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Tuesday 27 August 2013

Back in Sydney for SOCAP

So after a couple of trips to Melbourne in the last few weeks, I'm now a little further north in the sunny city of Sydney for the SOCAP Symposium and awards. It's actually one of the more interesting conferences that I photograph with speakers primarily taking about customer service and complaints procedures. The topics though seem to always relate to what makes a great service or product and how you support your customers to give them the best experience. Universally interesting topics for anyone in business.
I was thinking about this on the way up in two situations that I've been through recently, Flying Virgin and a faulty Calvin Klein watch.


Travelling a little more certainly makes you appreciate the small things; Virgin now offering free tea and coffee, or just walking down the isle with water. They've also go an on demand entertainment app now which worked seamlessly. On the other hand my rather expensive CK watch which fell apart after just over a year was resolutely denied a warranty claim recently, despite the fact that it has no signs of damage or careless treatment.
The decision for me is simple- support those companies that have an attitude of proactive care and support rather than those that decide they would rather squeeze another $200 out of you for simple repairs.
So anyway, after all my ramblings, it will be interesting to see what O glean from this years SOCAP symposium. Stay Tuned.

Thursday 8 August 2013

A long day at AIIA



It's funny how sometimes it's nice to do things just to prove to yourself that you still can. I don't know if that's just a slightly perverse way of justifying a 18hr day or what... But either way yesterday seemed to fit into that category. It was the annual AIIA iAwards held at crown. 


 Over 700 people, about 45 awards, Masterclasses, Breakout sessions, Plenary presentations, Marketplaces, Digital Marketplaces and of course a Gala dinner to top it off... oh and 1 lonely photographer frantically running all over crown trying desperately to cover it all.







CEO of Red Bubble, Martin Hosking and Ex-Premier of Tasmania David Bartlett during the Masterclass



 Add to that we were trying to social mediaise (new words, yay!) the event so we were downloading, retouching and uploading on the fly. It mad for a crazy day and a DamIT mine field. Added to which Crowns wifi was demonstrable slow and where we were working must have at some stage double as a WWII bunker as there was little to no mobile data reception.

 

Image by Scott McNaughton, leave this man a camera for 5 minutes and he out shoots you!
 My great friend Scott McNaughton, rocked up bright eyed and bushy tailed to give me a hand at 7pm,  I threw a couple of instructions, and a tonne of work at him and ran in the other direction. True to form, he took it in his stride and got everything sorted. Brilliant to work with "Proucy" again. Only problem being that I left him with a camera... then he goes and does this...



Ian Birks, CEO of AIIA during the government breakout session
 When ever I shoot this event it dawns on me both how far we've come in technology, and how for we still have to go. While the conference spent time talking about cloud computing, smart technology and the fact that by 2020 they'll be 57 billion devices connected to the WWW, THATS 57 BILLION!!! I spent 30 mins trying to send 6 Mb of images to a client who was sitting right next to me! Well let's  I started to wonder what the 700 people on the other side of the door were actually doing!

 
The Gala dinner at Paladium in Crown.
 Big shout out has to go to the team at Gener8 Events who put the whole thing together, (www.gener8.com.au)They all worked just as hard as me and were amazing to the end.
Great Gatsby Dancers (strangely modernised) for the entertainment)
All in all we stumbled out of crown at 2am, legs, back and pretty much everything else aching. 1600 images in 16hours of shooting. 

I still love photography.

Sunday 4 August 2013

Congrats Sam Stosur - A blog revived

Well I thought that it was time to revive the blog. See if I can keep some life blood into this time.
What a better way to revive it that say a big congrats to Sam Stosur who just minutes ago won the Californian open beating Victoria Azarenka. I've only met Sam a couple of times, but what an amazing ambassador for Aus.
Congratulations again. Sam.
See more here..
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-08-05/stosur-breaks-through-to-win-in-california/4864662?section=sport