Leweb 2009 – Weird stuff (Un commentaire)
Since 2006, I’m playing the photoreporter role at Leweb, on top of blogging and networking.
This year, I took with me my two Canon reflex cameras (DSLR) with a wide angle lense and a zoom lense. Every year, I learn the way to improve my shootings. This year, I got very nice results with using a mix of high ISO sensors (5D II), wide apperture lenses (2.8), fast speed (1/400s) and with caring about good focusing. My pictures are not retouched at all beyond basic RAW files processing using Adobe Lightroom, with some color balance and lighting adjustments. Despite the gear, I’m NOT a professional photographer. It’s just a hobby!
You’ll find all my pictures from this year’s Leweb here and there.
A couple ones deserve some comments on top of the speaker pictures already shown in my previous posts:
- Hands hands hands! Good speakers always move them in line with their speech. The higher they are, the more expressive is the speaker. But doing this while being seated like here is limiting the scope of gestures.
- This “on-site advertising” for DevenezCelebre.com (BecomeFamous.com). This is a weird French site combining tags pointing on web sites, (real world) display ads of these sites and some location based ads iPhone application to improve the visibility of blogs, web sites and brands. I guess the next step would be OLED panel based ads on toilet seats.
- Chris Heuer and his wife Kristie wells who run the Social Media Club. A very nice guy I met last year at Leweb. This year, he bought some French white wine and served it to friends just in the middle of the main session hall.
- Anina, a long-time alumni of Leweb. She’s the geekiest top model around, publisher of the 360°Fashion and Anina.net blogs and of various mobile applications. She’s still modelling and even won the best “China Foreign Model” award. Well, she lives in China! I’m surprised she’s not anymore a speaker at Leweb.
- The youngest attendee from Leweb, seemingly the daughter of some startup entrepreneur.
- The perfect geek laptop. Probably a Macintosh.
- The look and feel of the food was so-so this year…
- The seven cars used by Queen Rania and her suite.
- The second-tier bodyguards used for @QueenRania and @nk_m. Ready to jump to catch any dangerous blogger or photographer should a problem occur. But not the best position to be reactive.
- A security person working for @QueenRania who was taking video from all the attendees, probably for security screening purpose. I don’t remember he shot videos from Queen Rania herselve, although she also had her personal photographer equiped with two Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III.
- @nk_m’s shoes. She tweeted about it saying it was from Celine, and two years old.
- Ustream did an excellent job at streaming videos this year. But these are not yet in HD whether onsite or in webcast! Next year?
- At Leweb and many other events, we have mostly camerawomen instead of cameramen. I wonder how this profession attracted so many women more than others like photography.
- Did you know that the 104, where Leweb took place in 2009 and 2008 was the Paris city service of undertaking, closed in 1997? Still, a good end-of-19th century steel architecture. The City of Paris invested over 100m€ to renew the building and to create a kind of artistic space opened to the public. It was reopened juste before Leweb in october 2008. Looks like a disaster, costing more than planned. The price Leweb paid for renting the facility is peanuts compared to the building deficit. Le “104” founders and managers just left and will be replaced.
- Loic or Brad Pitt?
- Les Lemeur together, ready for a US political campaign run.
My next and last post will cover the startups who did present at Leweb. I did watch only two presentations but will still look at the typology of all presenting companies, just to have a clue about what’s perceived as being cool by the selection team.
On s’y croirait !