Thea’s Take: Traveling 6,000 miles round trip for 5 minutes

When I told friends I’d be making a cross-country day-trip to Seattle for a five minute presentation on the art of photographing same-sex couples and weddings, they thought I was crazy.  “To a world-wide audience,” I’d reply (to sound less crazy). Or so I thought.

Truth-be-told, considering my workload and my two young children, crazy was putting it kindly. My day began with a buzzing alarm at 3:30 am and ended 23 hours later at 11:30 pm as the hum of a jet engine lulled me to sleep (as if I needed any encouragement!).

Arriving at the CreativeLive studio was a thrill.  The halls were buzzing with nervous presenters.   I found my way into a whitewashed “green” room and was greeted by the event emcee and inspired photographer, Kevin Kubota. And, the closer we got to ‘show time,’ the more I kept telling myself: I didn’t travel 3,000 miles to flop

Just before we went live, Kevin gave a pep talk to the audience, ‘If you’ve never been to an ignite before, it’s easy, you just have to love everything.’  And with that, Kevin set the tone of encouragement, cheers, and laughter that carried the live studio audience through the evening.

I was number four in the line following Heather Dolan, Matt Kennedy, Lisa Reilly and Heather Hitt, and, by the time I got on stage I was anxious, but not really nervous. I knew that cadence would be key to my presentation since the Ignite format dictates that the slides will advance every 15 seconds through the course of the five minutes.

The reaction of the live audience throughout the Capturing Love presentation was extremely encouraging, and, when I finished Kevin Kubota seemed almost speechless for a moment before saying, “that was awesome!”

My Ignite experience — the 3,000 miles with another 3,000 to go before I would sleep — was all that I had hoped it could be: a fast-paced and important opportunity to share the importance of considering some of the wonderful and important differences in posing techniques when photographing same-sex couples.

Ready for a coffee break? Take a look at my segment and let us know: what do you think?

Want to see more of me and my co-author, Kathryn Hamm of GayWeddings.com, via CreativeLIVE?

Tweet this: Just saw the @authenticeye @photographersignite presentation. I want to learn more about photographing same-sex weddings @creativelive