Flat on my Face - my first webinar
Webinars, the perfect way to inspire and educate photographers in these lockdown times. How hard can it be?
I have been thinking about webinars and live streams for a while. And when I was approached with the idea to do a webinar for Fujifilm Belgium, I was immediately stoked about the idea and got to work. I did a lot of research, talked to my friend Piet who has experience with webinars and started building a setup to stream quality audio and video.
It took some tinkering with gear that I already have and spending some money to connect it all. There is always room for improvement but a substantial upgrade would mean spending a lot of money that I don’t have. A lot of testing made it clear that the current setup already yields pretty professional audio and video.
On the content side, I also spent a lot of time to put together a program around how I shoot life in lockdown with information about gear and settings, practical tips and a bunch of pictures.
We kept testing and everything went smooth, so I felt confident for the webinar on Friday night. We had over 500 people sign up so I got a little nervous but the knowledge that I was well prepared kept the nerves under controle.
On Friday night, we went live and everything seemed to be going ok. It was a bit awkward to talk to an audience without seeing them and to do video without having the option to edit the final outcome. But I guess that was to be expected. But then the technical side started to go wrong and things went south really fast. I picked up bits and pieces on the chat and through messages from my Fuji colleagues. Some lone individuals reported a perfectly fine connection but for most the connection was simply not good enough to follow the webinar. All this had a negative effect on the content too, as it was hard to deliver my message through all the noise.
After the webinar I immediately started looking into the reasons why everything went wrong. In the end it was just an unfortunate collection of factors beyond my control. I still felt angry, frustrated and disappointed. The only thing I could do is, get up the next day and re-record the webinar.
MIND YOU, THIS WEBINAR IS IN DUTCH
So my first webinar experience was horrible but I’m not ready to give up because of that. I’ve learned a lot from this disaster. By not pushing on, I would throw away that knowledge. So I’ll be doing some more experiments with live streaming and webinars soon. Hope to see you there.