January through March is typically the “slow time” in our industry, so to take full advantage of the free dates on our calendars, many of the photography conventions are scheduled during this time. Wen and I took 2 trips to Vegas (I’m pretty sure that we’re the only people who could go to a desert in January and be cold… they got 5 inches of snow the week before we were there!) and had all kinds of crazy things happen (I know, hard to believe that something crazy would happen to us…) One of the benefits of me not being a photographer is that I don’t know to be intimidated by some of the big names in our industry (I can also do a lot of things that others think are impossible, due to the simple fact that I never took Physics in high school…) The major up side to this ignorance is that we’ve had the opportunity to spend time with some amazing photographers (and really cool people too) We found ourselves having dinner or drinks with some of the big names in the industry, including our buddy Parker J and they all had very encouraging things to say about Wen’s photography.
A chain of events that can only be described as “surreal” at the first convention, made attending the second a no brainer. It turns out that my cousin Jerry is the “mayor” of Zappos. We spent some time at their headquarters and were completely blown away by what we saw. This caused me to drop a quick email to Dr. Joseph Michelli, an author who was the keynote speaker at the first convention. He’s doing some looking into the whole Zappos phenomenon.
The second trip to Vegas found us having dinner and drinks and often looking at each other and saying “is this really happening?” It culminated in a 39 1/2 hour day (okay, I slept for an hour before heading to the airport…) complete with a guest list only party where we were introduced to Clifton, the CEO of Affliction (he’s from Fredericksburg and it was their party… of course, why wouldn’t it be) a flight to Denver, lunch with Dr. Micheli (he lives an hour from Denver… of course, why wouldn’t he?) a seminar with some of our closest friends in our other life, and breakfast (after a much needed nights sleep) with our friend Michelle Miller, the foremost expert on marketing to women.
Wen usually encourages me not to name drop, but I’m only saying all of this to show that a little bit of “what have I got to lose” can get you into some pretty interesting situations. So what is it that do you want to do? Go ahead, give it a try? A lot of times I think it really is a case of “you have not because you ask not,” but then again, I never took physics.
-sean