When I started writing this, I was on the plane home from Salt Lake City after spending 5 days at the Outdoor Retailer Winter Market. For those who don’t know, Outdoor Retailer is the largest outdoor industry trade show in the country and happens twice a year, once in January and once in July. It’s an intense blitz of every single person involved in the industry converging on SLC for five days of mayhem. The following post in a slightly rambling recap of my experiences this year, complete with a slideshow of images that hopefully transmit the controlled chaos of Outdoor Retailer.

While talking with a few people about how the show was going, we all agreed that the typical OR experience is in fact less healthy than the typical college experience. Depending on what you’re there for, your day probably goes something like this: After the day up at Snowbird, where you can check out all the vendor tents, demo the latest gear and shred the mountain for free, the chaos begins. The show floor opens at 9am the next day, but you probably got up early for that 7:30am panel discussion on something important to your career. You always think you can grab breakfast on your way to the floor, but it never seems work out. So you wander the floor from 9-4, taking mental notes on where the free coffee is and how to get from any booth to any other booth and still go by an energy bar company for free morsels of food. Then at 4 o’clock the beer rolls out, and everything shamelessly degrades into Happy Hour. You wander from booth to booth trying to collect cool steins complete with beer, and try desperately to look like you’re still doing something that resembles work. At 6 the show floor closes and you go out to some expensive, gorging dinner that hopefully someone else is paying for. Then you go to a long string of parties, after-parties, and after-after-parties; for the sake of networking of course, not because you like to party. Finally, you round the night off with an hour or two of work in you hotel room, because you need to turn something in and get ready for tomorrow. Grab a few hours of sleep, wake up, and repeat. It’s incredibly exhausting, but it’s a lot of fun; not to mention that for a freelancer like myself, the entire industry is in a giant room and at your fingertips.

On my way to the show on Day One, I got a text message from Nicky Dyal, who I worked with in the Gunks to shoot some images (read about it here, on the old blog). The message said, “Whoa Ben!!! Sick photo in Liberty Mountain! I’m here at the trade show in SLC… are you?”. While I knew that Liberty Mountain was going to be licensing the photo to run full page in their 2010 climbing catalog, I had no idea it was going to be out in time for the show. That was a great way to kick off the show, made up for my lakofbreakfast, and it was also great to have some hot-off-the-press work to show to potential clients.

This year at the show I had a very different approach than at the last year’s Summer Market. For the most part, my hand was forced, due to the 6 week blitz it took to get this website running in time for said trade show. Basically I went into the show with one appointment and not much of a game plan. I was providing SNEWS, an outdoor industry trade publication, with interesting photos from throughout the day for their Morning Report, and I was checking some things out for Backpacker; but other than that, I had my one appointment and a whole lot of wandering to do. The thing is, it really worked. I ended up meeting with more art directors, photo editors and marketing people than the previous show, met and had great conversations with a few key people, and have some really exciting stuff lining up for the next few months.

While at the show, I had some new Pentax camera gear to play with, and play with it I did. I got some good hands-on time with the brand new K-x body, a new K-7 body, a DA 10-17mm fisheye lens, as well as most of my usual kit. Now that I’m back, I also have the new DA* 55mm F/1.4 prime lens, which I left at home in favor of the smaller FA 50mm f/1.4 prime. Expect to see my thoughts on this equipment and more example images in the following weeks. The quick and dirty report is that the K-7 is a rugged, amazingly compact, semi-pro body that is jam-packed with features; the K-x, despite being an entry level camera, is no slouch and has unbelievable high ISO performance; and the fisheye, as you’ll be able to tell from it’s dominance in the gallery, is just plain addictive fun.

I’m no longer on the plane home. It is now tomorrow. And even though this post was a little long winded, I promise that a whole day has not gone by since you started reading. Just be glad I cut out half of the stuff that I originally had slotted for this post. And as promised, here is slideshow of the wacky goings on of the 2010 Outdoor Retailer Winter Market. Enjoy the images, peace!