The day after 12×12 YVR

Wow…what a day! This past Saturday was the 1st annual 12×12 Vancouver Photo Marathon…aka 12x12YVR.

I was on the organizing committee and spent (most of) the day at our homebase inside the Blenz Coffee in Yaletown answering questions, meeting other photographers, drawing themes for the participants to agonize over, helping with the marathon’s social media efforts and taking a lot of pictures of the event.

Morten has a great recap of the event up on the 12×12 site and I couldn’t have said it better than he does. Suffice to say, the response, participants, feedback, turnout, sponsors and the positive vibe the event generated far exceeded our humble expectations.

Back in September when the committee had it’s first meeting, we were concerned about being able to sell 40 tickets to the event….let alone having to turn away interested participants because we were at capacity.

There is no question that this was a gruelling challenge of endurance…not to mention a big chunk of time for folks to make available during one of the busiest times of the year. The challenge was also somewhat technical – having to contend with camera gear that may not have been used for years (or ever by some of the participants who bought or borrowed their gear just for the event).

We also witnessed heartbreak when one participant went to turn in her roll of film, only to discover that it possibly hadn’t been loaded in the camera correctly and despite shooting all 12 of the theme shots. We’re going to process the roll anyway just in the off chance that the camera did expose something.

We also had the weather to contend with…fortunately the snow held off until the day afterwards!

I mentioned that I spent almost the entire day inside Blenz. Ben and I managed to duck out twice to visit one of the event sponsors, the Vancouver Lookout at Harbour Centre. We went once in the early afternoon:

and then again after dark:

You can view all my photos from the event on Flickr or visit the 12×12 YVR Flickr Pool where we’ll be posting the entries once they are processed.

I have to say, I’m kind of envious of the participants…if I wasn’t directly involved in the event, I would have loved to taken the challenge myself.

UPDATE: Check out the details about the 12×12 YVR event, Raw Talent which will showcase the winners at the Vancouver Photo Workshops on Saturday, January 16th at 6pm.