Thursday, February 26, 2009

Dublin seminar 15th February

Well, what a week that was! Totally and utterly exhausted after it. I was a bit nervous about the Dublin seminar as I'd never done a full day seminar before, but the week leading up to it was very stressful and threw my plans into turmoil. My granny passed away in the week leading up to it, and that knocked me for six. More about that later.

It was then a case of business taking a back seat for a few days, but by Thursday night I was absolutely mentally drained and couldn't see myself getting through the weekend. Then on Saturday I almost missed my flight, arriving at check-in at Prestwick airport with 2 minutes to spare. At that point I felt nothing else could go wrong and was an emotional mess, but then when I arrived at the hotel, it turned out they made a mistake with the booking the SWPP made and they put us in for 14-16th March instead of February! Although they were very apologetic, it was Valentine's night and they had no alternative rooms! I left Paul Taylor to deal with it and went away for a while!! We ended up being giving rooms at a different hotel, and an upgrade in the original hotel for the other 2 nights, but I so wanted to be at the seminar location that night to do some sort of preparation. By now I was so stressed I was a total wreck! Went off to bed feeling exhausted, slept for 2 hours then woke up to realise the battery had died on my mobile phone and I had no charger, and no other method of time-keeping! I had a total panic attack at this point and never slept the rest of the night. So Sunday morning Paul must have wondered what the hell I'd been doing since he last saw me!! I looked like s***!!

Anyway, despite being a nervous, emotional wreck, the seminar went really well. I couldn't have asked for a better crowd than I had under the circumstances, and special thanks to the Irish photographers for being so great. I thoroughly enjoyed being amongst them all and can't wait to go back over again! I ran through how I shoot a wedding from start to finish and did a post wedding shoot demonstartion around the hotel grounds, amongst other things, which I think went down well.

Special thanks to Paul Taylor of SWPP for being supportive throughout the week, and John Smails who drove me around and was a great host!

1 comment:

Mareike Murray said...

Honestly, I can't believe how much bad luck you had!! But at least it all turned out well in the end. Hopefully you had some time to enjoy Dublin as well after all that.