Photo-A-Day #1981

On the second day of the Modern Media Man Summit I gave a session on how to take great photos and post them to the internet to share with others and gain links back too your blog posts. It is my belief that we should be creating our own content like audio, video and photos even if it is not perfect at least it is authentic. So, that is pretty much what my session was all about. It was to be a panel but it ended up just being me doing the session. I think it went pretty well and I posted the entire thing in the previous blog post for today.

After Charles the breakout sessions started and thus started a whirlwind day for me since I was the Unofficial “Official” Photographer. I had to go to every breakout and take photos. That is, except for the session that I did myself which was right after Charles’s Keynote. My session titled in the program as Creating Great Photographs was attended by seven people but they were and engaged bunch, I thought. I enjoyed the interaction and questions after the session. I was very happy to have such nice people in my session. I was disappointed that I had to miss Jason Falls and Angus Nelson. I really wanted to see Angus speak, I enjoyed meeting him and bought a copy of his book, too. I am eager to read it.

The next set of sessions were Caleb Gardner – Getting Dads Organized for Brand Attention, Ron Mattocks, Danny Evans & John Cave Osborne- Daddy Blog to Book and Jim Kukral – It’s Tough Being an Internet Geek Dad. All great speakers and I popped in and out of each of the sessions. It was tough doing that because I really wanted to hear everything that all the speakers had to say but instead I would hear 15 of one then the next and then the next. I bounced between all three shooting photos and catching snippets of info.

After that it was time for lunch but instead of eating I took advantage of there being less people looking to test drive the Chevy cars. I took a test drive of both the Chevy Cruze and the Chevy Traverse. These were both “practical” cars in my opinion. The Cruze would be great for my morning commute and the Traverse for a little larger family than ours. I was so impressed by everything that Chevy did and the people who came were fantastic, Lisa, Chris, Deb, Charlotte, Nicole, Kevin and so on, there were a ton of great Chevy folks at the Summit. After lunch we started had two more rounds of breakout sessions where many of my friends were presenting. Guys like Nathan Hangen, Patrick O’Keefe and C.C. Chapman. I stuck around for all of Nathan’s session because his approach impresses me so much. He only started blogging around last year at Blog World Expo and in the time since has written a book and a bunch of Apps for the iTunes store. Nathan really makes things move. I did also get to see a little of C.C.’s and Patrick’s sessions.

The Last session for the day was one with Liz Strauss & Carol Roth titled – How to Partner with Women. Carol and Liz presented some great findings to the audience and I liked their session. I met Carol at Evo Conference when she posed with EvaBear and was interested in hearing what she had to say since I didn’t see her speak at Evo, but she saw me speak (thanks for attending that session). I hadn’t met Liz before, even though I had attended two prior shows with her. Paths didn’t get crossed till today.

It was a good session and when it was over we had a little time between that and the a cocktail party and screening of Doug Block’s Documentary, The Kids Grow Up. In between running from session to session I managed to spend some time in the Expo Hall and meet with some brands like T-Mobile, Chevy, Man of the House, Dad Labs, Mom Central and Dad Central. I also got up to my room and started converting the video of my session and spent a good while talking one on one with Kevin Metzger.

I think out of everything at the M3 Summit I enjoyed getting the one on one time with some people that I really like and admire. I found that part of the overall experience completely worth my time to attend.

There was a cocktail party from the guys at Man of the House and also a dinner for everyone. The food was good and it was fun to hang out with people there but Jim Kukral, Nathan Hangen and I had planned to get together and have dinner, so we left along with a few other guys Patrick O’ Keefe, Brandon Eley, Kevin Gainey, Scott Lockhart and Chrispian Burks. We went to Ted’s Montanna Grill. It is Ted Turner’s chain of restaurants and they specialize in meat. I had a Buffalo Burger that was delicious along with a Wedge salad. What is better than blue cheese and bacon?

We had a great time and it was fun hanging out with the guys, I met new people, got to know my existing friends better and enjoyed a delicious meal, what could be better than that? I even got to bed early and was able to upload my session to Vimeo. It was a productive day.