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.