One of our principals and one of the sales staff have just returned from attending a photographic conference in Albany - a delightful country city located on the south coast of Western Australia. They took a large Mercedes van stuffed to the gills with equipment down over the weekend and presumably entertained the masses. We are in the process of emptying the van and restocking the shelves in the shop.
Looks like they had reasonable weather - the rains have hit the place today but they are back up here in the sun. The Albany run is fairly long, and they would have had a busy and tiring weekend of it.
Country conferences and open days are generally good things - the local people out in the bush are as keen about photography as those of us here in the city and as a fair amount of the landscape in Western Australia is stored out in the country - they have the ocean out off-shore to keep most of the water together - the country people can sometimes get out to the scenery a lot more conveniently...And they can take some pretty good images of it all.
One problem that seems to plague some of them is the primitive nature of the internet connections out there. They want fast access to the sites and information but sometimes the wet length of twine that the PMG has installed as the country phone line gets overloaded and they are thrown back upon their own resources*. Thus the advent of the Camera Electronic Visiting Van is a blessing - they get to see the latest goods and discuss the new trends.
Hopefully, the CE people were able to answer some questions, inspire some ambitions, and find out what sorts of gear the folks really want.
* Wait for the NBN. It is coming to your locality. It came past our front yard and broke the concrete driveway...and had to pour us a new one. Heaven knows what will happen when they start to connect the new improved high-speed optical wet twine...
