At a lecture this morning Mary Virginia Swanson and her cohorts gave an assignment to the young student attendees of SPE – Make sure to make at least five friends! (I may be paraphrasing here)

Well, I missed the lecture due to volunteer duties and trying to troubleshoot some wordpress stuff, but I spent the whole day (about 15 hours) in the informal portfolio sharing room making friends and looking at work.

(images stolen from Kyle Ford’s memory card while he was out)

I talked to about 40 photographers (mostly students) about their work, doing my best to be helpful and looking for people to feature here. Some of the photographers had no buisiness card or similar contact info take-away (shame!), some had no website (double shame!), and some didn’t even have jpgs of their work anywhere on the internet, even flickr or facebook or something (oh the humanity!) I tried not to be too stern in my lectures and requested that many people email me jpgs of their work so I could post it up for the world to see. Hopefully those will start rolling in soon.

Here is a (very partial) list of the new friends I made today:

Kerry Kolenut, Daniel W. Coburn, The Zini’s Pizza delivery guy, Lauren Quinn Ward, Cain Nevaeh, Mary Barczak, Sarah Jamison, Keith Yahrling, Alexander Heilner, Ryan Ball, Ashley Miller, Frank M. Jackowiak, Katherine Robertson, Ryan A. Adrick, Sylvia de Swaan, Andy Bloxham, Susan Lirakis, Nick Flood, Andy Bloxham, Thomas Hardwicke, Natasha Montgomery, Victoria Wagner, Jon Jones, Ben Lieberson, Andrew Wittenmyer, and about a million more.

Those listed by name are just the people who gave me a business card or who with I had an extended conversation about their work (and took down their name to make a post about them in the future.) I know around 100 people must have visited me as well based on the amount of business cards missing from my box.

For an informal review session, I’d say it was pretty successful.As the night goes on I’ll be posting about some of these portfolios. When Kyle gets back, we’ll post something about the keynote speech (I think we might have some video.)

Stay tuned!