My Northern Voice 2010 Presentations

This past weekend was the 5th year of the Northern Voice conference out at UBC…and my 3rd year attending.

Thanks to a recent car accident, I didn’t take many photos but instead spent a couple of days in sessions, visiting with old friends and, as usually happens at Northern Voice, met a bunch of new ones. Strangely, the conference has gotten so big that I actually saw some friends across the room but never had a chance to say hi since the room was so freaking big.

Like previous years, there was a PhotoCamp session and I gave a presentation covering how I make timelapse videos with a still camera. My presentation was loosely based on a post I did a little while ago and was frankly surprised at the positive reception the presentation got. The post covers off, in greater detail, the steps to combine still photos into an image sequence so I won’t bother posting my slides. I showed a number of videos to help illustrate the result including this one made from over 2200 still photos as kind of an end run around the fact that I wasn’t accredited to shoot video, just stills at the Paralympic Games:

On the second day of the conference, I was part of the panel talking about Our Olympic Experience which covered the social media outcomes from the games. Also on the panel was Andrew Lavigne talking about With Glowing Hearts, the feature length documentary he’s working on about the impacts the olympic games have on the local community. He shot a ton of footage before, during and after the games…including a few bits with me. Andrew talked about the film and showed the latest cut of the demo reel for it. They are currently looking for distribution options to help complete the editing of the film.

You can view my slide deck (PDF|35mb), watch one of the videos by Scales & kk from the Beijing Olympics that inspired my Olympic adventures:

(this one is also good) and watch my Olympic Highlight reel:

all of which I showed during the panel.

Once again I had a great time…even if I was heavily medicated during most of it thanks to my back injury. I was also able to give both presentations via my iPad and the VGA cable which worked great.

All the sessions were videotaped so once they are packaged up, I’ll update this post with any relevant links or embeds.

Update: Stephen Hui has some photos up on the Georgia Straight’s site that he took at the conference. I finally got to meet Stephen in person and he also spoke about his Olympic experiences alongside Andrew, kk, Scales and myself.

Northern Voice 2009 Wrapup

What an epic weekend! So much going on surrounding the best little conference ever, Northern Voice. As usual, I’ll try to detail my experiences with photos and video I shot:

Things kicked off Thursday at Federico’s Supper Club with the somewhat controversial (due to political sponsorship) opening dinner which was a lot of fun.

It seems this photo of Jenn and Nadia is a little popular with a few folks online.

I’m not sure why…maybe the lighting?

After a fun night out for dinner, it was up bright and early Friday morning for MooseCamp at the beautiful Forestry Sciences Building at UBC.

Hopefully next year a few more people will show up…

For the most part, I used my fisheye lens the whole weekend….what can I say, I love that lens. Here’s a few more images from the weekend:

Tim Bray led an awesome PhotoCamp this year which as always was a great geek out session for the photographers in attendance. The first thing he asked everyone to do was to take a photo of their neighbour in the room. Here’s my shot of Anthony taken with my LensBaby Composer (unfortunately the only time I had it on my camera the whole weekend):

You can view my complete Flickr set for Northern Voice and check out everyone’s photos tagged for the conference which as I post this was well over 1200 photos.

I want to thank the organizers for all their hard work in putting on one of my favorite conferences every year.

Even the Canucks managed to win a couple games this weekend while the conference was on.

Yes, it was a great weekend.

BarCamp Vancouver 2008

I spent most of yesterday on Granville Island at BarCamp 2008 and it was a blast.
Things actually started off Friday night at WorkSpace for the opening night party and then up bright and early for the actual ‘unconference’ on Saturday.

This year, I helped organize PhotoCamp which is one of the few pre-determined ‘tracks’ (the other being WordCamp). BarCamp is meant to be an adhoc-like conference where the sessions are proposed by whomever shows up on the day, not weeks in advance. Photo (and Word) Camps require a little more prep since it’s not just an open talk but the idea behind all of them is that the participants shape the conversations.

Photo by Peter Andersen

I ended up giving a talk in the morning about jailbreaking the iPhone 3G (why you might want to do this, what’s involved, etc) which was well attended and seems to have been well received. You can get the apps to jailbreak your 3G here as well as to unlock your 1st gen iPhone.

Then I headed to check out the remaining portions of WordCamp and ended up giving a talk (more of an overview) of the FAlbum plugin I use on this site to share my Flickr photos.

PhotoCamp
Derek K. Miller started things off by explaining a number of digital photography concepts using his collection of film cameras and referencing his excellent cameraworks series of blog posts on the topic.

Next up was Tris Hussey who discussed some of the online photo editing services like Picnik.

Another session I led was about plastic/toy cameras and Elizabeth showed some of her cameras and photos she took with them along with mine.

Then Cameron Cavers and I talked about lens adaptors and macro extension tubes. There seemed to be a lot of interest in these inexpensive addons and the conversation quickly turned to all kinds of cool hacks and things you can do to/with your camera.

As we were quickly running out of time, our last discussion was around camera bags. There was just about every kind and style of ways to carry all that precious gear in the room and it ended up being a show and tell with everyone showing what they use and why.

Unfortunately, there was a little confusion about the end time so when we finally cleared out of the space used for PhotoCamp, the other sessions had already finished but we did manage to meet up with a bunch of BarCampers, had dinner and then finished up with a short photowalk around Granville Island at dusk.

Strangely, I barely took any photos yesterday.

Thanks to everyone that helped make BarCamp happen as well as everyone that came out to hear what I had to talk to about – I hope it was as useful to you as it was fun for me to share. See you next year!

Update: Here’s Roland‘s Qik video of my iPhone session (shot with his Nokia):

Update #2: Here’s Warren’s interview video from my iPhone session:

PhotoCamp 2008

BarCamp is happening this weekend and a component of that is PhotoCamp.

What would like to talk about this year? Submit your topics here in the comments or on the wiki.

A few things that are on the table which will be finalized this Saturday include:

• a photowalk around Granville Island
• RAW vs JPG – why you should use one over the other and the workflows that come with that decision
• Lens Adapter and Macro Tubes – inexpensive addons to your gear that can greatly expand your options
• Film camera resurgence – Lomos, Holgas and more….why they are fun
• Mobile photography – using various tools and apps on mobile phones

Be sure to bring your gear to PhotoCamp too!