Day 185, 050909: Photocamp

September 5th 2009 was Photocamp09 in Bradford.

Thanks to various reasons I was very late packing my bag, and heading off to the National Media Museum for a day of discussing all forms of photography in Photocamp.

Yes, I arrived halfway through the keynote speech, missing the opening remarks, comments about missing people and the introductions (sorry, Jon). The keynote was presented by Miss Aniela (arguably nsfw, if you work in a puritan church). Now, some of her photos are incredible, but she does seem to have a bit of a cult following, and even though she says things like "some people may describe me as pretty and if that helps my print sales, I'm fine with that" I can't help but wonder if she would have a similar following if she took fewer photos in her pants. I know the techniques she's used to do some of the photos, too; I daresay that if I was selfportraiting like that I wouldn't get a fiftieth of the hits she gets, despite the wow factor of apparent levitation. Still, she makes a living from it, so who am I to comment. The speech was quite interesting, to be fair, and she did a good job of saying "at least my photos tell a story, unlike these" - examples - " where the photographer seemed to spend more time writing the copy that explains the photograph than actually taking it" which is something we can all relate to.

The keynote over, we had the group shot, then dispersed up some stairs to the conference suite. Where the a/c was buggered. Never mind! I had to find the room I was giving my pinhole workshop. Locked! So we started late, and there were a lot of people wanting to do this; I counted fifteen people (although I did need two goes at this), each making cameras from matchboxes, and I think it went pretty well; I found it hard to explain some of the bits, but everybody got there in the end, and it was a real pleasure to see people wandering around the museum with their little white-and-black cameras, taking shots of things. I even made it onto the NMM's blog :)

I stayed in the same room for Rick's talk on "how to make money from photography", an interesting talk on self-promotion and flogging your wares, and then got a breath of fresh air before heading off to lunch with Dave and Alex; a veggie curry buffet on Forster Sq, very tasty with some of the best chapatis I'd had in ages - you really shouldn't go to lunch in Bratfud and have anything other than a curry. The afternoon was the second of Natalie's sessions where I learned a little more about compositing, and then the print swap (I gave away a copy of Wastwater and took away someone's Anthony Gormley at Crosby sunset shot), then I had to shift the car, then I was up again, talking about Open Leeds, a project I've been working on that takes publically-owned data (specifically, OOC photographic archives held by local government bodies) but inaccessable due to having a shocking UI or some other faffy access layer, and makes it more accessable. I got a lot of interest from that, which was nice. The person who was on after me was talking about digital panoramas, something I'm interested in, and I thoroughly enjoyed his talk. Neil uses Hugin rather than Autostitch; I've had trouble with Hugin in the past because it doesn't like beach scenes and throws a wobbly whenever presented with lots of open, similar space, but apparently that's been fixed in more recent versions. And, to be fair, Hugin does give you acres more control than autostitch.

There was no closing session, no "thanks for coming"; it was all a bit messy at the end. Lots of people went to the pub (and, indeed, came back on the Sunday), but I wasn't able to think about alcohol by this point and just went home. A good day, but there were a few niggly bits that could have been done a bit better. I understand why we didn't have a closing session (the only space big enough was being used by actual paying customers watching a film), and the a/c was out of our control, but the print swap was a bit chaotic, there wasn't really any space to mingle, and there were too many sessions going on that I wanted to attend, but couldn't! We'll see what happens next year.

Also, I took two cameras with me (and helped build a further 15), and didn't take any photos at all. None. How daft is that?

Anyway, this isn't a thing per se, but it's a nifty bit of stuff that kicked off the whole Exposure Leeds thing, so is technically part of task 85, I suppose. And the Open Leeds thing is part of my volunteering project, (#20) which will start gearing up a little more soon.

Fun!