At ETCON this year, I thought I’d buck the trend and use some ‘receding’ media to document the trip. I’m a 50/50 gadget/old tech fiend, and there’s two areas where I’m resolutely non-digital – photography and music. All my music is on vinyl, and I’ve got a lovely old linn sondek turntable and leak tuner. I’m even thinking of buying a valve amp, but that might be going *too* far.

So I took my medium format camera to ETCON – a Mamiya C330 – with the idea of taking quite formal pictures of the people there, trying to get people to pause for a minute for something a little different from the usual snapped digital pictures. I found a nice blank wall that looked like the kind of cheesy background school photographers use, and persuaded a few friends to pose. I’m quite pleased with the results, and will post them up here over the next few days. My only regret is that I stopped after the first few days, and so missed many people, including Danny & Phil, and also that a film I took of Larry Lessig and Brewster Kahle at the Internet Archive seemed to get fogged going through x-rays. I guess that doesn’t happen to digital cameras…

Still, it was a lot of fun – maybe Tim O’Reilly will be looking for a ‘school photographer’ for next year?

😉