Mike’s Camera is hosting a Spring Photo and Video Expo in Colorado over Mother’s Day weekend. I’ll be at the Boulder location this Sunday, May 11th, from 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM for a free class and photowalk. If you live in the area, please come out and join me—we’re going to have a great time! If your mom or mother-in-law has an interest in photography, bring her along, too.

The class is ‍called Fujifilm Film Simulation & Fuji X Weekly Recipes. We’re going to learn how Fujifilm’s 20 Film Simulations and Fuji X Weekly Recipes can transform your photography, achieving the results you want quickly and easily while making photography more fun. The class will be about 30-40 minutes long, followed by a photowalk on Pearl Street. You don’t need to register, you just need to show up on May 11th at 11:00 AM. Click here for directions.

Last year I co-lead a photowalk in Denver with Mike’s Camera, and it was a huge success. About 60 people came out for it—one as far away as Italy!—and we had a great time. It’s a real honor to be invited out again. I want to express my appreciation to Mike’s Camera and Fujifilm USA for including me in this event—thank you!

If you are in the Denver area, I’d love to meet you. It’s a great opportunity for camaraderie and to just chat cameras. It’s awesome that a local camera store is facilitating this community-building event, so definitely take advantage of it. I hope to see you in Boulder this weekend!

In other news, I mentioned several weeks back that my family had participated in a 72 Hour Film Challenge. This is an annual event hosted by a local creative arts group that my kids are involved in. Those who want to participate assemble a team, which could be their friends or family or whoever. Last year, my two oldest kids were on a team with their friends. This year, they wanted to enter the competition as a family. My two daughters were asked to join another team, so they were in both, and were seen in two films.

With this film challenge, you have three days to write, film, edit, and submit a five-minute short film. At the start of the 72 hours, each team is provided with a theme, a line of dialog that must be included, and a prop that must be used. The theme was Heroic, the line of dialog was “This better be useful”, and the prop was a sticky note. As long as our film fit the theme, used the dialog and prop, and was submitted before the deadline, we were included in the finals. Nine teams completed the challenge.

Those nine short films were shown in a local movie theater. Afterwards, awards were given for all sorts of things (Best Actor, Best Cinematography, etc., etc., etc.). The big award was for Best Film. The judges were film students at a local university. Our film, which I’ve included above in case you want to watch it, was called Will You Play With Me?, and I really like how it turned out. There were other movies that I thought were really good.

To our surprise, we won five awards, including Best Film. The movie that I thought was the best, which was made by the team that my two daughters were a part of, won six awards and was the runner up for Best Film. Overall, we had a ton of fun. I think it was a great experience. If you have kids who are interested in making videos, I definitely recommend finding something like this in your area to participate in. This is related to Fujifilm because we (as in, mostly Amanda…) used an X-T5 to record all of the footage.