Tech Camp – day one over

So day one of Tech Camp is over. A morning thinking about voxpopping, editing some video in iMovie (which is a completely novel experience to all but one of the campers).

There’s a kind of Mac vs PC war of attrition building up, with the majority unfamiliar with the peculiar layout of Apple keyboards and the UI. But there’s a general agreement, that while iMovie occasionally crashes, it’s no where near as unstable as Pinnacle’s Studio products.

Foodie blogger Ruth is not only in charge, but looking after our (spiritual and calorie) food intake. Only one brush with a Daring Baker challenge ... a yummy chocolate cake that went down well with a blob of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream!

This afternoon’s photo scavenger hunt (email me if you'd like a copy of the clues to reuse with a group/event) saw us tramping around Belfast City Centre, tracking down 26 shots. Victoria Square’s closure of the Dome “for essential cleaning” – though no sign of any activity when the lift doors opened at the top – made the “someone you don’t know up in the dome of Victoria Square shopping centre” shot difficult to catch.

Surprisingly hard to find a bilingual (English/Irish) sign in the city centre. More likely to find information in the Belfast Welcome Centre in Polish than Irish! Not even a tokenistic sentence or two.

But we did get a bus driver to smile behind his/her wheel, and one team caught the white rabbit (not) playing the keyboard as “a busker”.

Perhaps the best shot of the day was in response to the challenge to “the entire team standing beside a big fish”. Rather than ask anyone else to take the picture, the camera was set on the ground on a timer. Out of focus, but with a certain beauty.

Judging the two team’s photos was made easy by borrowing the three projector set up that’s part of the Add to Set photo exhibition in the Waterfront. Thanks Adam! For each of the challenges, being able to judge the two teams side by side with the wording of the challenge on the middle screen made it into a communal effort, and the size of the images (despite the lousy lighting that kills the contrast of the pictures projected on the wall).

Fun too to quite randomly bump into Red Mum and Mymsie who were in Belfast and checking out the exhibition on their way back to Dublin. And interesting to watch and listen as the campers dissected and commented upon the photos stuck on the walls, finding the TtVed bunny shot from Moochin Photoman (whose TtV/Through the Viewfinder exhibition opens next week in the Black Box).

The evening’s activities finished off with a blast from the past (boom boom) and a showing of War Games – a film I well remember dragging my parents to in the cinema when I was still in P7. (I keep thinking I’ve mentioned it before on the blog, but I haven't.) Very retro. And full of technology and devices (acoustic couplers, dumb terminals, Space Invaders and Pac Man arcade games) that are completely alien to today’s teens.