Reimundo Garcia Jr.

Nikon Presentation

This week I attended the PhotoPlus Expo at the Jacob Javitz Convention Center. I have attended this Expo for a few years now. I had to miss last year because of the Montvale Fair I decided to do instead. This year, I decided not to miss it.

I spent Friday morning walking around the exhibit hall and looking at all of the latest and greatest in the photography world. I had already heard about most of the exciting items for this year’s show in advance. For instance, the Canon and Nikon HD cameras. Although these cameras seem quite impressive, I am not looking to upgrade my current gear. So, I wandered through the aisles featuring hundreds of companies selling their wares. I did notice more models than normal at the booths who were there to show how to use various camera equipment, lighting equipment, etc. I also listened to the big vendors brag about all of their new products and software. Overall, I was not very impressed with my first morning on the floor.

On Friday afternoon, I attended two different conference sessions. The first was Staying Successful in Stock. I have been interested in submitting some of my work to stock agencies and wanted to get some first hand information on what the best approach was. The session was geared towards those who had already had some experience in the arena. However, I did have some positive takeaways. Some of these may seem obvious. For instance, I realized that many of the photographers on the panel planned their photos specifically for stock use. Although some did admit to submitting their previous work from other jobs to stock agencies, more often than not they planned their pictures specifically for use in stock. Also, the other clear theme from the session was the need to focus on what concept you are going for in each picture. Instead of just taking some nice, pleasing pictures, they all recommended keeping in mind what the photography industry is asking for. For instance, now one of the big needs is anything Green and anything dealing with Hispanic people. Overall, it was a very good session with some good speakers.

The second session I took was Archiving for Digital Images. I have been concerned about how to really maintain archives of my digital files for some time. Being a technologist all my life, I have read about and used various technologies like Zip drives, floppy disks, CDs, etc. The technologies change rapidly and none seem to be archival for various reasons. Seth Resnick, the speaker in this session, shared a similar view. Although there seems to be a push from the industry to use CDs and DVDs for personal backups, these are not archival in any way. Many CDs and DVDs can fail within a matter of years. Or, even worse, can be stored in a backup format or a disc format that is not readable by future computers. After depressing us all with the lack of reliability of the current CD and DVD formats, he recommended using hard drives to keep multiple copies of all of your important data. He recommended 1 active and 1 backup hard drive having a duplicate of all of your data. In addition, he recommended using a device called Drobo as a hot-swappable backup device as an additional copy of all your files. All his recommendations made a lot of sense including continually upgrading your hard drives since they too are subject to failure. Now, if I could make some more money from stock, I can invest in buying more hard drives!

On Saturday, I returned with a couple of friends, Rachel and Rohanna, to the exhibit floor. I took a few pictures and signed up for some information at a few booths, but did not see anything exciting other than my friends.