(cross-posted from my blog over at Raincity)

Checking in from the basement of CBC’s Vancouver headquarters as we kick off an event which is bound to be quite remarkable - the CBC Digital Development Labs.

This morning was introductions by the entrepreneurial-minded attendees chosen to display and refine their ideas for possible development by CBC. I’m participating as a mentor (along with others) here to advise, gut-check, collaborate with (and learn from) the emerging visionaries.

Our secret lair (which is very cool by the way - set up with a variety of workspaces, conversation breakout areas, Mac labs, gamer stations - feels like jPod) is also loaded with industry types acting more as observers to see how projects come together in the new media paradigm.

Check out the new ION Magazine blog - featuring Daily(ish) Reviews, behind-the-scenes peeks at fashion and music shoots, and access to guest list and insider info on the by-now-legendary ION parties. They assure me that 08 is going to be next-level, and Static Photography and Kris Krug will be a part of it all! Good work Fiona, Vanessa, and Michael.

PS. We’ve also recently created a ION Magazine Flickr group. Submit your photos there and have them included in the magazine and the blog. Here’s some more info…

For the past 2 semesters I've been teaching at VFS in the Entertainment Business Management faculty. I teach 'Internet Technologies 101' and 'Internet Technologies 202'.

As a part of our final project for 'Internet Technologies 202' each of the students has been creating and maintaining their own Wordpress.com blog. With Matt coming into town, and so many awesome social media types on hand for Nothern Voice I decided what better way to toss them all into the deep end, than requiring that they all come to Northern Voice to pass my class. *evil grin*

Here’s a recent segment of the The Lab with Leo show of me talking about Bryght. We cover Drupal, open source software, and our recently launched work on the Grateful Dead’s online community website. I’ve done 3 other segmants that haven’t aired yet and am scheduled to be in the studio to film 2 more this week including on our our new FreeTheNet.ca project.

This weekend is BarCamp Vancouver and I’ll be heading up a PhotoWalk on Friday night and a PhotoCamp on Saturday.

Here’s some shots from last years late night photowalk at BarCamp.

If you’re interested in photography, cameras, or just want to talk a cool walk through East Van… it would be great to see lots of you out there. Here’s the details. Get in touch with me if you have any questions.

PhotoWalk
- signup on FaceBook
- meet at WorkSpace
- 11pm, Friday August 17th

PhotoCamp
- signup on the Wiki
- @ Workspace during BarCamp Vancouver
- TBD, Sunday August 18th

Back in Vancouver for a week after a few days in Seattle at Gnomedex. Gnomedex is a secret club of uber geeks that gets together once a year to hang, chill, chat, chest beat, network, share, and collaborate. Or something. It’s put on by friends Chris and Ponzi and draws a great group of nerds, dorks, and geeks from around the globe. I got the chance to hang with lots of old friends like Ethan, Lee, Mark, Dave, Darren, Scott, Schlomo, and Jay and met lots of new ones like Guy, Cali, Jacob, Molly, and others.

BarCamp Vancouver is this Friday and Saturday. I’m one of the organizers and will be hosting my 5th PhotoCamp. If you live near Vancouver and use the internet you should come to this event. It will be fun. You will learn a lot. You will mean a lot of awesome people. You unfortunately will not get laid.

Here’s all the details and informations about the event… get in where you fit in.

My buddies over at Burnkit, the hottest web design and creative services firm in Vancouver, launched their new website today… and it’s smokin’. They are a part of a bunch of boutique design agencies that are participating in a web redesign contest called May 1st ReBoot.

The site features video embedded in Flash and lots of awesome photos of the Burnkit team and their stunning new offices in Railtown. I was honored to find upon clicking through the super creative ‘Team’ section of the site that a couple of my photos had been used on Jeremy Crowle’s profile. Swedish! I should probably also mention, that like any uber-hip new media outfit… they have their own Facebook group.

Solid work guys. Can’t wait to see what you come up with next.

(this has been cross-posted from my fashion photography blog)

We've really been learning a ton about flashes, strobes and studio lighting for fashion photography in the past year and one of the main avenues for my education has been assisting other working photographers on their creative projects.

Recently we had the chance to go to a local Gastown boxing training gym to assist on a shoot for Trevor Brady. We brought our new lights and between the 2 of us we lit 4 different locations and came up with these shots.

