Hot Spots In The Trade Show

Hey, it was a super big trade show - and sure there were a gazillion album companies available to view - some even from the far east - all showing some cool cover designs, various sizes and a myriad of products. Even the labs were getting into the act offering what they call their "print to bind" services - i.e. You send the images to the lab, they print them up and bind them into your choice of album - all for one low price. When the labs started offering the service just as Zookbinders, my favorite album company, is also jumping into the lab business and started offering the same service. What do they call that today - convergence. I guess it's happening across all types of industries.

Anyway, the first of four vendors that impressed me with their products was Tamron, who was showing their first VC - Vibration Compensating lens. Yes, we are quickly running out of acronyms for these kind of lenses. It was a 28-300mm lens and is quite compact. It was cool to point it at something across the room and see it instantly lock into both focus and stabilization. The image looked rock solid - no shake - as I looked through the viewfinder. It was so good in fact, that at one point I even released the camera and it held firmly to the scene suspended in mid air!!! OK, just kidding here, but it still was really,really impressive.

Athentech was showing a beta of their stand alone "Perfectly Clear" technology. This is cool stuff to enhance your work flow. The perfectly clear technology has been incorporated in some other software as an example Bibble, but this is their first endeavor offering it separately as a stand alone product. So what's it do?? How about you point it at a folder where last weekend's wedding images are sitting - raw or jpeg - press "play" - metaphorically speaking, and Perfectly Clear kicks into gear and color corrects and density adjusts each image improving color, luminance, shadow detail, sharpness, just to name a few. It looks amazing. I'm going to be hooked up as a beta tester and can't wait to give you the low down on how it all works. I'm really fired up about this one!!

The folks over at Jainco Tech were promoting their Quality, Performance, Productivity solution whereby you, the photographer, send them all your images from a job, like a wedding, and they will do all the color correcting, density adjustments and edit. Each image is reviewed, accurately adjusted, saved separately and then sent back to you on one of those little mini hard drives. How much does this service cost? This is the part that caught my eye - how about $.13 an image! Pretty darn reasonable. They will even give you 75% off your first order. I'm sending them a wedding just to see how well they do. Expect about a two week turn around time. I'll keep you posted on the results and my impressions.

The fourth vendor - Tafota.com - was showing easy to design, update, and post websites. Its main promise to the user is it's "ease of use" unique design, end user updating of their own site. This has always been the big headache - keeping our sites fresh and new. Tafota makes it really easy to change design, color schemes, layout, images - anything you need to keep potential clients coming back to your site. It's a new company, but they struck me as really committed to offering the best costumer service available. Anyway, check them out and see what you think.

Folks, that about it for the show report, so hit the links for more info. I'll keep you posted with any new info in the next several weeks as things develop.

Hey gang, that's going to it for today. LaDawn and I are planning to spend a little time relaxing today and possibly hit the desert. But, don't worry, I'll be back in time for tomorrows post. See you then. --David