Kevin Whitworth / Jacurutu

I'm back from BarCamp Leeds, and I've even managed to get a few of the photos edited. There's a few left to go, but as people were uploading them at the event, I didn't want to leave it too long. I'm not sure I'm really happy with the photos - mostly they're too dark so exposure has been heavily boosted in post-processing, resulting in lots of noise. Lighting at the event was a challenge - trying to expose both the projected images/slides and the people is quite tricky - flash helps, but washes out the projections. Still, they may not be art, but I guess they're a record of the event.

I have to say, I came away with mixed feelings about the event. It wasn't really what I expected - which was lots of people talking about Web 2.0 and social media applications. Ie really geeky (meant in a nice way, of course). Given this isn't really my area (which is more networks, OSS and dull back-office stuff), I guess I was hoping to recieve a crash-course in what's going on a the front end. I turned out that the talks were much broader than that. Lee Strafford's talk on his history, inlcuding Force9/PlusNet, and his latest project The NetStart (aka Project Sahara) was interesting, as it covers similar timelines to my involvement in Freeserve, and there were one or two interactions between Freeserve and PlusNet. Tim Water's talk on OpenStreetMap was also interesting, and I note he used my photos from the Leeds Mapping Party (which are incidentally marked as copyright - the lawyers will be round shortly!).

Unfortunately I had to leave after the afternoon coffee break - too much time spent working away from home, so being away for half the weekend as well wasn't really on. I kind of wish I'd done the talk about DSL, ISPs and stuff, but at least now I'll be able to prepare it properly for next time. I keep getting ideas (which I must try to remember), but with only 20-30 minutes, it could be a struggle to get through everything.

Right, that's it for now. When I get the chance, I'll try and edit the rest of the photos and put them online. One last thing, a big thank you to Imran and the rest of the organisers for such a great event. Roll on BarCamp Leeds {2008}!

Another spate of photo editing led me to sort out the photos from the Leeds Mapping Party back in September, which, if you recall, was to make further progress on the mapping of Leeds in OpenStreetMap.

There's a couple more photos in the set on Flickr, or in my own photo album, including Tim being interviewed by 2 Masters students from Trinity and All Saints College, and a nice shot of Tim, albeit with a video camera sticking out of his back.

It's been a while since I posted any photos, in part because it's been a while since I've done much photography (or editing of the backlog). However, I did manage a bit of a session the other weekend, and went through the shots of the Flyball demonstration by the Hillam Hot Dogs Flyball team at the Cawood Craft Festival over the August bank holiday.

Trying to get a good position was a struggle - the whole arena was (quite sensible) fenced in with orange plastic fencing, and then there's lots of obstables blocking the shots, plus you don't want to distract the dogs. However, the biggest problem is that the dogs just move so fast! Most of the shots I got ended up as junk, but a few came out OK. Attempts at panning shots were mixed, probably because the dogs are moving up and down (over jumps) as well as along - panning is probably best left to motorsport shots! The best couple are in a Flickr set, and the rest are in an album on this site. Enjoy!