We spent most of the time on set setting up and testing lighting and cameras, but also had the opportunity to step in and Trevor took a couple test shots of Kris this time around and published them with the rest of the images. *blue steel* Careful, now he's a 'male model. Ha.

Trevor is a true creative talent… We're big fans of him as a person of his work as well. He's been super gracious and knowledgable and very fun to hang out with. Thanks again man.

Model - Kay (Jettmodels.com).
Photography - Trevor Brady.
Assistant - Kris Krug.
Makeup - Dana Mooney.
Wardrobe Stylist - Jessica Smith.
Location - Vancouver, Canada

With Northern Voice behind me it’s time to finalize preperations for my trip to Austin Texas for SXSW (thats South by Southwest for the uninitiated) 2007.

Last year SXSW was huge for us at Bryght. We had a booth, thew a great party with Raincity, Blue Flavor and NewsVine, and drummed up a bunch of great Drupal development and consulting gigs. Since last year we’ve worked on lots of online community projects including the one for Warner Brothers Records and are excited to mix it up again with music industry moguls down in Texas.

This year will be more of the same with the exception that I’ll be speaking on panel this year. The first panel of the whole conference in fact! Alex Williams, Corey Dennis and I are working together to present the talk “Snakes on A Mother Fuckin Plane“. Raincity will have a booth this year and Bryght will have a presence in it. Come find me in booth J5 during exhibition hours.

I’m trying to keep track of all the extracurricular activities that I’ll be participating in over at Upcoming.org. Of particular interest is this years South by Northwest party throw by Byght, RCS, and Blue Flavor as well as the Yahoo BarTab party featuring Flickr, MyBlogLog, Upcoming, Bix, Pipes, etc etc..

I took a bunch of pics last year including some great ones of the Flaming Lips. I’m super excited to get out and about with my cameras again this year and see what I can capture.

I’m super excited and have lots to do before I leave next Friday. If you’re gonna be there and wanna hang out make sure you drop me a line and let’s plan to meetup!

(photo by Trevor Brady)

(Cross-posted from my fashion photography blog over at www.staticphotography.com)

This is a very exciting week for me as I prep with the rest of the organizing team for Northern Voice 2007 and MooseCamp.. I'm going to be leading a PhotoCamp as a part of the event and am wondering who else will be there?

Didja catch all that? I know it's a lot… here's a couple quick descriptions.

Northern Voice - Vancouver's 3rd annual personal publishing conference held out at UBC. Saturday, February 24th @ UBC.

MooseCamp - the first day of Northern Voice is a self-organizing 'unconference in the style of BarCamp. Friday, February 23rd @ UBC.

PhotoCamp - the session at MooseCamp that I am pulling together focused on photography and collaboratively presented by the many talented photographers attending Northern Voice.

So far I know that Matt Trentacoste, Warwick Patterson, Bre Pettis and Evan Lesson plan on giving workshops at Photocamp… and that good buddies Robert Scoble and Scott Beale will be on hand for the event… but I'd love to know who else is coming and if you have something you'd like to talk about? Drop me an email or post to your blog and I'll get you on the agenda.

Kdon over at Discollection is an amazing designer and stylist. I've been using her for lots of Static Photography shoots lately and was even more impressed than usual in the job she did styling the Ashley-Rae photoshoot with awesome designer vintage clothes from her store.

I’ve noticed an interesting trend in online communities and social software. It seems that quality of design and usability of a site is inversly proportional to the number of people who use it.

That is, in a situation where more than one tool/site exists to serve a similar market… the ugliest, most unusable one will ultimately attract the more users than the aesthically beautiful, super intuituve ones. Think MySpace versus Facebook. Delicious versus Magnolia. ModelMayhem versus ModelLaunch. Flickr versus Photobucket/TextAmerica are the only notable exceptions. Whaddya think?

I’ve been overdue in posting about the upcoming Web Directions North coming to Vancouver February 6-10th, but 2007 is upon us and it’s just around the corner and I’m getting really excited. The combination of amazing speakers, fantastic location, and after-hours events will make Web Directions North about as good as a conference can be. But the connections and friendships that you build there are what will make it even better. Here’s the deal…

* WDN is a tier-1 web design and development conference that is going to be here in Van and attract the who’s who of the UI, UX, and design worlds. It’s gonna be all our peeps who usually we only get to see at SXSW (i.e. ‘internet spring break‘) but here in Vancouver.

