Monthly Archives: February 2016

 

 

WARNING THIS IS AN ADVERTISEMENT!!!!!

 

O.K. in the last few years I have been doing more and more one day seminars for camera clubs,  photo groups and photography dealers.  To be honest I really enjoy them and I’ve been getting great reviews from my hosts.  So as I said this is an advertisement,  I would love to do more and I can tell you how to set one up if you your club, organization or store would like to particpate.

 

It’s really a win/win proposition as most of my clients have made a nice profit running these seminars and I’ve really enjoyed doing them with the folks that attended.  We usually do them on a Saturday from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.  I can structure the days workshop units based on the skill level of the group or do a program that covers all the bases, I’ve done both. So how does the money work?  It’s easy, I will come in for a one day seminar and sometimes add an evening before or a day after, as part of the package for the club or store.  I charge $4,000. plus travel and lodging.  Let’s say the Acme Camera Club in St Louis, MO brings me in and sells tickets for the day for $75. If they get 100 people they clear more than twenty five hundred dollars, if they get 15o, they make over six thousand.  If they charge a fee for an evening program before or a field session the day after the seminar, that is all profit for them too.

 

Why am I doing more seminars?  I truly enjoy working with an audience, meeting a lot of great folks and not only helping out a club or dealer, and it’s a pay check for me too!  I do about a dozen, 4 day workshops year and the Summit and a couple of other events, but the seminars are some my favorite.  So, here is the sales pitch!!!  If your club or dealer is interested in doing a seminar, please contact me, all my contact info is in the CONTACT window at the top of the page.  Maybe I’ll see you in your hometown someday soon!

 

Blessings,

 

the pilgrim

 

 

 

Well the office, my equipment room and projection room are “de-junkified”,  32 contractor bags full of junk; 35 slide trays, 2 tons of nylon and velcro sewn together into every imaginable kind of container, trust me I kept 300 lbs. of it anyway!  A stack of old magazines, paper work 8 feet tall, and soon most of 35,000 color transparencies ( that’s slides to you newbies)!   O.K., some light exaggeration, but I did throw away all those slide trays and a lot of containers and will dump most of my 41 years of slides after a few days of making sure I pull the few that are worth keeping of posterity, my posterity, no one else will care!  Of course I will not throw away family images or anything that is historic, but most all the landscape and wildlife stuff will still hit the skids.

 

Why would you throw away what it took four decades to produce??!!  Digital images have become so wonderful it is very hard to use the old 35mm slides and get any thing near equal quality.  if you had a drum scanner and really knew what you were doing you could salvage some usable stuff, but the quality of current cameras, it’s hardly worth the trouble.  The only stuff I will keep will be things I can never shoot again, or any kind  of situations I may never see again, and truthfully they won’t last long.

 

I have loaded 8 boxes (some big) with everything Nikon I had, and it was a lot of stuff, some highly collectible, some practical, and some probably junk, but it will all go to Vinnie Colucci! Vinnie is the Nikon guy in our region and he has given his heart and soul to Nikon and he deserves this collection! Does this mean I hate Nikon or have turned my back on them?  Not at all.  For most of my life I have held a Nikon of one kind or another in my hands, and they served me well, very well!  Somewhere along the trail I woke up and was an older man, shoulder surgeries and, well, age, and I had to go lighter!  The X-System was a blessing and an answer to my prayers.  So I can still shoot high quality, retro cameras, with fantastic image quality and superb lenses, with less than half the weight!

 

I can’t tell you how much better I feel with so much of the junk out of my life.  Now it’s up to Photo Pro Expo to have great fellowship with some of my dear friends, and some great Graeter’s ice cream, and hopefully entertain the troops.  I will be at the Fuji booth Saturday and hope to see some of you there!

 

Time to scream for the sky!

 

Blessings,

 

the pilgrim