My trip out was uneventful with a rather long non-stop flight to Denver. Southwest is awesome. 🙂 I had a major headache during the entire trip, but did manage to read the rest of my book. 🙂
I headed straight up to Arvada for Friday and then down to Littleton for the remainder of the evening.
In Arvada, I met up with another photographer that I’ve “known” for two years now, but we’ve never met! We were in the one online class I took. Go figure! We’ve kept up, email/IMs, etc. for 2 years and got to meet!
I spent time in her studio and at her house. We share lots of good ideas and it was just awesome getting together, meeting her curly-haired daughters and seeing the view from her deck — the mountains! Awesome!
In Littleton, it was a night of meeting 31 other NILMDTS members and getting a hug from Sam herself! Sam (Sandy Puc’) is an amazing photographer and an AMAZING business woman and one of the two co-founders of NILMDTS. In three years, she and her team have grown NILMDTS from 2 members to just under 5000!!! It was amazing to be in her presence — she’s like a celebrity to us photographers. 😉
I met photographers from around the US … though Kirk Kief (another “celebrity photographer) and I came from the farthest points away … me NC and he FL. Kirk has been in the industry for a long time too and was wonderful having him at my studio back in March — teaching a NILMDTS training class.
The different personalities at the meeting were neat and hearing their stories was amazing. Everyone has a different reason for being a part of NILMDTS and it was really nice hearing why … including my own story. They all have their reasons and they are all powerful.
The evening ended with my getting to my hotel and basically crashing … 2 hours time difference really threw my body clock off. 🙂