After my little trip up to Washington, IL, I feel like I’ve been running a 100 meter race to try and get caught back up on all the things I have going on here – both at work and at home. But I learned so much from the event that I feel like I ought to at least share a little bit of what I learned and plan to implement into my own business.

One of the greatest things about getting to be at Escalate LIVE in person was the opportunity to talk to all of these brilliant professionals in person and to see some pretty amazing products and studios. In the back of the room – there was a whole table of press products – a lot of which were from WHCC. I honestly was so impressed with the quality of their products that the first thing I intend to do is switch from my current lab to WHCC. I am going to be sending for some samples as well. I want all of my clients to be able to see the difference between a Walmart print and a professional print. Honestly the difference is astounding and well worth the additional cost! So thanks Mike & Jed – you sold me on switching over! 🙂
Here’s a couple pictures of the product table:

So I mentioned that it was awesome that we got to meet some of my photography idols in person and ask them as many questions as we wanted. Over the next few weeks I’m going to write an individual post about each photographer and what I learned from them. But here’s a picture of all the speakers and our host, Dane Sanders.

Photo taken by Kenny Nakai at the V Gallery in Morton. Left to Right: Tamara Lackey, Vicki Taufer, Julia Woods, Lori Nordstrom, Julieanne Kost, and Dane Sanders is smack dab in the middle.

All of these people were amazing! They took time out to answer any and all of our questions no matter how silly we felt about asking them. It was the kind of community that is so hard to find in the photography industry these days. With the ever increasing number of amateur photographers entering the industry, more and more photographers are feeling less inclined to share their knowledge and love of photography because they are afraid of getting burned. But for 2 glorious days – I got to share my love, my passion, my livelihood, my success and my struggles with other like minded people. It was an absolutely amazing and life-changing experience.

I told Julia that I didn’t know what to expect. I have been following these photographers blogs for the past few years now, and feeling in awe at what they do. I’ll admit I kind of put all of them up on a bit of a pedestal and I just expected their would be this invisible barrier between myself and them. But I came to see that they are just people, though not quite people like everyone else. Because each of these people (Tamara, Julia, Jeff, Vicki, Jed, Lori, Julieanne, Dane) – they have such open-hearts! So happy and willing to share their knowledge, their experiences, their lives with us. I left Escalate LIVE feeling loved and humbled by these amazing individuals.

So I just want to end this post with a Thank You! Thank you to all the speakers (Vicki, Julieanne, Tamara, Lori, & Julia). Thank you to Dane for being our awesome host and huge supporter of sharing education in the photography community, and for giving away the free seat that I was blessed enough to win. Thank you to Kevin Kubota and his crew for their hard work and support for the event. Thank you to sponsors – Adobe & WHCC. And Thank you to everyone else who made this event possible. You have definitely impacted a change on me.

Check back next week for more tidbits from the Escalate LIVE event.

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