Canon Collective

On Thursday night I was lucky enough to secure a space at Canon Collective. What's Canon Collective? Good question. I had no idea either until I was sitting in the venue, in my chair, with a bowl of fruit on my lap. Basically, Canon Collective was kind of like a night where Canon could show off all of their cool products, brag about how they invented practically every imaging device we now use for health/printing etc before anyone and give us an insight into this totally cool new website they're developing.

I thought, going into the night that it was going to be more of a camera club type situation. Meet and greet, look at some artists photographs and just generally chat about some awesome techniques. We actually spent most of the time watching multiple videos about how Canon was invented, (a small gathering of Japanese men in an apartment in Tokyo f.y.i) and videos with lots of pretty pictures of eyes with reflections in them that looked just a little bit too fake.What I was most excited about though was this new online space that Canon have developed called ImageSpectrum. Basically, it's kind of like Flickr, but for people who use Canon products. There are challenges, online videos and tutorials, community forum boards as well as an online storage system for your photos (which hasn't been launched officially yet). They also briefly touched on the new Photo5 competition, which you can enter here, if you're interested. It's actually a really cool competition and concept. They send you a little brown box with five different props and you create you photographs according to the briefs.Although I did feel that the night was a little bit boring, I did walk away with some awesome goodies. We all got show bags with caps, pens, discount offers and a drink bottle, (I was super excited about this because I was literally thinking five minutes before we arrived that I needed to buy a new drink bottle) and because I was one of the first 20 people to arrive I got a Canon teeshirt that I'll be able to wear next time I photograph an event and feel totally professional. I went with Paul's brother Daniel, who's also a pretty awesome photographer. We walked through Southbank and Crown after the event and spontaneously took some photos, which I haven't done for a really long time. I love the city at night, mostly because I never get to be in Melbourne after dinner time, let alone roaming the streets just to take photos. These are a few photos I took on the night. The lights in the trees at Crown were incredibly beautiful and it felt very romantic and Parisien. I'm back in Melbourne this weekend to hear the ever wonderful Tavi Gevinson speak at Melbourne Writer's Festival so I'm hoping to snap lots of pictures then.