I spend most of my working day as a Digital Project Manager. Actually, aside from lunch, it’s what I spend my entire day doing. I want to get in touch with a few more though, so I have started a meetup.

In an effort to meet more Digital Project Managers and learn and develop further than within the confines of where I work, I have started the The London Digital Project Management Group. The general idea is to have a number of pub meets within London where we can discuss project management methodologies, techniques for getting work done more effectively and anything else which might come up in the meet.

Initially, I don’t anticipate many people attending, but along the way I hope that a number of people will get involved so that we can share knowledge and insight between the different experiences that we have.

Everyone is welcome, and it’s completely free. So, if you’re interested, head over to the meetup page and sign up. The first meetup is on the 26th October.

The London Digital Project Management Group

Photo: Eerste Wereldoorlog, zeeoorlog by Nationaal Archief

On Saturday 6th of February I attended a photographic workshop organised through the London Strobist Meetup group on Flickr. This is the second event i’ve been to and from the pattern so far, the events are as broad and wide as you can want in a strobist photographic group. The workshop is an extra event in addition to the tour of universities throughout the country Tom Miles has been doing. Read on to find out more about the day.

The day began at 10am, kicking off with Tom Miles talking the group, of around 20 amatuer / semi-pro strobist photographers, through how he got into professional photography, who he works with, how he works and also how he gets his work. Tom’s photos are mainly editorial, focusing on sports and active subjects. Many of the attendees had some experience with strobist photography.

Shortly after talking through plenty of different work scenarios including problems encountered along the way, and giving the audience a better idea of how a pro works every day, we had our assignment handed to us.

We had to choose from five topics: Portrait of a Business Person, A Sports Shoe, Family Group, A Retail Park/Industrial Estate/Shopping Mall or The Hat. We then had 3 hours to go and shoot between 4 and 10 shots with our chosen subject. I chose Portrait of a Business Person, mainly to work on my skills in approaching strangers to take their photo.

So I wandered from Calumet Photo in Drummond Street, where the event was held, all the way down past the British Museum and onto Holborn, looking out for what I immediately thought of as a business person. As it turns out, this part of London has absolutely no men or women dressed in shirts and suits on a Saturday!!  So, with a little creative thinking, I expanded my search to include people who ran their own business.

First stop was a flower shop, but they were a little too busy. Next stop was Ruaraidh Murray (pictured above) at Folk Clothing who although wasn’t a business person, he did work in a business. He was kind enough to pose for a couple of shots, also incorporating ‘The Hat’! He recommended that I go and pay Tom Bodaly a visit down at Oliver Spencer. Tom was running Oliver Spencer, and although pretty busy agreed to stop for a few shots (picture at the top).

As we had to have our photos in by 3pm, i had a bit of lunch, headed back and handed my photos in with an invoice. Overall there wasn’t much criticism, except a few points about watching items in the background intersecting people’s heads! Something to definitely watch out for in the future!

The other photos taken by the London Strobists were also pretty good, with plenty of people approaching random strangers and pushing their own personal boundaries.

All in all, a very interesting day. A big thank you to the two guys who posed for a few photos, as well as Tom Miles, Emma Taylor, David Robbins from Nikon, and the guys at London Strobist Meetup group on Flickr for arranging the whole event. Tom’s report card on the day is available here.

As is usually the case over the festive holiday period, I had a little more time on my hands than usual. After seeing a number of adverts for the Decode: Digital Design Sensations exhibition at the V&A I decided to go and check it out and see what all the fuss was about…

I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of translating digital ideas into physical reality. The idea of taking a set of data, either made up or recorded from somewhere and representing that in a digital way. The Decode: Digital Design Sensations exhibition at the V&A is a demonstration of just that. Digital ideas represented in an easy to understand way.

The exhibition was split into three distinct parts: Code, Network and Interactivity. Code simply showed what could be done with raw data and the different ways in which it can be represented. I particularly liked the Digital Zoetrope by Troika London in this section which comprised text spinning on the outside of a cylindrical object, and appeared to slow down periodically in order to reveal certain facts.

Network contained exhibitions which displayed information which used a network in order to supply the information. There were a number of different ideas present here which mainly seemed to aggregate data and provide a visual representation of the data. One of the possibly more well known exhibits is the Exquisite Clock, where users who have downloaded the iPhone app can contribute an image to the clock pool. The clock uses these contributed images to display the time.

The interactivity section was by far the largest, in space and numbers. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Make Out display was one of the most intriguing with a six screen display with lots of videos of people kissing, sourced from the internet.

Other installations which I really liked included the Vanetian Mirror by Fabrica, which essentially recorded a long exposure picture but in a digital form. It was displayed on a high definition screen, almost life size. Because of the long exposure, subjects would have to sit or stand still for a few minutes before being completely and clearly shown.

Daniel Rozin’s Weave Mirror was also extrememly clever using motors, electronics and laminated c-shaped prints to display a reflection of whatever was in front of the mirror. The mirror was constantly moving to reflect what it saw using a gradient from light to dark.

Alth0ugh not by any means the last of the exhibition, Body Paint by Mehmet Akten seemed to be one of the most enjoyable interactive exhibitions with people throwing themselves and everything else they had up, down and around in front of the display which altered the paint on the digtial canvas. A very neat idea, and very well made!

Overall, the exhibition really shows off current trends, capabilities and performance by digital designers around us. The multitude of ways data can be represented, used, manipulated and displayed are seemingly unlimited. This, it seems, is the future – digital ideas which transcend the virtual world and real world boundaries, and bring some of the human elements back into computers.

Human input, digital output!

This is one of my photos from this years Scott Kelby’s world wide photo walk. I went along to the Bristol event along with a number of other bristol photographers and had a very interesting time.

My photos from the event can be found on the Flickr website in the World Wide Photo Walk set if you would like to have a look.

Here is a map of the photowalk:

View Scott Kelbys Worldwide Photo Walk – Bristol EN, UK in a larger map

The walk was made by around 30,000 people in approximately 900 cities all over the world, all on the same day. Peraps next year i’ll go to a different city somewhere else in the world.