CodeWorks 2009 was a series of two-day conferences for PHP developers and IT managers organized and run by the publishers of php|architect Magazine. It was held in seven cities: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, Atlanta, Miami, Washington DC, and New York over the course of September 22 to October 5th. At the DC stop, I arrived to take pictures on both Friday and Saturday.

The event was held inside the amazing Embassy Suites in Old Town Alexandria, VA. I say it was amazing because it had an incredible indoor atrium over eight floors high.

This particular picture was taken from the eighth floor. I'm not particularly fond of heights, and it made me nervous to be up there, but I leaned over the railing (eek!) and took a picture of the attendees while the ate lunch on Friday.

I took this shot from multiple vantage points, and the trees were a challenge because they obscured the view.

Also a challenge was attempting to pull my camera all the way back to 28... every time I leaned over the railing... THUNK. It took a few times of tipping my camera to the point right before the lens would shift (thank you, gravity!) and I got to take this really cool photo.

The rooms for the conference were on the ground floor, but there was an interesting issue: the air conditioning!

Since the "rooms" were actually a "mega-room", it was freezing in the room to the left, perfect in the middle room, and a complete sauna to the right.

More so, the lighting was awful. Each room had a staggered, uneven lighting scheme, with the lights turned a bit low so the attendees would be able to see the screens better.

What that creates, of course, is orange and blue light!

It didn't help much that the walls were off white, either, because it reflected the weird haze off the chandeliers. This is a common problem at any event.

The solution is to change the color temperature of the photo. It's best to do this while you're actually taking the picture, for example, to put your camera at 2600K or so.

Another option is to fix it later in your photo editing program. I use Aperture 2 myself. Fortunately, all the tables in the room had white table cloths, and all the attendees were wearing white nametags. Problem solved :)

One of the most insanely difficult parts of shooting an event is THE SPEAKERS.

There are a few reasons for this. One, they are near the projector, so, in addition to being in an orange room, the white light of the projector is making them blue!

They also MOVE. This is the hardest part, because when I'm shooting during a presentation I Do Not Use Flash. It would be incredibly annoying to everyone attending to have the flash going off repeatedly, so, I have to up my ISO and open my camera all the way up in order to stop motion as much as possible.

Of course, they're also talking. It is hard to take a picture of someone talking because most of the time, you'll get a shot right when they've got their mouth at some crazy shape, and that makes them look weird.

So, I take about twenty shots at a time of them speaking, purely with the intent of "getting the mouth open but not in a bizarro sort of way." It needs to be apparently they are giving a speech, but not in such a way the person wants to strangle you later.

Each speaker also has their own style. I watch each person for a while to see if they are hand wavers, podium balancers, or walkers.

Some of them, of course, sit on the table and drink tea while their PowerPoint is on AutoPlay. If that's who they are, that's what I try to catch!

I also try to catch the event's flavor, and by that I mean I try to show what the people themselves were like. Of course, there is the part where everyone is sitting around eating lunch. But there is also the part where people are really enjoying themselves and they're going to goof off for the camera.

Near the end of the two days, there is always the time where I've sifted through all my photos and decided, nope, I really don't like any of the shots I've taken of someone.

In the case of speakers, I will always ask them if I can take a portrait instead.

Most speakers are quite happy to pose, and I've frequently had the new photo I've taken of someone become a new profile shot. I take that as a compliment!

I tend to not take a million and one photos while I am shooting an event. I do not come back to my computer with a memory card loaded with nine hundred photos I have to sift through. For this event, I came back with maybe four hundred, and I chose 178 to put up online.

I think that every shot I take should be exactly what I was attempting to do, every time. I've found that shooting that way has enabled me to get that shot where I'm only able to take one photo, and it actually comes out right. This last photo, for instance, I saw the speaker for all of two minutes and was able to take one picture of him... but I think it came out rather well. It looks a bit like he's sitting in a forest (he was in front of a planter).

It's also a lot easier to not  be excessive shooter when I start sifting through all those photos- I've got mostly exactly what I want, and I'm not wasting my time sorting! That enabled me to upload photos within two hours of finishing: upload, sort, adjust, export, voila! I love Aperture 2 :) I recommend it.

Shooting the DC stop of the tour made me want to follow them to New York (the last stop). I like shooting events, and most of the time I get at least one person who wanders up to me and starts talking about my camera. I almost always shoot events with my 28-70mm 2.8L lens, because it gives me enough freedom to get awesome bokeh (like in the "he's in a forest?" shot) and yet enough pull back I can shoot an entire room and get the whole thing in.

All the shots from this event are in my Code Works 2009 set on Flickr, or you can browse them in the player below.

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!