It's hard to escape the fact that trade shows suck. Sure, lots of people look forward to shows like PhotoPlus East, PMA, WWPI and ImagingUSA, and for good reason. Trade shows, especially those that feature top-notch semiars, can be really fascinating. It's a perfect opportunity to see the newest and best products, and to actually get a moment to get some hands-on time with really pricey equipment. (And
sometimes seeing how something will feel in your hands makes all the difference.)

But when you've gone to trade shows for a while, they become some of the most grating, irritating places on earth. This year marks the fifteenth year that I've been going to trade shows, though my attendance didn't really pick up until about a decade ago. These days, I'm at about eight a year.

This year's ImagingUSA in Austin was a good, albeit small show. A few too many muslin vendors for my tastes (one coworker heard me say that and thought I was complaining about the number of Muslims at the show, pronunciation is king after all) and a dizzying number of choices for photographers looking to do beautiful wedding albums from digital images. (I still want a company that gives me iPhoto like simplicity of design and outputs to a book that's mounted to those stiff high-quality wedding pages. Setting up the pages in Photoshop takes too long, it's not a layout tool after all.)

ImagingUSA is really a warm up to PMA, one of the two big shows in the US, and as such, it's important to remember your priorities. In my case it's attend the show all day, then go back to the hotel and get on my bike. See, I have a travel bike that I bring with me, packing it up and carrying it along in a suitcase. I'm a pretty nutty
guy to begin with, but I get some strange looks when I roll through the lobby of a fancy hotel on a bike.

Of course, biking in a foreign city is a blast, and it gives me an opportunity to improve my photography as well. When I'm out in a new city I usually spend a day just slowly meandering around it, orientating via landmarks and small pocket maps and letting traffic patterns choose my course.

There are some practical photographic advantages to this, as I am in essence a rolling location scout. I always bring some sort of digital point-and-shoot with me, and have spent days in cities grabbing little shots of things that are interesting, and remembering places that I want to come back and shoot with more serious gear.
Of course, I don't have to be on a bike to do this, I often wander around a city, first with compact photographic gear (never can tell when you might wander through a bad neighborhood doing the concentric-circle style of walking that I practice in a new place) and then later going to specific locations to grab some more images.

It might seem silly to a lot of trade show attendees when I duck out early and head back to my hotel room, just as the booze cruise or other party-in-a-can is heating up. But really, how many photographs of drinking adventures at Coyote Ugly does one need to amass in a decade of conventions before all of those (blurry, underexposed,
drunken) pictures look the same? I think it's better to capture a photo of a sunset from the saddle of my bike than it is to do almost anything else.