PSW Day 2-3 final post.

pffff

I’m back at the hotel room, it’s 23:48 at the moment local Orlando time.

Today it was the final day of my first Photoshop world and to be honest it’s hard to find the right words to express my feelings about this. What I do know is that working with this kind of people will without a doubt inspire everyone for many weeks/months to come. I did have some expectations from Photoshop World but nothing could have prepared me for this.

Starting with the keynote up until the end a few hours ago have been a roller coaster ride.
PSW buzzes from the creative energy but most off all the feeling of meeting friends and having loads of fun will stay with me for a long time. Of course it’s always fun to meet up with our friends from the Kelbygroup but having a room full of so many talented people like Joe McNally, Jeremy Coward, Dave Black and many many more is of course something you don’t experience that often. For me PSW has also been an experience of making many new friends and building a great network.

The seminars I taught were very well reviewed by the people and I have to be honest that when I saw the sizes of the rooms the first day my thoughts were “I just hope that I fill up more than the first three rows, which already would be rather good”, the reality was however totally different and every seminar the amount of visitors grew, with my last seminar the room was almost completely filled, this is without a doubt the biggest crowd I ever taught at once, a very cool experience.

What I also will remember for a long time is the incredibly well organized after parties, Midnight Madness, live shows and of course the wonderful presentations from my colleague instructors, again having so many talented photographers, photoshoppers and other experts together in one room (and several theaters) is just amazing and I would love to see something like this in the Netherlands, although I’m afraid that will never be possible.

Because it was my first PSW I had a lot of people to meet, and also here it shows how “different” the Kelby instructors are from other tradeshows I worked on. There is a huge amount of friendship, respect and above all a enormous feel of creativity and energy in the air. And of course teaching for so many people in English always is exciting but when after the Midnight Madness (end of day 2) you end up in a 24 hour restaurant with a group of instructors and Scott asks to participate in the closing ceremony with a slideshow or just a talk about my work you can imagine that the stress factor was very noticeable for me. Far away from home and no access to the things I would love to use….. So I decided to McGuyver to slideshows with the images I had with me (I always carry a collection of a reasonable amount of images with me luckily), because there was enough time in the presentation I decided to use two slideshows. The first one showing some personal work ranging from images I took during travelling and some sports. The second slideshow was a chronological slideshow from my modelwork, it hit the nail on the head I think people loved it. And trust me when you’re on stage with icons like Jeremy Cowart, Dave Black and Moose Peterson you have one choice and that is PERFORM.

I already blogged about the first day so here we go with day 2 and 3.

Day 2
Day 2 was my “free day” well actually that doesn’t happen at PSW.
Day 2 was the day I taught several small demos at the Manfrotto booth (Elinchrom for the US).
Because of a problem with my first model I started with a very special model in front of my camera, one of the best military photographers in the world Stacey Pearsall but also a wonderful and sweet human being, I will be featuring her work on my blog very soon and trust me you will LOVE this.
After the normal activities it was time for a tradition, MIDNIGHT MADNESS !!!!
Think about a crazy night with games, prices but most of all LOADS of fun, bloopers, videos etc. time flew.
After Midnight Madness we ended up in the 24 hour restaurant for a wind down party.

Day 3
Much of the start of day 3 was spend with McGuyvering the slideshows for the closing event, and of course my last seminar about creativity and getting the shot. I already told you the rooms were huge and even filling up the first three rows is not that bad, so imaging my joy when I walked in the room and it was already half full, when I started the seminar the room was almost full. And because the creative seminar evolves a lot about interaction with the group this was a great chance to have some real fun with the class. After the final seminar I went over some last minutes changes and we closed Photoshop World in style with a wonderful closing “party” again with some amazing prices.

Looking back
Really words can not describe my feelings about being part of something like Photoshop World.
This is really totally different from all shows I’ve ever done.
But to be honest hanging out with people like Jeremy, Dave, our friends from the Kelby group, Joe McNally and talking with an icon like Jay Maisel is of course more than exciting and fun, the thing that really hit me (and Dave said it so well during the closing ceremony) was the feeling you get from the complete group of instructors, there is no competition just an enormous feel of all being colleagues with one goal and that is TEACHING !!! and inspiring people to grow and grow beyond they thought was possible, on both a creative level but also emotional.

But the thing that moved me the most was without a doubt YOU !!!!
Yeah you read that correctly YOU the public, MAN YOU GUYS ROCKED !!!!

It’s a shame PSW has ended, but luckily for us there is another one already planned 😀 and who knows……. maybe I’ll be there.

the final video is being uploaded as we speak, but the net is very slow in the hotel so I will add the video in a later blog post.