My First BarCamp – Vancouver 2008

There are various conferences around the world that deal with various topics and levels of geekiness though this past Saturday would have been the first time I attended an unconference which was to be held at Granville Island in the beautiful city of Vancouver. What is an unconference you might ask? Well I have never really been told what it may be but whatever it is, it seems to be a free-for-all mashup of topics that people who attend might fine interesting.

So what is BarCamp? Well I am still a bit unsure what exactly it is but the turn out seemed to be very good and there was a bunch of discussions on various topics ranging from iPhone Jailbreaking, US Politics, general discussions on Video Gaming and more.

10:00 AM – Schedule Jam

After walking and taking the False Creek ferry over to Granville Island it was time to go sign in and find out what the whole Barcamp Vancouver 08 was going to be about. I actually didn’t know what it was but the only two items I wanted to see was the WordCamp and the PhotoCamp sessions.

The Schedule Jam seems to be a free-for-all with some rules in play. People lined up at the front of the Revue Stage and wrote down what they would like to talk about. They went up one by one to pitched their 30 second speech about what it was they wanted to talk about to the crowd and then were slotted into an appropriate venue and time. Pretty cool way about setting up topics for discussion, you don’t know what you might attend until the first day of this particular unconference.

11:00 AM – WordCamp

Rebecca (Miss604) and Duane (Duane Storey) were the organizers of this particular WordCamp and it was fairly informational and popular.

Duane & John setting up

Some of the topics that were discussed were as follows:

An application of using WordPress MU (I didn’t know there was a multi-user version available to the public) in conjunction with some plugins to create a social network in which people can add ‘friends’, send messages between each other and have their own WordPress blog. (BuddyPress)

Tris Hussey talked about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) with WordPress and mentioned using the plugin All-in-one SEO plugin that is quite popular.

Lloyd from Automattic (WordPress) talked about how WordPress can be used for business and not just blogging.

There was a lunch and the WordCamp people headed over to The Cat’s Meow for some beer (courtesy of Automattic) and food. I walked around Granville Island as I had a mission to find a particular item which used to be sold in one of the small shops.

1:00 PM – WordCamp Continued

There was some talk about a new service in which you can ‘snip‘ content from various websites keeping their licensing (if applicable) for use on your WordPress site.

John (John Biehler) talked about a great and very useful plugin called FAlbum. It brings the functionality of Flickr to your blog without having your visitors actually goto Flickr. I might be loading this plugin soon.

Duane (BraveNewCode) and John (John Bollwitt) had a general Q&A session where items such as the newly released plugin Lifestream was mentioned (a few times) as well as trying to protect your content from those nasty scraping sites.

There was a break for a little bit and while walking around Granville Island I say Henry Winkler! Yes the Fonz! Though I didn’t think about taking a photo from him nor asking if I could because I could not remember his real name until Stephen said it on Twitter when I twitted about the celebrity run-in.

3:00 PM – PhotoCamp

Now I am a relatively new photographer and am I always looking for more information on the subject or little hints and tricks to better my photos and skills.

John Biehler was the lead organizer of this session and unfortunately Kris Krug could not make it.

Derek (penmachine) started off talking about some basics which made sense and helped explain things I really never thought about such as what does 200mm mean? Well in general it means the glass (if it was a single piece) in the lens is 200mm away from the film or sensor of a camera. He also talked about how telephoto lens and wide angle lens work in more detail.

Tris (Tris Hussey) talked about Piknic as an alternative for photo editing but online. He demoed the various actions you an perform on a photo and for those who are on the road and need to edit and upload photos should really take a look into using this. It’s like Photoshop on the fly!

John talked about Holga 35mm cameras and how they can create some pretty interesting effects for being cheap. He also talked about the use of his fish-eye lens and how you can spend under $40 instead of spending over $500 on a lens.

There was talk about macro tubes and how there are inexpensive way doing macro photography. Reminds me I have macro tubes that my Grandfather gave me way back in the day though I doubt they would work with my Canon EOS 450D, perhaps I could find an adapter for them? Also a trick was to shoot backwards through a 50mm prime to get a macro effect as well. Now who out there wants to sell me a 50mm f1.8 lens for my EOS 450D?

John, Derek and Tris talked about their backpacks and slingbacks and various other considerations when looking for bags to carry your camera gear around with you. Derek’s slingback looked pretty cool by Lowepro though I liked John’s Crumpler as it held more, looked cooler and more comfortable for hiking.

Since 5 PM was approaching quickly and there was rumours that other sessions were being kicked out they ended PhotoCamp and I wondered my way back to English Bay via the False Creek ferry. Though checking out Flickr (using barcampvancouver2008 as a tag) they was a small photo walk around Granville Island that could have been fun.

Final Thoughts

Even though there were a lot of other sessions that were being held none of them really peaked my interest enough to leave the WordCamp or PhotoCamp sessions. I did enjoy BarCamp Vancouver though and will probably attend on the next one, next year.

I would have liked to also have taken more photos but none of my lenses were good enough in lowlight to produce anything decent. The above photo was taken at ISO 1600 with the aperture as wide as possible which was I believe 4. It turned out alright, I did some post-processing on it with Adobe Lightroom which pretty much was just the use of the Fill-Flash slider.