Focus on Imaging at Birmingham NEC

So today was the annual trip to Brum to check out whether the ratio of beards worn by photographers still is three times the national average - and yes it is!

Aside from this vital observation I trotted around getting lost several times, always somehow finishing up at the Nikon stand (is someone trying to tell me comething?).

Mulling about in my brain is the issue of where to go with the mainstay of my equipment - the DSLR. Already possessing a Pentax K10D and a Canon EOS5D it may seem strange to be considering scrapping the lot and buying a Nikon D300 (I must write more on this soon) but at least I was using the show to help me make big decisions (OK, I normally just go to take candids of the models....)
Just what was going on with all those laptops anyway?

My day was interrupted by a surprise call from a friend who works in big deals at a big city bank calling to let me know that Getty Images had just been bought by a Private Equity group. Who knows what this means but perhaps a good time to get my images in before Getty reinvents itself ("I submitted to Getty in the good old days before they accepted images from riff raff with any old camera"). After all I bought the EOS5D to fit in with them and I will be heartily pissed off if new owners open things up to the likes of me (before I owned the EOS5D, that is).

Back to the Nikon stand where a couple of guys were explaining to a couple of hundred people about the wonders of wireless TTL flash. Strangely it was pitched as if this was something Nikon had just discovered and that the audience had never heard of. Strange to a Pentax user anyway whose cameras have had this technology for 10 years now but whose marketing team have felt it appropriate to keep it all very quiet....

I'm rambling now.