I've put the photos I took of the big screen at the last two conferences I participated in, DUX05, which ended yesterday, and Ubicomp 2005, which was in Tokyo in September. I didn't take pictures of every slide, just the ones I was interested in, but I figured that others may be interested in 'em too, even though the quality of the photography isn't always great. I've put them up on Flickr and I encourage everyone to annotate and tag them as you feel appropriate.
Here they are:
DUX:
Ubicomp:
Also, in case you want to try this at home, here are my off-the-cuff thoughts for taking photos of slides at conferences:
- Set your camera's ASA as high as possible (mine goes to 400)
- Pay attention to the shutter speed. If it's super-low (like 1/4 of a second or less), you're not going to get much no matter what you do, so just listen to the talk.
- Sit roughly in the middle and 5-10 rows back; you may be able to get a flatter perspective if you sit further back, but you have less light coming from the screen so you have to zoom, which makes it more likely that the images will smear beyond readability.
- Take two pictures in rapid succession. Odds are that one of them will be less blurry than the other, usually the second one.
- Keep you camera open and turned on, people flip through slides fast.
- Don't worry about taking perfect pictures. It's just documentation for the sake of convenience. The actual slides are available elsewhere, if you really want them.
- Hold your camera with both hands.
- Never use the flash. It doesn't help and it's annoying.
- Like with a sunset, sometimes you just have to put the camera away and experience the real thing.
