It’s  this time of the year when photographers from all corners of Britain (and maybe even abroad) are coming to London for the Societies convention.

It always takes place in January at the Hilton hotel on Edgware road. This year it wasn’t any different.

I always attend on Sunday and so I did this weekend as well. What stroke me when I came in was that there were so few people in there this time. I have attended this event for about four years now and this is the first time it was so quiet. It’s always been crowds of people but this time it was different. I have also noticed that some of the companies who have been there all these years  I’ve been attending didn’t display this time. Take Adobe as an example. There was no sign of Adobe for the first time I’ve been here. There was no sign of Datacolor this time either (company that makes Spyder colour calibration tools).

Maybe this explains why so few people this time. And there were fewer demonstrations this time (Adobe did many demonstrations last year), with the Flash Centre doing most interesting to me, with lighting techniques by speakers like Glyn Dewis. Hasselblad did some presentations as well.

In general, not much going on in terms of demonstrations, seminars, as opposed to previous years. As to companies presenting their products, we could group them mainly into two groups (these were the largest numbers of exhibitors, same in previous year I would say):

• Accessories companies
• Album creation companies

I think there were more of these than camera companies (I’ve only seen Canon, Sony, Fuji, Olympus, Panasonic).

I shot some videos of the tradeshow and will put it together within the next few days and share it on my YouTube channel.