PhotoFest – Dublin 2012

Just the other week Brian and I took a little trip over to Dublin to help Canon Ireland out with the PhotoFest 2012 show. This is an event that I have presented at before, though not for a couple of years due to the Icelandic Volcano (I’m not even going to try and type it!) and other commitment, so it was a welcome return to be back over in some familiar surroundings.

We were tasked with giving a series of seminars on EOS kit, covering the EOS 5D Mark III, the Speedlite 600EX-RT flashguns, Canon workflow from input to output and Printing with PIXMA. Certainly a wide range of topics and one that encompasses pretty much the entire spectrum, of Canon consumer products.

The most frequent talk we gave was the workflow session – we repeated it four times during the day – and every one was basically full. As part of this talk, I was shooting with the EOS 5D Mark III and Speedlite 600EX-RT, while being tethered to a laptop where Brian was showing Canon software before taking one of the images I’d shot and outputting it through a PIXMA Pro 1.For us as presenters, it was an interesting seminar because we got to present together and therefore bounce off each other a lot more than you can in a solo talk – we had fun and the audience seemed to enjoy it as well!

During this talk, I had the lovely Hannah Devane as a model. She was great! Very easy going, relaxed and new how to pose for the camera. With models like that, it’s easy to get good pictures. Here’s two from the day, one shot with the very conventional portrait lens (EF85mm f/1.2L II USM) and the other with a very unconventional portrait lens….. the EF400mm f/2.8L II IS USM. And this served a purpose too – Despite having to walk to the back of the seminar area to take the picture, I still had full control of the three speedlite groups I was using to light the image, all from the ST-E3 on top of the camera.

The on thing to say about these images is that apart from the resize and sharpen for web, they have had NOTHING done to them. Even when we printed them at PhotoFest, they were taken from the camera, opened in DPP and then sent straight to the printer with no adjustments!

If you came to PhotoFest and saw us talk, let us know what you thought!