The Bild Expo first started in September of 2023 as a big 50th anniversary for the B&H Photography & Video super store. After attending that, I figured it was just a one-time event for the photography store’s big birthday, but in 2025 a second Bild Expo was scheduled. It was actually even bigger than the previous one two years ago.
It is great to see that maybe a new big photography expo will regularly come back to New York City and the Javits center again. Before the pandemic, we had the PDN Photo Plus expo every year. The Photo Plus expo started in 1983 and lasted until 2019. The 2020 Photo Plus expo was cancelled due to the Covid 19 pandemic and never returned.
So let’s take a look at the BILD 2025 expo and see how it went.
The line to get into the Javits on the first day of BILD 2025 was actually very long; going all the way down the length of the Javits Center and then around the block. Thankfully, the QR code scanning and badge printing went very quickly though, so waiting/walking through the line wasn’t so bad at all.
There was a huge variety of speaker presentations available to attend in the upstairs area of the north wing of the Javitts. Some were geared towards social media influencer tips as well. Although, I don’t think they really provided much value. Big influencers don’t really seem to know exactly how or why they became influencers and think that anybody can just post anything they want and they’ll easily obtain a following.
This presentation was about “Mastering the Visual Hook“, but the speakers (James Tralie, Producer and Animator at NASA and Grace Wells, Commercial Creator and Filmmaker) couldn’t even describe what a visual hook is nor did they provide any examples whatsoever on the huge video screen behind them.
The Smoke Genie booth had a very cool little handheld smoke and bubble generator for special video and photo effects.
I love that there were several PC manufacturer booths at the exhibit floor. I got to see the above high-end Asus Strix gaming laptop which was very cool with its animated RGB lights on the back of the lid. Lenovo, Microsoft, and Wacom were showing off some great creative professional computing hardware as well.
Dell had a model and studio set up at their booth too! Above is actress Jolynn Carpenter.
Minnie Lee was nicely modeling at another exhibit booth.
The Nikon booth was pretty awesome. One staff member was actually giving out 32Gb SD cards that we could insert into each of the cameras on display, take as many photos as we wanted, and then take the SD card out, repeat with another camera, and take it home when done. I even recognized one of the models as someone I had worked with before: Tatjana Sinkevica.
Adobe had a nice exhibit booth set up as well where various speakers would give demos on photo editing techniques showcasing different Adobe software programs.
I hope that this B&H BILD expo becomes an annual occurrence as it was a very fun event with lots of great photography products and information to see.