packs of paper for inkjet printers.  Granted, I don’t even have a decent photo inkjet but a friend of mine does and he’ll enjoy the paper.    They also had a large bowl of Lifesavers mints out, and some old man came by and grabbed such an obscenely large fistful he couldn’t leave for a minute because he kept dropping them all over the counter.  Man, the things some people will do for a free piece of candy at a trade show.

onOne software (with the pretentious mixed case name) was demo’ing their stuff, and I stopped to watch the demo for Mask Pro 4. They showed a Pshop layering using a bridal shot with a crappy gray sky on one layer and a nice sunny cloudy sky on another layer, and used Mask Pro to intelligently select colors to keep and replace. I fully expected it to look like crap once the guy started painting into the bride’s transparent veil and around her hair, but it did an amazingly good job! Yes, it did eat a little of the detail, but for 30 seconds worth of work it was nothing short of miraculous. I already knew that their Genuine Fractals product was the way to go for upscaling images with the least objectionable results (definitely the tool to have when your original shot just doesn’t have enough pixels), but now I have something else to admire them for.

datacolor (yet another pretentious lowercase name) was showing off their goods, but all I was interested in was the SpyderCube, a tiny chunk of monochromatic plastic that may be the most ingenious color calibration tool since the invention of the Macbeth/Gretag/Xrite/whatever. This unassuming scrap of refined petroleum product is a cube the size of a child’s building block, painted with a black, gray and white color scheme, a shiny silver ball on top, a tripod mount on the bottom, and a hole drilled halfway into the body. This deceptively clever gizmo, dropped into your photographic scene, gives you a surprisingly large amount of information about color balance, black point, white clipping… look, if you don’t know what it is and you are a serious photographer do yourself a favor and go take a look. you will thank me for it. It was nice to see one in person… now I feel more confident about hacking one up in my workshop.

The most clever product I have never heard of comes from NRD, a company that specializes in electrostatic air solutions for the electronics fabrication and manufacturing industry. Yes, really. These guys suddenly realized one day that they were already making the ideal tool for cleaning the sensors on digital cameras, and crufted up a product to market to the photographic professional who was sick of jabbing dangerously abusive cleaning tools into their pricey DSLR. What it does is de-ionizes a stream of air blown from a standard Giotto rocket blower, so that the resulting puff actually causes the dust on your sensor to lose its electrostatic charge and blow cleanly away in the blast of compressed air. Friggin’ genius! It is called “Firefly”, it lists for $200, but with the secret handshake the rep gave me you can get it for $50 off; just go to the website and enter “TS25″ as the promo code. Better hurry, as I suspect that code will only last a short while after the end of the expo!

Which brings us to the last company: SmugMug.  They had the best swag, a cheap yet effective camera strap that is just begging to be haxx0r3d into an R-strap… so I grabbed 3 (sorry d00dz! I swear I’ll make it up to you!).  They were there with their parent company, bayphoto (gah, more pretentious lowercase/nospace!), showing off all the great photo papers and surfaces they offer.  I got into a lengthy discussion with one of their people, who despite claiming he was not the web guy was extremely well-informed (not many grunts know what a CNAME is) and showed me how their custom print sales system looked to end-users.  I had already decided that SmugMug was the way I wanted to go for print sales, so it was nice to get to confirm what I knew and pick up little value-added tidbits here and there.  For those who do not know, and in brief, SmugMug’s “pro” account will let you upload photos to them, set pricing above the actual costs, and allow you to have your customers choose which ones they want printed, in what size, and on what paper/surface.  SmugMug handles the credit card billing, shipping and all customer service issues like reshipping damaged photos or even correcting color/density/etc. until the customer is satisfied… something I found utterly unbelievable due to the potential for a fussy customer to abuse the system, but they assured me that they stand behind the work 100%.  Color me impressed.  I also got a promo code from them: use “PPA30″ to receive 30% off the signup fee (but only for about a week after the show)!  The pro account is regularly $150, so that is a hell of a deal!  I’m all over that!!  While I was there I grabbed some sample books of their papers, which will come in handy for future sales to my photography clients.  Good job, SmugMug, good job.  I look forward to working with you.