H dragged me along to a photography trade fair last weekend, which all sounds the wrong way round doesn’t it, it should be me dragging her along to these things right?

The show was called “Photo and Imaging Shanghai” at the Shanghai Everbright Convention and Exhibition Centre on Caobao Lu and is apparently one of the trades most influential shows.

We arrived pretty early, 9:30 or so I guess and the show was already buzzing and quickly turned into a nightmare as we had to fight our way through crowded alleys filled with hordes of middle aged men dragging extremely large cameras around taking photos of pretty much everything they could lay their eyes on, Canon L lenses were all the rage, and the longer the better.

The show was a little disappointing to be honest, there was nothing you couldn’t see at Xing Guang but there were about 10 times more people, plus pretty much every stand had a huge PA system pumping out incredibly loud music which mean’t that we sped past most of the stands with barely more than a glance, not to mention the girls with megaphones…

The main stands catered for the camera holding tourists and took the opportunity for some free advertising by having models on their stand in front of their company logo, I took some photos (purely for the blog you understand..)

The Metz stand, you should have seen some of the filthy looks I got when I started taking pics through the crowd with my iPhone, at one point I thought I might be chased away by tripod yielding fanatics..

These girls went to all the trouble of actually picking up some of their companys products (wireless flashes if you’re interested), nobody seemed to care about that though..

Leica, the busiest stand by far, there must have been 30 guys bustling to take photos

This stand got it wrong completely and went for a guy in full royal wedding style military regalia singing karaoke, nobody cared..

Anyway, for me, the most interesting area was over in props, some of the most amazing backgrounds, anything you could think of, and the most outlandish props, here are a few favourites:

A fake Rolls Royce (Phantom?), the amazing thing is that at the exhibition this thing looked so obviously fake that it had me giggling, but on the photos it looks pretty damn good!

Horse and carriage… yeah, that’s not convinving anyone..

Helicopters, speedboats and sailing ships.. You see that guy on the left? He worked on the stand, his job was to stop people taking photos of the exhibits..

More on that sailing ship, if anyone has any idea how this could possibly be incorporated into a wedding photo etc then please let me know, I honestly can’t figure it out..

Pretty much the worst of the lot, a fake Ferrari which looks absolutely nothing like the real thing, ONLY 23800 RMB though, I’m tempted!!

Enormous swans, unrealistic zebras, a church with stained glass windows.. If we ever get round to getting wedding pics these are the elements I want in EVERY photograph..

This was pretty impressive though, a life size tea room which could have been plucked from the Cotswolds, it actually looked pretty realistic in real life. The name needs a bit of work though..

“WILLOWONGSDX TEA ROOM”

Hold on, I’ve changed my mind, if we get wedding pics I want them all to be with a man-sized ice cream and a ginormous candle..