RailsConf Website

Over the years that I've been working with O'Reilly Media, they've steadily been ramping up the use of photography in their conference marketing materials. One of the most recent implementations of this is the RubyConf 2008 website which features a set of large photos in rotation from last year's conference.

The photo above was one of those rare audience shots where everything worked out. Most of the time when a speaker asks a quick show-of-hands question of an audience sitting in the dark, the moment is gone before I can change the settings on my camera to capture it. And, usually it's so dark that even if I get the camera set, I can't get enough shutter speed to capture the action. This time, however, the speaker on stage had the crew bring up the house lights and then proceeded to ask a series of questions. This gave me more than enough time to react and fire of a set of photos in halfway decent light, including the one above.