* Topics include Ajax and Javascript, CSS, Microformats, mashups, standards based web design and development, accessibility, web app development, XHTML and HTML and more.

* WDN is put on by Dave Shea, Derek Featherstone, Maxine Sherrin and John Allsopp. These guys are awesome collegues, mentors, and friends.

* People like Cameron Moll, George Oates, Kelly Goto, Andy Clarke, Adrian Holovaty, Douglas Bowman, Dan Cederholm, Joe Clark, Molly Holzschlag, Derek Featherstone, Veerle Pieters, Jeremy Keith will be in town presenting and training.

* There are 2 days of skiing and snowboarding up at Whistler planned for the event. That’s what I’m talking about. Everyone is gonna wanna move here after their visit!

I’ll be there for the event and the snowboarding and hopefully I’ll lots of you there as well.

A few weeks ago I blogged about submitting a few of my photos to JPG photography magazine for inclusion in their upcoming issue. Well, submission are now closed and 3 of my pics are being considered for publication. Please head on over there and take a look at them and vote for these 3 pics of mine.

“Free Radical” to Embrace the Blur

“The Streets of Italy” to Tourist

“Shower” To Intimate

I’m in it for the free subscription. Here’s the deets in case you are interested in submitting for the next issue.

Street photography is about getting out there, observing the public, overcoming your shyness, and documenting the world around you. It shows the world as it is, like holding up a mirror to society, capturing a moment in time.

So let’s see your best street photo! Remember: Photos in this theme must have been taken on a public street. And we’re not looking for photos of streets, we’re looking for photos taken on streets.

Hey there guys. We’ve been scrambling to pull together the plans for our 3rd Northern Voice personal publishing conference here in Vancouver. There are a couple important announcements from the past few days that I wanted to pass along.

The deadline for prentations, panels, and speakers has been extended to December 1st.

You don’t have to be famous or a professional conference presenter: we’re looking for both fresh and experienced voices who wish to present or chair a panel on topics related to personal publishing, the internet, gaming, interactive, entertainment, blogs, videoblogging, podcasting, virtual worlds like Second life and that all fun geekery. It’s all about the abstract. If it’s well written and topical, your chances will be much higher.

Submit a speaker application form.

Registration is open now!

The last 2 years this has been a hugely popular event… we’ve sold out both times months in advance of the event and needed to run a waiting list. Don’t wait… it’s not expensive.

Pre-register and save $10. It’s only $30 for a single day and $50 for both days as opposed to $40 for one day and $60 for both days at the door. I bet we’ll sell out like last year so pre-registration is recommended.

Register online now!

Also… I’m going to be pulling together another lil Photocamp at the Moosecamp part of the event. If you want to be a part of presenting or sharing please drop me a line and lets figure something out.

UPDATED: Darren just uploaded and posted some groovy new graphics and badges to help promote the event. Please check them out and consider sticking one on your site or in a post and linking to the site. This conference is promoted purely by word of mouth and we could use your mouth!

For those of you who don't know, that lil white 'puter sitting on the bar at Workspace has an awesome app on it called Photobooth. It works with the onboard camera and you can take fun and silly pics of yourself and the peeps you see at Workspace. I'm currently working on a lil documentary project where I take at least one snap everytime I show up at the space. It's been fun and I have quite the collection going. If you do take some please tag them 'photobooth' and 'workspace' so we can find them on the internet. You can also submit them to the Workspace group on Flickr. I'm going to make a Qoop poster of them all my Workspace Photobooth self portraits and give it to Bill for Xmas.

Mmmm… Movember.

So you’ve decided to be awesome.

You’re about to embark on a mission that will not only change your face, but also the face of men’s health. It’s natural to have questions, to wonder if you have the sheer strength of will to make the world a better place.

Fear not, Mo Soldier. We have the answers that you sorely crave.

How to participate

1. Before you do anything, sign up. Do it now. Seriously.
2. Tell your friends. Ask them to pledge you, or, if you think they have the testosterone, challenge them to grow their mo’ as well.
3. Spread the word as much as you can, through your blog, through the mail, or by spelling out “GROW YOUR MO” in skywriting.
4. On Movember 1, shave your mo’ for the last time until December, and prepare yourself for the adoration of a hero.
5. At the end of Movember, come together with your Mo’ Bros and celebrate a job well done at the Mo Bash on November 30 at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto. (Barrows will definitely hold their own party somewhere, all participants will be welcome)We’ll do a Vancouver version of this party if any of you cats can actually grow whiskers.

