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2026-01-26
This past weekend, I had the wonderful opportunity to volunteer at DistrictCon Year 1. While only responsible for a few tasks, I asked if I could also help take photos of the event, to which they agreed. Mind you, I had only owned a camera1 for three and a half months at this point, and had never done photography in a professional context. These are my thoughts on what I learned from this experience.
Some people prefer to keep control over what the world knows about them, including who they are and what they look like -- hackers especially so. This poses an interesting challenge for a photographer: how do I take photos of an event with 1200 people without violating someone's right to privacy?
My initial approach was to capture the cool activities people were up to. Many attendees were tackling CTF challenges across hardware and software, which made for compelling subjects. Several Villages also had cool exercises and displays laid out at their tables.
Another approach was to capture speakers during their talks. One of the tracks was already dedicated to being recorded and streamed online, which made it straightforward to simply capture these folks in a cool moment on stage.
Many attendees had incredibly unique computing setups or outfits, which compelled me to ask for their permission. It was important to ensure that 1) they were comfortable with having their photos taken and 2) they could address any personally identifiable information that may be exposed on their laptop screens. That being said, every person I asked was happy to help me capture incredible moments, and were grateful that I asked first.
Being an individual at a large enough event means you'll simply be unable to be everywhere at once. Rather than taking that as a challenge, I accepted that I wouldn't be able to take photos of every fun and interesting thing. The best I could expect was that by splitting my time between the things I could photograph2 and being intentional with how I chose my subjects, that I would be able to provide a nice set of highlights across the event.
Three months spent with a camera is not a whole lot of time, not to mention three months spent as a photographer. When you're in the moment, you don't want to be messing around with settings. It's important to have all of the important settings in place to be ready whenever the opportunity arises. Knowing which options are available to tweak and how to quickly change them are also crucial to never miss key moments. I definitely haven't spent enough time configuring sane presets that I can rely on in a pinch, and aim to deepen my knowledge on my gear.
Photography has been a fun and rewarding challenge, and I'm grateful to have been given this opportunity! Hearing praises from folks on how my photos turned out was encouraging and drives me to continue this hobby. For next year, I'd like to dial in a bit more on shooting indoors and have better presets for focusing on people and general subjects.
By this I mean a standalone camera, preferably with interchangeable lenses.
A lot of fun and interesting things happened behind closed doors, including various policy discussions, a separate speaker track, and the Jump The Wall hackathon.