Busy, Busy week...
I'm typing this post on my new laptop! I was excited to be able to get it before I left for the conference last Sunday.

I spent the week at the Arizona Grand Resort, helping the AMFM folks with their annual Marriage & Family Conference. It was a good week! Actually a piece of cake compared to managing events on my own. Here I just had to show up and find out what they wanted me to do next. No worries about forgetting things or issues that came up. Those were headaches for someone else to handle. This was easy and fun.

They were pretty organized since this is at least the 4th or 5th year that they've done it. Of course, there are always things that could be improved or run a little more smoothly, but overall it went well. It's quite a substantial conference, with around 350 people attending and close to 100 different sessions, including workshops, general sessions, etc. They also have an exhibit hall with various ministries exhibiting their resources. I helped with checking people in, printing signs and missing or lost nametags, selling CDs of the sessions, answering questions, directing traffic and most of all photographing the details of the week. There were a couple of other volunteer photographers there off and on too, but overall we were just trying to document as much as possible.

I took over 1300 photos and have been spending much of the weekend deleting the bad ones and editing the rest of them. I learned a lot about using my external flash because most of it was inside those dimly lit hotel conference rooms, so I was forced to figure it out. Good news is that I will probably do better next time since I've had more practice with it.




95% of the photos are of people you've probably never heard of, so I won't post them here. I'll post a couple of random ones that I took, as well as one of Michael O'Brien.

If you haven't heard of him, you should check out his music. He did a concert at the conference on Thursday night and he does some beautiful romantic music. They say he sounds like Michael Buble and in some cases, Billy Joel too. I can't wait to listen to the CDs I bought.