Northern Voice 2008, Day 1 Continued

The high­light of the after­noon was for me, as it turned about, Pho­to­Camp. That’s the ses­sion on pho­tog­ra­phy led by Kris Krug, Pres­i­dent of Bryght. I’ve been to this ses­sion in past years, but this year Kris had a slight­ly dif­fer­ent for­mat (although he had done Pho­to­Camp this way at oth­er venues like Bar­Camp): A group of dif­fer­ent experts in a vari­ety of pho­to­graph­ic tech­niques and top­ics fol­lowed. Tim Bray talked about what ide­al small cam­era to get, even if you already have a larg­er Dig­i­tal SLR (and I was glad to see that he pro­mot­ed the site DPRe­view, a site that Steven had rec­om­mend­ed many times when I was shop­ping for a cam­era.) Local art pho­tog­ra­ph­er Rachael Ashe showed some stun­ning­ly psy­che­del­ic effects you can get by using long expo­sures in a dark room along with var­i­ous kinds of coloured lights; a kind of light paint­ing. You can see an exam­ple done today here. I’ve seen oth­er exam­ples of this online, but the ones she did had an almost icon­ic (in the reli­gious sense) qual­i­ty. Novak Rog­ic of Microsoft showed how you could make ele­gant and almost pic­turesque lit­tle plan­ets from stiched togeth­er panora­mas, Duane Storey (who I am hop­ing to pur­chase one of his stun­ning pho­to­mu­rals of the Van­cou­ver sky­line from) talked about how to set up a store to sell your pho­tos on SmugMug.com and Miran­da Liev­ers, a local por­trait and wed­ding pho­tog­ra­ph­er, gave a superb show of how to make the best pic­tures from avail­able light. It was that last pre­sen­ta­tion that par­tic­u­lar­ly impressed me, and I hope I’ll be able to use some of what I learned in future photos.

After Pho­to­camp, I went to the ses­sion on Word­Press (part­ly as a pre­lude to tomor­row’s keynote by Matt Mul­len­weg, the found­ing devel­op­er of Word­Press, one of the most suc­cess­ful blog­ging soft­ware pack­ages today, and the soft­ware I use to pub­lish all of my blogs.) While that was main­ly a break­out ses­sion where we all had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to avail our­selves of local experts, it was fol­lowed by a ter­rif­ic pre­sen­ta­tion called ‘More than Cat Blogs’, which was how Word­Press can be used to build web sites that are either not blogs at all, or don’t look any­thing like blogs. (unfor­tu­nate­ly I did­n’t get the pre­sen­ters name and he has­n’t post­ed any links to his ses­sion or him­self on the North­ern Voice Wiki).

After all of these pre­sen­ta­tions, I went with sev­er­al oth­ers to the near­by Mahoney’s bar, where Vox­ant News­room, a dig­i­tal news video host­ing ser­vice, was offer­ing free drinks and t‑shirts in return for fill­ing out a short sur­vey regard­ing blogs and oth­er demo­graph­ic infor­ma­tion. It was nice to be able to get drinks (and even­tu­al­ly din­ner) so close the the con­fer­ence, and I was home at a decent hour, ready for a full sec­ond day of North­ern Voice tomor­row. It starts ear­ly (at 8:30 AM), so hope­ful­ly I’ll be up and ready.