Joe did a great job photographing the kids and I had a lot of fun photographing the action.
There were 9 kids and some of their parents that stopped by to have their photos taken. That meant there was more time to play with the shots and get different poses. There was also time for photographers to play as well.
Thanks to Joe for setting it all up and to the staff in the Child Life center for letting us do this!
Today’s Charleston Help-Portrait event was cold and rainy and probably not nearly as busy as expected. Like last year, we had four portrait stations set up with a computer and photo editor for each one (I was one of the photo editors again this year). Unlike last year, we had a big tent all to ourselves, so there was a lot more room to move around. The rain also didn’t wait until we finished, so the first part of the morning was chilly and damp. The rain eventually stopped, but it didn’t really warm up all that much. We also didn’t do any printing onsite this year either, which made things considerably less chaotic.
Setting up
Despite the weather there were still a lot of people that came by to have their portraits taken. There were 48 groups at my station, and the one next to me did around 40. Not sure how many the other two did, but I’m guessing probably about the same. That means there were probably between 150-180 groups that came through so over 300 people had their portraits taken.
Thoughts on this year.
Tethering camera to laptop is definitely the way to go. It was planned for this year, but the cables didn’t arrive in time. I was able to work tethered, but the others needed to swap cards. DIYPhotoBits worked very well on my PC to retrieve images from the camera.
With the number of people that came through, giving each group a unique number was very helpful for identifying which photos belonged to each group. Using folders named by number and name helped keep things organized.
I thought I might be able to view and adjust/crop the photos after they were taken, but that turned out to be not very practical at the rate people were coming through. We were able to let people see their portrait on the laptop after they were taken, but all of the processing and cropping is going to happen afterwards.
Next time get a tent with solid white roof. Ours had yellow and white stripes, which made for some odd lighting.
Making sure it all works
I’m not sure how busy the rest of the Convoy of Hope event was, but it sounded like there were a lot of people, although not as many as planned. Still an immensely rewarding event. Thanks to Rhea and Chris for making it all happen! Can’t wait to do it again!
Photographers, equipment (backdrops, lighting, printers, laptops) will be needed for all events. That’s not all though! We want to make sure people look their best before taking their portrait, so makeup artists and hair stylists are needed as well! Donations of photo paper and ink will also be gratefully accepted.
If you’re interested in helping out in any capacity or want to find out more, join one or both groups and help out. Make a difference in someone’s life!
Got to do something I don’t get to do a lot of here in Charleston: meet other Canadians!
Thanks to the new Canadians in the South meetup group, I got to meet a few more of my people this evening. The meetup was supposed to take place at Moe’s Crosstown Tavern, but apparently they’re closed for renovations, so we ended up meeting at Charleston Beer Works instead. Had a good time meeting and talking to people. There were 7 people so it wasn’t a huge group.
It looks like Barcamp Charleston was another resounding success. Lots of hard work was put in by the organizers and there were lots of happy people everywhere I went today. Learned lots of things, met lots of people and put more faces to Twitter names.
Thanks to Baked for providing all the delicious breakfast noms!
(This is not Baked breakfast noms. This is BarcampCHS robot)
There were something like 60 proposed sessions, all of which I think got scheduled. All the sessions I went to were pretty good. Probably the most interesting one was the Google Q&A session where a couple folks from Google’s Berkley County data center answered a bunch of Google related questions.
The ham radio session I went to was really interesting too. Learned a lot about what it takes to get into ham radio.
BarcampCHS was yet another awesome learning experience. Charleston could use more events like this to give people more chances to get their geek on and meet other people to do that with.