Movember Rules

1. Once registered, each Mo Bro must begin on the 1st of Movember with a clean shaven visage. Five-o’clock shadows at 10 am are considered ‘false starts.’ (participants will have to take their own ones and mail them no later than 11am on the 1st)
2. Each gentleman’s moustache must, through the entire month of Movember, adhere to the following guidelines:
a. At no time shall the aforementioned ‘mo’ join the sideburns — that’s a beard.
b. At no time shall the gentleman’s chin hair overshadow the Mo’s brilliance, nor may it join at the sides of the Mo — that’s a goatee.
c. For gentlemen who crave balance above all things, we will permit growth of a patch of the man’s own design under his bottom lip (aka a soul patch).
d. At no point may a gentleman’s eyebrows connect to the moustache. We most definitely do not endorse this.
3. Failure to observe these guidelines will, at the complete discretion of the Movember Committee, result in an embarrassing ejection from further Movember activities, including the Gala Parté. You do not desire this.
4. The Movember Committee accepts no responsibility for requests of heroism, increased female affection resulting in the alienation of girlfriends, increased senses of self-satisfaction, or any other of the potential side-effects of sporting a Movember mo.

Spread The Word

The best way to tell the world about how you’re going to change it is word of MOuth. Tell your buddies, your brothers, your fathers, your grandfathers, your uncles and your cousins about the cause. Tell them you’re a Mo’ Bro/Sista, and they should be Bros/Sistas too.

Be forewarned, they may object; they may resist. You’re likely to hear things like:

“Mine will look ugly.” “My office won’t allow it.” “My girlfriend/wife/casual bed-friend has banned moustaches from our common living space.”

Stand strong Brothers and Sistas. Be brave

This WILL get interesting…

Due to the overwhelmingly positive feedback from attendees to Northern Voice 2006 and Northern Voice 2005 we’ve decided to bring it back again for 2007.

For those of you who are unfamiliar (gasp!) Northen Voice is an independant and grassroots personal publishing conference based here in Vancouver. Think internet, photography, audio, video, blogs, games, mobile. Think passion, creativity, geekery and community.

Planning has been underway for months and we’ve just opened speaker submissions for Northern Voice 2007. Here’s what Boris has to say about all that:

Right now, the speaker submission page is open. One thing to note….write a good abstract, and take filling that speaker submission form out seriously. We got lots of entries from great folks who just didn’t bother telling us what they would talk about, or make a case for why they should have a session (or un-session, as the case may be). Colin Brumelle (and yes, he works with me at Bryght), was the only abstract submission that was unanimously voted in on the first pass.

What kind of submissions do we want to see? Well, let me tell you what I would love to see…

I sat down with Robert Scoble at Gnomedex, asking him what he would like to see at next year’s Northern Voice (he mentioned it briefly talking about Kris’ part in a MediaShift article). We talked about two things: Geolocation and virtual worlds.

Abstracting this a little, to me it means the intersection of the physical world with online. Blogging has always done this — with people bring pieces of their offline lives online, or helping to make real life connections through communicating online.

I talked about our mandate — appealing to a wide range of people. Geolocation and virtual worlds are still new. But, not too new that people can’t start experimenting if someone gives them a few pointers. Flickr now has integrated geotagging, and Second Life continues to explode. Your barber is not unlikely to play World of Warcraft, and the Nokia N95 has GPS and photo sharing built in.

Much thanks to my fellow organizers Darren, Brian, Cyprien, Lauren, Boris and Roland as well as the many friends of Northern Voice and volenteers that help to make this thing so fun and a big success.

As part of BarCamp Vancouver and PhotoCamp, Matt and I are pulling together a lil photowalk in Vancouver’s Gastown.

Digital or film, pro or hack… everyone is welcome… bring a camera (or several!) or be a subject/model. We’ll walk around, take pictures, eat Mister Tube Steaks and generally have a good time. Bring a flash, a tripod, a flashlight, some glowsticks or other fun things and we can expirament with long exposure stuff and light painting.

We’ll be leaving on foot from Workspace in Gastown at about midnight, tonight, Friday August 25th. Hope to see ya’all there.