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Article What to Look out for at Focus Show The UK's major show of the year for photographers, Focus on Imaging, takes place from 22nd to 25th February 2009 at the NEC Birmingham. Doors open 10am each day. Entry is free for those who pre-register or costs £6 at the door. The Focus on Imaging website is at Focus on Imaging. You can see the floor plan by Clicking here. You can see who is attending by viewing the exhibitor list. A a number of companies have been failing this year, there is the possibility that some of these will not be present. In this article we take a look at what we expect to see. This year there are over 200 exhibitors, and many have discount offers. A number have seminars, many with a new seminar starting every 30 minutes, so that there is only about 15-20 minutes of presentation in each. The main suppliers and manufacturers will be showing their full range, although it can take some time to get to the front of the crowd to get your hands on everything that you would like to see. Many of the items we will have seen announced, but perhaps not had the chance to look at close up, while some other items will be new to us. While the major manufacturers get the coverage on new developments many of the secondary producers, providing lights, backgrounds, and all the accessories are often not covered, so the annual show is the best time to see what they have brought out, plus take another look at some of the items we have seen before. Some of the interesting items are perhaps not completely new developments but enhancements to existing ones, like new heads for tripods, new add-ons to background systems, or additional filters to go in particular systems. There will also be new suppliers who have not exhibited before, and may be unknown to us, some of these will be new and around only a few months, while others will perhaps become useful suppliers. Many will have useful information, and people who can answer all your questions, while many use exhibition staff to handle these events and can sell you items but not help a lot with information. Of course some will also tell you wrong information and its often difficult at such events to tell one from the other. In our case we also go with several lists, items we want to get now and are looking to confirm the models and get the best deals, having worked out before what price we could get these same items elsewhere. Items that are on our wish list, perhaps we are not going to get yet, but want to check them out and confirm it will do what we want, and items to see as we want to be able to write about, tell others about them, or to be able to answer questions from others. We also want to know what else is verifiable in case the need arises at some point, its surprising how often information we have collected and just stored away has been able to be used to assist one of the training or consultancy clients. Next week or the week after we will give you on Photographers Resource the highlight of what we found interesting.
More Specialist Interest A lot of what is new will be only applicable to a sub set of those visiting, but probably of interest to many of us. A few of these items are:-
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