WOW What a Week!

Well it is hard to believe that a month has passed since I last posted, but after this week, I felt I should share.

Many of you know that I am the photographer for the Woburn Daily Times
chain of papers, but I also do a lot of freelance work, and one of my bigger
freelance gigs is for a Cambridge based company - the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council.

So when they hired me to come into Boston for the three day Bio 2007 Convention I was pretty happy. I know I am weird, I actually enjoy these things! Heck getting paid to be there is a bonus!

So into South Boston I went each of the past three days (side note - I don't envy the people who drive in there daily - that was some of the worst traffic I have ever seen! UGH!) to go see what more than 22,000 conference attendees had to say, and show about the world of Bio Technology.

WOW, was I blown away!

I have gone to or photographed or even was a salesman at many trade shows,
but this had to be the mother of all trade shows. There were booths from every
corner of the world there, I heard so many languages spoken, millions of
business cards were exchanged, and I am sure many deals were brokered.

I spent most of my time in the Massachusetts Pavillion, (shown here in a view from the skybridge) which was the largest of all the state pavillions, occupying about 5% of the total show floor
area. It was my homebase for the three days and was a hot spot of activity. One of the bigger events of the show was Governor Deval Patrick making a big Stem Cell announcement:

This was big doings for Massachusetts and I am happy to have been there to photograph the historic event. A funny thing happened near the end of the governor's speech - an old Asian man climbed up onto the press photo platform, and pushed past me with his little point and shoot camera. After taking a photo or two, he turned to me and said in a thick accent: "Oh so good to see Barack Obama here in Boston." I couldn't help but laugh out loud!

There were a couple of chances for me to observe the rest of the show, and I think, that since I was not there to make a deal, or buy equipment, I looked at this show with a different eye.

Here are a couple of photos that I liked:

This photo is the membership desk area of Bio and it changed colors every 3 or 4 minutes - it was totally cool and could be easily seen from many areas of the show.

This photo shows the new Biogen Idec "Hyposurface" it is a surface that responds to TOUCH and to SOUND. In this photo, the man in the middle had blown into the microphone, and caused a wave effect on the surface. This was also totally cool!

The rest of the photos are really just talking heads and not as cool as those, but overall it was an awesome experience!