“You should never meet your hero’s”
I have just returned from the Photography and Video Show hosted at ExCel London.
I went on Sunday 9th March 2025 and had a plan of action ready to go.
- I was going to buy a new camera lens.
- I was going to see how much I could get a ricoh gr iii for.
- I needed lens filters and cleaning fluid and a spudz lens cleaner cloth
- I wanted to meet some of the suppliers behind my print shop to ensure i was happy with them.
First off I visited one of my suppliers. They had just a single person attending their booth and as I tried to talk to them about paper options another member of the public came over and tried to talk to the representative who decided to talk to them. I tried to come back a few times to check their stool out but they didn’t leave me with a very good impression. I decided to visit some competitors and they seemed to give me the time to talk about what they could do! So more options is only a good thing in my books!
Wex, London Camera Group and Camera World all had massive stools offering discounts.
I picked up UX filters for half price, I got Tamron 70-300mm F/4.5-6.3 Di III RXD Lens for £563, I found it online for £649
I went over to the ricoh Japan booth and I finally caved in and decided I wanted a ricoh camera. If you haven’t stumbled across Ricoh cameras they tend to be a favourite among the street photographers as they are small compact and easy to point and shoot. They also are amazing in night time photography scenarios so I was particularly keen on getting one!
In the end I went to a couple of vendors and settled with Wex. They had the GR III for £854 during the show which is considerable as the RRP is £949 online!
I tried to buy cleaning fluid but it wasn’t for sale during the conference and the spudz micro fibre I love so much wasn’t for sale either however many booths offered free swag that tended to include free camera cloths!
I really enjoyed the show but I wanted to touch on an area that was a tad more sensitive.
As a landscape and wildlife photographer there is nothing more I love than supporting the wildlife and caring for it. There are some amazing charities that do amazing work around this. One of the charities was featured at the event and I fondly remember going to one of their nature reserves as a school child. I wanted to donate to them but was told they only wanted to do monthly financial commitments. Upon returning later to the area the same person said very sternly “what did you buy at the event?” This was very pushy and uncalled for so I decided to avoid certain areas. My wife also experienced some pushy sales tactics which made us avoid certain areas typically these would be your top-ship style booths with products that had been brought to the conference to be sold at a high mark-up.
Overall it was a very good event and if your trying to get some kit it’s probably the best place to grab it at a discount rate that being said I would always say try and get things second hand. I noticed the lean I got today I could have grabbed online a lot cheaper if I had opted to go second hand! For me this experience was more about finding new potential suppliers but pushy sales people made it a bit more difficult, in my normal profession I’ve attended conferences before and said the lines “I don’t have purchasing authority” and that seems to do the trick, I don’t think that works at these kind of conference’s so your best bet is to just ignore them.
Would I return to this show again? Absolutely.
Travel
- Elizabeth Line was down til 14:00.
- DLR was super packed due to the three exhibitions on.
- Uber tried to charge us £60 for a taxi from ExCeL to London Waterloo. We opted for the IFS Cable Car which took 20 minutes to queue for, then a mad dash when getting onto the car due to impatient people behind us, followed by Tube.
- Limited trains due to maintenance on Sundays.