I’m super excited to be able to announce my newest project, The Big Apple Unpeeled!
What is the Big Apple Unpeeled?
On 8th October I will be jetting off to one of the most iconic cities in the world. Staying in New York for one whole fantastic month, I will bring you a taste of authentic New York life.
From the backstreets of the Bronx, to peeking into the haunts of the rich and famous, from the bustling streets to birds eye views and everything inbetween, you can share my experience with me. I’ll be asking you, “What do you want to see today?”
My curiosity knows no bounds. My camera, laptop, phone and other contraptions are ready to record. I won’t miss out a thing! Whatever I see, you will too.
You can follow my blog, tweets, live videos, interviews, photography and audio broadcasts. You will get a big crunchy bite of what’s hot in the Big Apple whilst I unpeel and squeeze the juice out of NYC – pips and all!
I will be travelling solo and would love to make some friends along the way! If you have any must-see and must-do suggestions for NYC, I’d love to hear from you. And if you have something you would like me to review on the Big Apple Unpeeled, just give me a shout!
After weeks of waiting and speculation, the results for the City Of Culture 2013 came in a few days ago with the news that Derry/Londonderry won the bid and the City Of Culture title. I lived in Derry when I was younger and my family are from there, so it kind of softened the blow Many congratulations!
Naturally there was some disappointment in Birmingham, but we seem to have very quickly gotten over that and recovered quickly and we are already making plans, with the word that the cultural events that were planned for 2013 will continue anyway.
I think the process of going through the bid procedure alone has been great for the city. It’s highlighted the cultural awareness of what is going on around us. We have tapped into creative talent and given it a space to bloom and I really hope that continues. The cultural creativity in this city is so vibrant and it deserves it shine.
I am proud to have played a part in Birmingham’s City Of Culture bid by organising a 4am Project event which was held at the Museums Collection Centre. This was part of the Birmingham 24 hour cultural blog. Thank you to the City Council for their support in making this event happen, and to Cllr Martin Mulaney for writing and speaking about the 4am Project too.
Birmingham may not have won the title, but we are still a City Of Culture. So let’s get on with getting creative and showing the world we have got to offer
The Ipex exhibition at the NEC is held every 4 years and is a global trade event for print, publishing and media.
So what were you doing there Karen? You may well ask!
I thought I would pop along and meet some of the exhibitors and introduce them to the 4am Project. I visited the Focus On Imaging Exhibition in March & met with a lot of big names in the photographic world and the result from that was that Nikon, Moo and Photocreator kindly sponsored the 4am Project by donating top prizes which I wrote all about over here.
So with that success behind me, I registered for two tickets for Ipex. One for myself and one for my biggest fan, my Mum. Also, by registering in advance I saved myself the £25/£30 ticket price!
Now, Ipex is a huge event. It spanned 11 halls! Normally events at the NEC will have 1, 2, 3 or perphaps 4 halls, so an 11 hall event was (for me) the biggest yet!
I needed a plan, and so a plan I made!
Even though Ipex spans 8 days, I only had one day there. With so many exhibitors I had to fine tune my visit. The majority of the exhibitors were not relevant to the 4am Project and it’s audience/participants. For example, many of them dealt with heavy machinery and hard-core printers. However, there were certainly some companies who I thought would be interested (as you can see from my plan) such as Hewlett Packard, Ricoh, Mitsubishi, Epson,Canon, Kodak, Konica Minolta, Agfa & Fuji.
I got my bearings very quickly and headed to the Hewlett Packard stand first. Of course, this wasn’t a stand in the traditional sense, it covered 100’s of square feet as did most of the exhibitors. I introduced myself at the reception area and within a minutes I was in Hewlett Packards coffee area with a lovely chap called Jonathan chatting about the 4am Project. It was a brilliant start to the day and Jonathan really ‘got’ the 4am Project straight away. A great start!
And so, with some brilliant tips from Jonathan I made my way to all the companies I wanted to visit. I told them about the 4am Project, left some literature and my business card and had some great conversations.
I can imagine how intimidating it might be for some to walk into an environment like this. It would be easy for me to feel like a small fish in a big pond when I introduce the 4am Project to multinational corporations. Naturally I am very proud of the 4am Project, it’s success and world wide reach. It’s popularity is growing day by day, week by week. However, it would be foolish of me to compare it’s reach to those of the huge photography companies like Kodak, Nikon, Canon, Sigma etc whose brands/message/products are instantly known in practically every country. What I have discovered is that by putting myself out there, being a bit brave and talking about the 4am Project more and more is that people are people, business is business and big corporations and innovative ideas and projects can and do mix well.
What will happen from my visit to Ipex? Time will tell. I’ll certainly be following up our meetings to see how we can work together, and I’ll keep you posted on any developments.
I really liked the Ipex exhibition. You could tell from walking in that it was designed for business and the corporate world. There were visitors from all over the world and as I walked around I tuned into many different languages and accents; a truely international and very friendly event.
I must give a big thank you to Fuji who agreed to my request of a gigantic world map for the 4am Project.
Hot off the press!
With help from my Mum and Step Dad!
And thank you to Agfa for these beautiful poster sized prints which I intend to frame and admire at home.
When I have an exhibition for the 4am Project I plan to use this map to mark out all the countries that have taken part. Yay! I see a plan coming together….
So as well as a good and busy day, great atmosphere, networking, what struck me about Ipex was the use of social media. Ipex itself was using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Zing.
Off all the companies I visited that day I must say that Kodak’s use of social media grabbed me almost immediately.
I think it’s fair to say that Kodak’s ’stand’ was really, really big! And impressive.
My first stop at Kodak was to introduce myself to Pat who is part of the marketing team at Kodak. And then I wanted to say hello to Jennifer! I was really grabbed by her quick twitter contact, especially seeing as she is following over 21,000 people! How does she do it?
Jennifer and her colleague even had their own dedicated social media desk!
We (me and my lovely mum) took a seat in the K-Zone; Kodaks platform for 20 minute talks that took place every hour. The first talk was about printing and business cards. Kodak have developed a printing method where business cards have more dimensions to them in raised printing giving a better quality feel and impression.
Gaby Gaby’s work with Kodak involves him painting on Kodak’s empty boxes. He created paitings every day at the Kodak stand and they print them out using Kodaks dimensional printing. Gaby Gaby gives them away, thus having his art reach a wide audience.
Gaby Gaby kindly signed some of his prints. I chose Kodak Girl.
Gaby Gaby also signed one of his magazines which features a lot of his work.
During Gaby Gaby’s talk he mentioned how he got most (if not all?) of his commisions through twitter. That’s pretty impressive & great news too!
All in all it was an amazing day for myself and the 4am Project and I found inspiration even when I wasn’t looking for it.
But the highlight of the day came from my Mum. Just as we were saying my goodbyes she handed me this little note.
Thank you Mum. I do my best and I’m figuring it all out as I go along. I hope I’m doing a good job.
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