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Full Transcript of Generator Ep. 027 - "The Recap of WPPI 2024"
WPPI 2024: The Recap, Part Two
If you haven’t listened to part one of this conversation yet, go back and start there. This is the continuation of a long, wide-ranging debrief with Jonny Edward about everything that happened at WPPI 2024, and it goes some places you won’t expect.
What the shooting bays got right and wrong
One of the more practical threads in this conversation was a honest look at the shooting bay experience and how it could be better.
Jonny made a case I found genuinely compelling for bringing constant lights back into the bays instead of strobes. His reasoning wasn’t just aesthetic. When someone who is already nervous about studio lighting, already intimidated by the crowd behind them, already burning through whatever confidence they walked in with, suddenly can’t figure out why their screen is black, the whole experience collapses. The technical problem swallows the creative opportunity. Constant lights remove a layer of complexity that doesn’t need to be there.
I watched it happen repeatedly. Great photographers with good instincts, defeated by exposure compensation buried four menus deep on a camera body they hadn’t updated in two years. The energy just drains out of the room. You can see it on their face.
The fix isn’t complicated. Technical support roaming the lines before people step up to shoot. A laminated if-this-then-that card for the most common issues. A Profoto rep walking the queue instead of standing at a booth. Small things that would make an enormous difference in how people actually experience those bays.
Jonny also floated the idea of predefined aperture settings for low key, high key, and somewhere in between, so photographers have a space to make actual creative decisions rather than just trying to get a properly exposed frame before the timer runs out. That’s the difference between leaving with a technically correct photograph and leaving with an opinion about how you like to light.
What actually made the show worth attending
Here’s what Jonny said was his favorite part of WPPI, and it had nothing to do with the shooting bays or the vendors.
It was watching people who had only ever known each other online run across a convention floor and jump into each other’s arms. The genuine, unguarded joy of finally being in the same room as someone who has mattered to you for years. No hierarchy, no performance, just people who love the same thing finally getting to be present together.
That energy is hard to manufacture and easy to lose in the chaos of a large trade show. The commerce and the chaos crowd it out. You’re always in motion, always producing, always trying to get somewhere or see something or buy something. The moments that actually stay with you happen in the margins. In a hallway. At a bar at the end of a long night. In a bathroom at Caesars, apparently.
That observation led to something worth taking seriously. There’s no dedicated space at these shows for people to just stop. A quiet room, ambient music, chamomile tea, somewhere you can sit with another human being without having to be achieving anything. It sounds minor. It’s not. We have a finite amount of energy and these events ask us to spend all of it. Creating a place to recover some of it mid-show would change the experience in ways that are hard to quantify but very easy to feel.
The last night in Vegas
I’ll be honest. The final section of this conversation is not something I planned to share publicly, but here we are.
After a week of WPPI, a full day workshop, and the logistical chaos of shipping several hundred pounds of Nanlight gear across Las Vegas on a Friday night using the wrong carrier, Jonny and I ended up walking the Strip in a state that I can only describe as pharmaceutically educational. A medicinal chocolate bar intended to manage sleep throughout the week had other plans.
What followed was a lap of the Mirage casino that covered the same ground twice, a detour to Caesars that felt like walking into a Chad convention run by emotionless Pink Floyd knights, a near confrontation in a bathroom that I exited at high speed, a street crime we witnessed and immediately decided was not our problem, and an interaction with a cover band of substitute English teachers that I would genuinely hire for every future event I ever attend.
We eventually found the center bar at the Mirage, ordered Woodford from a bartender who appeared to resent the existence of customers, and sat there watching the room with the particular clarity that comes from being completely spent but somehow still present.
It was the best possible ending to the week.
There’s something about those unplanned, uncontrolled, slightly chaotic nights that makes everything before them make sense. All the stress of the week, the shipping labels, the wrong carrier, the black screens and exposure compensation and two-minute timers and crowds and noise, it all just washed away somewhere between Caesars and the center bar.
That’s what these shows are really for, if you let them be. Not the bays or the vendors or the education. The people. The unexpected conversations. The nights that turn into stories you’re still telling a year later.
The full episode is up top. Part one is worth going back for if you haven’t listened yet.
