Aaron Brazell, of Technosailor.com, organized and orchestrated the WordCamp MidAtlantic event held on May 16, 2009 in Baltimore, MD. I was tagged as the “official photographer” of the event, and therefore was tromping around the conference rooms of the University of Baltimore's School of Business for about eight hours. Right before lunch, I managed to catch Aaron as he ran around, and made him sit down on the stairs for his official photo. I took six of them, trying to get the one with his best smile. It was helpful that about six people were standing behind me, calling him a goober and all sorts of things- it was making him laugh.

Events are extraordinarily difficult to photograph. For hours, people are (a) sitting and staring at a speaker (b) talking to each other (c) poking their computers and (d) looking really, really boring. It is the challenge of the photographer at this point to take hundreds of photos... and not put everyone to sleep when they’re reviewed later!

The first keynote speaker at WordCampMidAtl was Anil Dash. Anil is the VP of Six Apart, the makers of Movable Type, TypePad, and Vox.

Of course, the entire room was crammed full of the 170+ attendees. As for me, I’m fortunately never star struck, and I walked right up to Anil and told him that as the official photographer, I got to make sure I got a great photo of him... and that would definitely, most positively, include holding my TravelMonkey Jacques. Anil cracked up, held the monkey, and beamed at me. Voila! Personality overload.

A major, massive challenge are two things: the lighting is sure to be terrible, and, photographing a room THIS BIG is sure to create all sorts of eyeball aches (look at all those laptops!):

So, what to do? Well, looking at massive crowd shots is not exciting. Oh certainly, I took quite a few of those. But I went roving throughout that huge room in every session, hunting for people’s personalities, ready in a split second with my camera to catch people acting interesting.

Essentially, I never sat down all day. I think I probably did sit down, but my eyes were scanning the crowd, watching for the moment when I could snatch a moment of people-being-people.

That really large conference room, by the way, did indeed cause light problems. Some evil designer of the building decided that the recessed lighting would be *awesome* if it had neat-o lampie things- that were orange. As in, I had to compensate for everyone having a really nice looking tan later. Everything was seriously the wrong shade! When you are actually standing in the room, your brain will adjust and you won’t really notice the color. But the camera doesn’t lie to you: the speakers were blue (from the white screen behind them), the audience was orange, and the photographer was muttering the entire time (as I constantly adjusted for the wrong color). Oh! And flash? Oh, no no no. (I've actually been called a "flash nazi!" to my face, LOL) I did whip it out occasionally, but that was for the initial shot of the speaker showing up. During the sessions, I decided that a constant flashbulb would be extremely distracting, and therefore I didn’t use it.

In the smaller room, there was a whole lot less light. The lights were OFF, actually, because you were supposed to be looking at the speaker and their slides. Er- that’s great for THEM, but for me?! Well. I adjusted for exposure, and overexposed the entire room. Problem solved. All but for the “boring room full of people” part:

What are you supposed to do with THAT?! Ah, the dilemma. Actually, that’s the usual dilemma, as I pointed out. After a couple hours (and six more to go!) you could start wondering what to do with yourself.

My solution, of course, is to start doing people studies. I sat in the room for (obviously) hours, watching people. I do that anyway-I’m a natural people watcher-and so I wait until I see the person looking especially portrait style delicious, and then I snap away.

At the end of the day, the hope is that the flavor of the place was caught. In this case, it was crammed full of people and their laptops, so I definitely went for the shots that reflected that. For the laptops-on-table shot, I politely walked up to the table, stood on a chair, and took the picture. The people at the table found this entertaining, for sure.

Quite a few times I was asked “what I normally photograph.” Well, I normally photograph events, actually, just like this one. A wedding is an event. A tech conference is an event. A party is an event. A congressional hearing is an event. Anything where you’re trying to show the star AND the attendees in the photographs and get the overall ambience = event. (Portraiture is definitely very, very different!)

To see all the photos of the event, visit the set on Flickr!

Anyone who was tired afterward, raise your hand!