California Photo Festival!

What a great week!  It was inspirational, instructional,  exhausting, surprisingly wonderful....I think I am running out of adjectives!  I was able to volunteer for the week at the 1st annual California Photo Fest which Light Workshops in Los Osos put on.   In turn for volunteering I was able to attend much of the events, seminars and workshops at the festival with the other photographers attending. 
There were photographers mostly from California that converged upon San Luis Obispo County for the week with their bags of gear, extra large lenses and leggy tripods.  There was even a photographer there from Malaysia and one from Moldova (another volunteer and I had to Google that to find out where that was which is between Romania and the Ukraine).  Others came from Florida, Connecticut and Arizona.
The people from Light Workshops are amazing people and they did an amazing job putting the festival together!  Granted, it was the first annual, and with the first comes a few glitches which they are more than happy to be working on for next year's festival to make it even better.
The instructors were talented photographers and really good at communicating their craft to other enthusiastic photographers eager to learn.
There were early morning sunrise photo shoots every morning at beautiful locations throughout the county such as vineyards and the bluffs above Cayucos.  There were also sunset photo shoots each night at similar locations with some well-attended shoots of horses on the beach.
It was a friendly little community that I saw every day for six and a half days and I actually miss seeing them now.  It's been fun seeing the images that people have posted up on a flickr group formed just for the festival, you can check it out too.