I love how, upon entering the convention center, you can immediately tell you're entering a convention like no other - one that is darkened and filled with haze!

The show floor this year was much longer than the last time I attended, though there seemed to be less booths.

I don't know how to pronounce their name, but Chauvet (is that "shaa-voe", "shaw-vette"?) had a very impressive rig above their booth. I like light rigs that have "pods" like these, they're a design feature I usually incorporate into concert shows I design that often have no sets and are going into an otherwise empty stage.

And, only at LDI would the rigging of one's booth get noticed by an attendee. I was really impressed at all the bridles (a hanging point that hangs from two or more points) that were used here and everywhere on the floor to get around the many obstacles on the convention center ceiling.

Another look at the Chauvet rig! I think I might be "inspired" to "pay homage" to this design sometime soon!

The LightNetwork booth was jumpin' off!!! All jokes aside, this was a booth staffed with volunteers, so I just caught it at a bad time. The LightNetwork is an online discussion forum for lighting designers that I've been a part of for almost ten years, and is largely responsible for me realizing that a successful career as a lighting designer was possible.

Just me and my shadow, literally, in a projection on a staircase across from a booth selling club lighting fixtures.

I sat on the floor and waited about ten minutes to get a nice frame of people walking in front of a soft LED curtain on the back of the Coemar booth. Everyone that walked through my frame, upon hearing me fire off my shutter, would apologize thinking they'd ruined my shot, when in reality, I wanted them to walk through it!

I sat down Sunday for a fifteen dollar meal from one of the vendors on the show floor, consisting of orange chicken, pork fried rice, and a bottle of Pepsi. The meal was actually half-decent. While consuming my delicacy, and watching the Coemar booth loop over and over, I noticed how heavy the haze level in the room had become, to the point of setting off the fire alarms a few times. I found this amusing since setting off fire alarms with haze is often a problem we deal with on shows of smaller scale. It was nice to see the "big boys" having this issue as well.

Rosco Litepads are a very interesting product for photo / video applications. I can see a few of these bad boys replacing the $14.00 fluorescent light I often tape to car dash boards to light people's faces in cars at night.

I forgot what booth these were in, but they're LED balls that are actually mapped out to be a video screen. I enjoyed the texture they created, they'd look great in the background of a camera shot at a concert.

Of course, I had to stop by the Vari*Lite booth. Vari*Lites are, to me, the holy grail of automated lighting. When I first noticed concert lighting on TV wayyy back in junior high, say, on the MTV Awards or the Grammys, I wondered what those lights moving around were. At the time, they were more than likely all Vari*Lites. Of course, I've used lights many times since then that are probably comparable to, if not better than, Vari*Lites. There's still that stigma and allure, however, to actually using them on a show that I've yet to quench.

Only at LDI #2: Devices meant to protect people from tripping over cables also have an advertisement written on them.

I stopped by the ETC booth for a good half hour and grilled the sales reps on the new ETC Ion console, and how it compares to the ETC Express (Ion is meant to replace Express). I dug the Ion, though I still think the Wholehog II and III consoles operate more like my brain than any other board.

I saved my favorite booth for last, Aqua Visual FX. Aqua's product is a water curtain that is able to display graphics in droplets of falling water. I first saw the product on this year's BET Awards with Chris Brown, and thought that I was seeing video projected on a sheet of water. Only when I received frantic phone calls from several other techs (yes - we live sad, sad lives at times) asking me how it was done did I look into it further.

The system uses computer controlled solenoids housed in 2' sections that release water drops in sequence. Confused? Think of an old dot matrix printer (this works a lot like that), only instead of the printer printing lines of dots, the water units are spitting out lines of water drops. Robert Pratl, who ran the Chris Brown performance on the BET Awards, was nice enough to show me how the curtain is programmed (lots of Photoshop, who knew?), and shared some stories from the BET awards about getting the unit up and working in a VERY, VERY short amount of time. Truly impressive.

The water drops fall into a specially designed catch drain (the black part of the floor), and the water is then pumped back up into the rig where it is recycled. To be fair, another company (Aqua Reign) had a water curtain on the show floor almost exactly like Aqua's, but I saw Aqua's first and was impressed with *their* unit on TV.