Not.
This past Friday I wandered over to the Canon Expo 2005 at the Jacob Javits Center to check out what Canon has been up to and sit in on a couple of seminars featuring well-known photogs (I assumed) who shoot with Canon equipment.
I arrived 15 minutes late (forgot that the ferry ride from Jersey City had 2 other stops in NJ prior to returning to the 38th St pier) but was still able to slip into Clint Clemens' talk on Action Photography. He shoots mostly action shots of boats and cars and has taken some pretty great pics. Also couldn't stop praising Canon and MacOS X (especially Spotlight) enough. My kinda guy. ;-) He also showed some really impressive CGI pics where they took CG models of prototype cars and stuck them in real background photos. Couldn't tell that the cars weren't real. He firmly believes that that's the direction that car photography will be moving towards in the near future.
After that talk was over, I wandered around the expo a little bit. Wasn't really very big (and I was interested in the photo area only anyway) and I don't think they advertised well enough cause it almost seemed like there were more Canon employees there than convention goers. Most of the people were gathered around the "EOS Portrait Studio" where they had pro photogs doing photo shoots with the new Canon 5D that also had the new Wireless File Transmitter WFT-E1A attached. So the photog would snap away and the pics they took would be automatically and near-instantaneously transferred over to a computer that would display them on a couple of screens for everyone to see. The better ones would then be immediately printed out (no editing done) from a big ol' poster printer that they had set up next to the stage. For many (if not all) of the photogs this was their first time using the 5D and they all seemed quite impressed. It was pretty interesting to watch the photogs at work and it also didn't hurt that the models were quite pretty too. ;-)
Also took a look at the new Canon EF 24-105mm f/4 IS USM lens which seems like it could be quite cool. It actually costs a little more than the Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8 USM lens which I would think would be a better lens but I guess you're paying for the extra reach and IS even though you're losing a few stops. Although I guess the IS makes up for it.
I also wandered over to Display Technologies area and was quite impressed by the OLED and SED displays that they had out. I think OLEDs definitely gonna be the next big thing in gadgetry while the SEDs should pummel the plasma and LCD TV market provided that it's not priced way over the top. Screens in the future are going to be pretty damn sweet.
After about an hour wandering around, I headed back to the seminar room to check out David Hume Kennerly's talk on photojournalism. Arrived a bit earlier so also watched the last coupla minutes of Roger Ressmeyer's talk about Scientific Photography. He had some awesome space and volcano shots and also showed some retouched space photos from the Apollo missions which were pretty darn cool. Kennerly initially had problems getting his Powerbook to run his Powerpoint presentation correctly but once he got it working he went through a bunch of photos that he had taken throughout his 40+ year career and talked a little bit about the stories behind each. Impressive body of work.
So what does the Canon Expo have to do with this blog entry's title? Well, I would've put some pics that I took while at the expo but when I tried to download the pics onto my Powerbook, something went haywire and froze the machine. When I did a hard reboot, not only was my Powerbook now affected with a directory structure problem that will require a reinstall to fix, it also corrupted my Lexar 1GB CompactFlash card so that neither my Mac OR my PC would recognize it as a hard drive and my Digital Rebel XT would crap out with an "Err 99" message when I tried to reformat it. @#$!!#%!^!#&#!$#%!!!!!! So the CF card is, for all intents and purposes, useless. Fortunately, I may be able to get a replacement for free cause apparently these Lexar cards have some problem with Canon's newer line of dSLRs that require a firmware fix and they'll send me a new one if I send back this old one. So we'll see how that goes.
Anyways, as for the Expo, I had a pretty good time and saw a lot of cool stuff. They definitely need to get the word out more though cause I heard that attendance wasn't too great. From what I saw on Friday (which was the last day), that did seem to be the case. Which is too bad cause they did have some pretty nifty products to show. So looking forward to the 2006 Expo if they decide to have it again. =)
