This past weekend I attended my very first Alt Summit Salt Lake City- an enormous and highly anticipated conference for bloggers and social media gurus held at the beautiful Grand American Hotel. I was there with the Blurb Books entourage, who generously invited me along to set up my Instant Polaroid Photobooth at their Winter Olympics themed Alt party. A free business trip full of schmoozing, learning, and a super fancy hotel? Sign me up! Though I'm not much of a blogger (but I do love to blog here and there), I did take the opportunity to network with some really smart and kind women (I was one of five men in the entire conference. The ladies were nice to me.), as well as attend a few enlightening classes and seminars. But the real work happened on the last night of the conference where the Blurb team and I put on a wild, wintery party to promote Blurb's amazing self-publishing platform and beautiful books (of which I use exclusively for all my self-publishing. Haven't seen my Blurb Bookstore? Click on over with this link: www.blurb.com/user/store/jfreidin to preview and purchase my latest dog photography books).

Not knowing how many people to expect at the photobooth, I decided to play it safe and buy a few extra packs of instant film, just in case we needed them or something went horribly wrong. The moment the doors opened, I had people posing in front of the camera for four hours straight. This is not an exaggeration. There were winter olympic themed props, as well as an olympic posing podium- all of which made for wonderfully fun and entertaining polaroid portraits. I shot the instant portraits with my Fuji Fotorama, and as per usual it was a great conversation piece. I had an amazing assistant who flawlessly developed and peeled all 160 portraits from the evening- which I'm pretty sure is a photobooth record for me. Everyone had a great time, loved their polaroids, and at the end of the night I only had two back-up packs of instant film left. Also, I was surrounded by a pile of instant film carnage in all directions. You know it was a good party if you're pulling peel-apart film wrapping out of your pockets for the next two days.

Here are some photos taken by the talented Dan Milnor- Blurb's "Photographer at Large" and fellow analog nerd. His work is amazing. You should visit his site now: www.smogranch.com

Thanks to everyone who stopped by my photo booth at Alt Summit Salt Lake City. If you've got any images from the evening, please feel free to share them on our Facebook page: www.facebook.com/jessefreidinphoto

Alt Summit Salt Lake City 2014: A Photobooth and New Friends