Gamercamp 1.0

Mark Rabo, a good friend of mine from my university days, asked for help recently in shooting the event he and his friend Jamie Woo were hosting, a gaming forum called Gamercamp (http://www.gamercamp.ca/).

While I've long been out of touch with anything gaming related since I left my university dorm room back in 1999, I was craving for a chance to get back to photographing something other than my 9-month old son, who has been filling my lens non-stop recently.

I showed up on the early side to be able to scope out some of the rooms, ask Mark who the important people were that he wanted photographed, and get some set-up shots in before people started showing up. I was ferried around from room-to-room as Mark pointed out what would be happening and the rough schedule. We walked into the last room, the theatre, where the featured speakers would be demonstrating their latest gaming innovations and talking about their trade. My jaw dropped. This is what I saw...

Black walls.
Black ceiling.
Black floor.
Black chairs.
Black back-drop.

Crap.

Exposing me as the total geek that I am, I later commented that the event might as well have been held on the event horizon of a black hole as far as photogrpahy and exposure is concerned. Being out of practice, I paniced for a few minutes then got down to some set-up shots using the stage hand as my subject (something I don't think she appreciated).

I shot with the aperature wide open and a shutter speed that the meter thought was two stops too dark.  With the pure black background, this resulted in a decent exposure of the subject.  I think the shots turned out reasonably well and Mark was very happy with them.  Some of my photographs were used in three write-ups on the event:

A Couple of Gamers
Toronto Thumbs
Torontoist

Here's a sample of some of the photos I took. For the rest, they can be found in my Flickr set.