Backstage at the DIPP workshop

Last Sunday it was time for the DIPP meeting of the year. The DIPP is the Dutch Institute of Professional Photography so the members are all photographers that know how to work with their camera. When I was asked to teach a workshop as main speaker for this event I immediately said yes but I also knew that this would be something that was different from most other seminars/workshops. Last year I won Portfolio of the year during the same event so I think people did expect something from the seminar.

I divided the day in three parts, starting with a small introduction on my work and what our studio does, after which I showed the video for http://www.help-portret.nl which I organize for the Netherlands. Then it was time for a seminar about “Inspiration, reaction, getting the shot”, this seminar is part of the seminars I do during the “why fake it when you can create it” tour and always get a lot of good responses due to the fact that it’s not only aimed at model photography but a much broader audience. Because I hate to “bore” people with 3 1/2 hours of powerpoint like presentations I also invited Susanne to model during the last part of the day…. well so I thought.

Normally my seminars are good planned and most of the times I start and end at the right times, most of the times. During the second part of my seminar I misunderstood a signal and thought I was running slow (sometimes times flies), I looked at my laptops time and much to my horror indeed it was already one hour later than expected, wow time flies when you’re having fun, so I somehow upped the tempo and instead of allowing people a 30 minute break for some of the other activities I gave them 15 minutes. During the live demo with Susanne everything went smooth and I ended only 20 minutes over time (skipping my Q&A). Much to my horror and disbelieve however I got the question what would happen after this break…….. believe it or not the clock of my laptop was one hour ahead (aaargh). I decided this was no time to panic (although I did) and I ran to our friends from NIK, stole their Wacom tablet and ended the day with Part IV (let’s call it the bonus part) with a small demonstration of how I work in Photoshop. Don’t ask me how but I managed to run over time after all 

To be honest this never happened to me before, well not this way…
During Photoshop World in Vegas I was doing a lot of floor demos, small interviews etc and I knew I had to teach a seminar at “let’s say” 14:00, somehow I managed to be there just in time (missing the book presentation from Scott, sorry Scott), when I arrived much to my surprise there was only one person in the room, I quickly checked the schedule and indeed I had to be here… well ok, one moment you teach for a full room (and those rooms are HUGE) and the next probably for only one, although that seemed really weird for me I told the guy that we would start in 5 minutes and that he could ask whatever he want…. his reply shook my pure foundation “I’m only here to rest, he stood up and left”, I almost fainted….. until I checked my actual time, due to the stress of the day I was one hour early :roll:, luckily after that hour the room was packed. I never actually wear a watch, but I think I will start doing that from now on.

We also shot a small video during the day, which I would like to share with you in this post. The weather was incredibly bad that day so we also filmed some of the roads.

ps.
Don’t worry, I used Elinchrom during the demonstration, but there were several other brands there 🙂