Just returned from a busy, busy, wonderful week in Las Vegas – the WPPI (Wedding & Portrait Photographers International) Convention, with an estimated 15,000 photographers in attendance from all over the world. I so enjoyed the entire week, kicking off with two days of intense print judging of some very cool categories, including photojournalism, humor, fashion, and nature & landscape. I had the great opportunity to judge alongside some immensely talented individuals, even if I didn’t agree with all their judgements ;). But that was kind of the coolest part of it – challenging each others’ opinions and sharing such an intense interest in all of the work. On Tuesday, I had a blast presenting my platform program on children’s portrait photography. The good news is that I was thrilled to see a fantastic turnout of photographers ….. The bad news is that the room was so full that they had to start turning away photographers who were hoping to get into the room about 20 minutes before the presentation actually started. Quite a lot of them, actually, so I was asked to offer an encore presentation the next day, which was also a really amazing experience. I think it had everything to do with the luckiness of the city. All in all, I had the great honor or presenting to about 700 photographers. Darn good-looking ones, too, I might add 😉 A huge thanks to all those who have written in response to seeing the programs, too. It means a great deal to me. I would be remiss if I didn’t sent a special thanks to Lisa Walter and Rachel Garrison for their unbelievable down-to-the-wire recreation of a fabulous slideshow put together originally by Kaitlin Rogers (who created such a lovely piece). Long story short, we had to re-up the show the day of the presentation, but they did a fabulous job, and they turned it around just in the nick of time. One last cool thing – just before I left for Vegas I was honored to be selected as WPPI’s monthly spotlight photographer, with a really sweet writeup in their newsletter. Thanks for the recognition, it is so appreciated….here’s a glimpse of the article…
I also got some great images while out in Vegas or had some great ones sent to me – I’ll be posting some of those very soon!!
