Helen Bartlett at the Photography Show for Canon and Light Blue

This morning I’m off to the NEC in Birmingham ready for The Photography Show, the main event in the UK photography calendar. Over four days, thousands of photographers will get together to look at the most recent kit, listen to inspirational speakers and catch up with their friends. I’ve been going for years and look forward to it each spring.

As always, I’ll be spending the majority of the show on the Light Blue Software stand (A68), helping out my husband Tom who wrote the software, and his talented team to demonstrate the benefits of studio management to new users and answer questions from existing clients. It’s always such fun to be on the stand, to see the familiar faces who always pop by to say hello and how much they love the program and also to meet new people and introduce them to this amazing piece of software which can transform their photography businesses.

I’ve been lucky enough to use Light Blue since I started my business, in fact I was the first ever user when Tom built the first system to run his wedding business and my portrait business and now, fourteen years on, I really don’t know what I would do without it. I love how I can see all the details of all my clients at the click of a button. It’s so fun when chatting to people to be able to check and say yes ‘yes, it was back in 2009 we first met’ as we look at old pictures and try to remember exactly when we took them. Many of my clients have been having family photography sessions annually since I started, having all the details of all the sessions to hand is brilliant.

As well as singing the praises of Light Blue, this year I will be hard at work on the Canon Stand, presenting my talk ‘Great Family Photos and How to Take Them’ on three occasions over the weekend.

I’m on Saturday at 10:30-11:20, Monday at 13:30-14:20 and Tuesday 15:30-16:20 and I hope to see some of you there.

It’s so fun writing talks, I love the process of going back over my work and actually thinking through all the different elements, what it is I look for in a picture and also coming up with tips and tricks to help other photographers improve their work. It’s been particularly fun writing for such a mixed audience, at the photography show we will have full time professionals who have been photographing for years but also keen amateurs who just want to improve their pictures of their own children. I’m hoping that there will be something for everyone in the talk and that the audience will leave full of enthusiasm for photographing the families in their lives.

It’s going to be a busy few days and I can’t wait. If you are at the show do come and say hello on the Light Blue stand or pop by Canon to hear me talk, it would be lovely to see you.