ProFusion Expo – Queen Street Magazine

ProFusion is an annual, 2-day imaging trade show. Think photo & video—and everything related. Printers, lighting, accessories of all kinds, professional and prosumer (camera nerds like me). There are presentations, tutorials, demonstrations, new gear..it’s a good time. It’s organized and hosted by Vistek, one of Canada’s largest camera store chains. It’s a big deal – and it’s free.

I’m going up the escalator into the Metro Convention Centre. The sun is reflecting off the glass from the buildings across the street filling the huge atrium with warm light. There are swag-bag ladies waiting at the top of the escalator; swinging their hips in the beams; backlit; arms out holding a branded plastic bag, “Take a bag for all that swag??” – “ok, thank you”.

The room is very big and impressive; 60,000 square feet of ocean-blue carpet. (Drake’s house is 50,000 square feet). The space is broken up into smaller spaces with tubular stage-rigging and black cloth. Some of the largest camera brands are here. Canon and Sony have spaces so large they’ve sub-divided them into lounges, tutorial areas with seating, places to shoot models – either with their new cameras, or with the camera you brought yourself. It’s not tacky to walk around Profusion with a camera on your neck. Some small brands have only a single table, I saw a guy from Henry’s sitting on a milk crate (just kidding). There is corporate signage everywhere; it’s hung, lit, inflated, hovering, rotating, blinking. Sony has a high resolution photograph blown-up of a new camera hanging from the ceiling, it must be 15 feet tall, you can see every detail.

The show has 3 or 4 stages with seating and screens for demonstrations/tutorials. The first stage I encounter has a 25yo-something talking about using a new medium format camera to shoot. He claims the file sizes are so large you can crop them endlessly without loosing quality. Another stage has a young woman who spent a great of time in the Arctic shooting content for a startup watch company. Another stage has an older photographer talking about emotion and storytelling, trying to evoke feeling, or mood, or thought – this is my speed.

Some of YouTube’s earliest and biggest camera influencers are Canadian—and there was a couple of stars at the show. Gerald Undone was there, walking around and talking to people. Gerald does technical reviews of cameras and lenses and is considered one of the original gold-standard reviewers on YouTube (480K followers). Simon d’Entremont was there also. He is a highly regarded wildlife photographer/influencer (740K followers). He offers educational content about improving your techniques, but also demystifying principles related to photography. YouTube links – (Gerald) (Simon)