Very early I woke up for a 7:30am start time to photograph an event in the south Tampa area at Crowne Plaza hotel. This was so early that there was not even any traffic yet on I-275 so it was actually a pleasant morning cruise down the highway. The event itself was very straightforward with a series of speakers all speaking in the same room with only an adjacent room for food breaks needing to be covered.
I was told by the client that this 6.5 presentation had been done in several cities before so tons of photos of the speakers themselves were not necessary and that I should instead focus more on the attendees interacting with the activities called for during the presentations. Above you can see two people working on an X and O strategy puzzle.
The speakers all did a very good job making it seem like it was the first time they were ever giving their presentations, which to me is the sign of a good speaker. They mostly spoke about strategies for improving the hotel business, not something I normally read up on, but even I was entertained by how they presented ADR, etc. I always like learning new inside jargon for a particular industry too. ADR!
It was not all just fun and games, there were actual nuts and bolts tutorials on how to better use the mountain of data collected on hotel guests for establishing room rates and more.
They even found a way to make hotel business trivia work for a realistic Jeopardy tournament complete with red buzzers! I noticed that the front row tables were either stacked or trigger happy as they were the first to buzz in the most.
I enjoyed my time listening to the speakers, learning about the hotel industry and finding creative ways to photograph a group of people who were for the most part, basically just sitting around tables.