The above photo was taken in Gastown, Vancouver, with a Vivitar Ultra Wide and Slim toy camera.

I’m really glad Zak invited me to work with Foo Associates at Northern Voice this past weekend. I don’t think I would’ve attended otherwise because my experience last year didn’t leave me “wanting more”. I would’ve missed out on a lot if I hadn’t been there.

I felt last year was great socially, and interesting because I was “thrown” last minute onto a panel, but lacking in the kind of content I’d actually paid for. This year was still very social, but because of my role as “Foo Associates representative”, brought me into contact with many new and interesting people instead of just chatting with friends. I was definately more interested in this year’s speakers, and made a point of not opening my laptop and (mostly not) shooting my camera during sessions to divert my attention. An open laptop in the audience usually seems to mean surfing/chatting/photo editing is going on, and I didn’t want to fall into it this year like so many others I observed.

Zak and I led a morning session on the first day called “Photo-Blogosphere-Meatspace-Mashup.”
The idea was to document different information related to blogging, such as the year people started blogging, number of blogs kept, and so on. We threw out some ideas, as did the audience, and then found a spot to create human graphs using the twenty or so participants. The results were fun, and though we hoped to explore this further during the conference, weather and space issues were against us. It’s an idea I’d like to try again, if I can figure out a good way to bring together interested bloggers.

I never did get further on the second day with my diptych series of conference attendees and their equipment, as mentioned in my previous blog entry. But again, I definately want to explore this further, now that I have a better idea of what works well and how best to shoot it.

All in all Northern Voice was a great source of inspiration, knowledge and social interaction.