PhotoCamp 2007 Wrapup

During BarCamp this year, Kris Krug hosted PhotoCamp which was actually a session within the BarCamp program and not a longer event as I had originally thought. I touched on it very briefly in my BarCamp wrapup post but thought I should elaborate on it a little more since there was lots of good stuff in there.

Andrew Ferguson started things off by giving a talk about running a photography blog and the amount of effort it takes to keep an audience – basically you have to post daily or at least regularly because there are so many photography related sites out there, fresh content is (and always will be) king. I just started reading Andrew’s blog as a result of PhotoCamp and he’s got a lot of great stuff for photo geeks on there.

Matt Trentacoste was up next and gave a talk on ‘Computational Photography’ which was very interesting. He talked about what advantages digital photography gives over traditional, film based photo editing. While I do love messing with photos in Photoshop, most of my stuff is left untouched. I did love playing in the darkroom back in high school (where I first fell in love with photography) but like Matt says in his slides(PDF), darkroom work is hard work….and also quite expensive compared to the cost of decent photo editing software. He also talked about different software that can help correct issues caused by optical distortion or noise. His last part was about wavefront coding which (if I understand it correctly) is basically the ability, in software, to correct things like blurry images – basically (or maybe optimistically) an unblur filter that would allow you to fix blurry images (assuming you had the right camera gear to take the image in the first place) without affecting other variables in the image. Really cool stuff.

Duane Storey gave a talk about his HDR photos and went through the process to get the great shots he does like the one above. He does it via post-processing software called PhotoMatrix. I still haven’t had a chance to really play much with HDR yet but want to even more now.

Kris wrapped up the session with basically an open Q&A about various software and camera techniques, managing your photo workflow (Lightroom, iPhoto, etc), what lens to buy, etc…too many nuggets that I didn’t capture.

All that got squeezed into just over an hour and a bit. Seems to me there is probably enough cool stuff to talk about, smart people to give presentations and interested people to have a stand alone/full day event for photography geeks.

Thanks to kk, Andrew, Matt, Duane and everyone else for a great session.