There is a reason why photokina is only once every two years, it is a huge place to visit and get around. Have you been to Photoshop World? PhotoPlus Expo? To sum it up you would be able to fill these expos into the bottom floor of one hall. There are seven halls at Photokina and four of them are two floored! Imagine an entire floor filled with china, japan and hong kong companies, many of which are just copies of other vendors! It is crazy! Here are some highlights for me:
Yes, there are vendors…
There might be a reason as to why the show needs to have see seven halls, everyone wand I mean everyone is at photokina. While vendors like Canon, Nikon, Olympus etc. have almost an entire floor to themselves, smaller ones still have good sized booths and as you can guess, there are a lot of the small ones here! One of the main reasons to visit the show is to chat with vendors and get up to date on all the new gear that ends up being released in connection to Photokina, maybe even more so getting to chat with all the smaller vendors and finding new companies that you haven't heard about before that might stock your next favorite gadget.
Seeing the news!
Inevitably there are a bunch of new cameras being released before Photokina and this year was no exception. For me, the Nikon D7000 is a true highlight and a camera that is high up on my wishlist now that I got around to playing with it! It just kills, even the D300s is pretty much beaten by the D7000. Sure there were a lot more of the news from the show but you can find that on sites that are all about covering them (like 1001 Noisy Cameras) instead of me even trying to list it all here in a wrap-up.
Animoto
I caught up with the good guys over at Animoto and got a good demo of their software which makes it very easy to design a slick video slideshow to music. The photo slideshow that you can see above is all made by the animoto slideshow interface. Check them out!
Seminars
Even though photokina really is about the vendors that are exhibiting, there are a bunch of different seminars going on in the different booths. Big names such as Joe McNally and Vincent Versace were there and a special shoutout to Rufus Deuchler who did a great job presenting the CS5 news specific to what photographers can do with them, especially within InDesign. What can you say, the crowd loved what you can do in CS5.
