Conference, Photography

Open Sauce Maker Portraits: A Photography Self Project

tdsepsilon

One of the areas of photography that I want to improve on is portraiture. Being able to capture someone’s likeness, their personality, their soul, is such a powerful tool. And in so many situations I consistently fail to achieve the look I was going for in my head. Inspired by Willem Verbeeck’s idea of a self photography project I came up with my own project to do while attending the Open Sauce Live event.

The event was a massive gathering of Makers from all over the world, showing off their amazing projects and sharing their creative wisdom. Headliners included Adam Savage, of Mythbuster’s fame, to YouTubers like Nerdforge, Mark Rober, Joe Barnard, Zack Friedman, and others. But they were already getting all the attention, so I set out to find some amazing maker exhibits and try and tell a little of their story through portraiture.

Alex Lynd

Alex is a hardware and cybersecurity instructor. He has created educational videos for Hak5, specializes in embedded security & signals intelligence, and is the creator of the Nugget, a cat shaped hardware console targeted at making learning hacking fun for beginners.

Álvaro Prieto

Set up at his “Repair Station”, Alvaro was helping support the other makers and their projects all weekend at Open Sauce, and I even saw him fix a few phone charger ports as well. Alvaro is one of the hosts for the “Unnamed” Reverse Engineering Podcast, creator of the cheese controller, and has presented numerous times on various reverse engineering projects.

Alex Fiel

Alex came to Open Sauce with his own photography project! He created a 3D printed variable aperture wigglegram lens, which is all open source! He used the lens to capture some of the headliners doing funny poses. I even got to have one taken of myself, jumping in the air with the camera I used to take his image, very Meta!

Everything is Hacked

Up for a game of chess? It may look harmless but something about this board will shock you, and I mean that literally this board is connected to a live taser! Depending on your move you may feel a tingle down to your toes. Everything is Hacked has a YouTube channel showing off their cool and quirky projects.

James Mertke

James is an engineer, artist, and acrylic painter from San Jose with an amazing portfolio of still life’s that span the classic fruit to the nerdy 3d printed benchy! I picked up a lovely print of an LED still life during the event, and look forward to what he comes up with next.

Bar Smith

Creator of the original Maslow CNC, a unique router that uses belts instead of linear rails making it infinitely expandable. It’s an open source project designed to be affordable, cheap to ship, easy to use, and powerful! They recently closed a successful Kickstarter campaign for the router and are focusing on building and shipping the products to backers.

Russ Fogle

Making digital-first ceramics with a special 3d printer that doles out clay instead of plastic. His ceramics show the precision of the printer but with an organic feel. Check them out on his instagram and website.

Artillect

Combining the old world with the new this typewriter is connected up to a Linux terminal. He uses this to create ascii art like a teapot or paintings like “girl with a pearl earring”.

90percent.art

90Percent.art uses a drawing machine to combine dots, dashes, and lines into amazing visuals. On poster board size sheets of paper these artists have created mesmerizing tessellations using a pen plotter. They also have open sourced code for generating objects if you are looking to do someone similar yourself. You can purchase their work through their web site if something strikes a chord with you.

David Yang

Working out of the Sunnyvale Makerspace called ”Makers Nexus” David makes amazing custom wood and resin pens. Each pen is unique with a different geometric or organic design. They are also super affordable compared to custom pens you may find in a boutique so check them out if you are interested! He also was playing a custom string instrument at open sauce where you turn a wheel that rubs on the strings instead of a bow like a violin.

Josh Sheldon

Light painting is the process of using lights to draw things while taking a long exposure photograph. But it’s difficult to create them with high repeatability. So Josh created a light painting machine to automate the process and create animations as well. Running in a blackout tent on the exhibit floor the machine resembles a 3d printer or cnc but with just a light at the end. Then with software to control a camera and motors an image or animation take form.

David Sloan

All the way from Edmonton, Alberta in Canada, David Sloan is the Technology Master behind the custom LED driving software that BeatSync.ca uses to create immersive light shows synced to music. He and his brother have shipped thousands of custom products all over the world making crazy ideas a reality. Cue the DaftPunk!

Jonah Stiennon

Creator of the Wyldcard DevKit an Epaper trading card system, funded through a CrowdSupply campaign, as a unique meld of physical and digital table top gaming. I got to play around with the device and the magnetic snapping interface from the cards to the plinth and it was very well engineered. Looking forward to what games people create!

Egmanila

At Open Sauce to show off this impressive giant quad copter project. I learned all about the build and the challenges that the they overcame as well as what autopilot technology that ran the whole thing. It was definitely a blast to see the progress that quad copter tech has come!

Thtxpr

Ever tried water color painting? Well if you haven’t it’s not the most precise medium, so what happens when you combine it with a robot? That’s just what they created a watercolor painting robot! With custom hardware and software, developed from the ground up, to create beautiful organic looking postcard paintings. It was truly an amazing project to see!

Reflection

This was a fun self assigned photography project that I learned a lot from, mostly on how to interact with my subject but also that I need to be a bit more diligent in collecting information. So if I got anything wrong or you want me to add an update to anything please reach out.

In the portraits I had a little difficulty critical focusing since I was shooting wide open on the 28mm F2.8 lens on the Pentax ME Super. It’s only the second time using the lens but I think I like the focal length more than my 50mm. I chose this focal length because the exhibit hall was quite compact but the 50 may have been better for the portraits.

In my compositions I definitely like the ones where the makers were sitting in their booths rather than standing since it was sometime difficult to see their projects as well. But I really like how all of them turned out!

I decided to use CinesStill400D film which was shot at 200ISO to get a dreamy light with halation in the background to give each image a warm sci-fi look. I think this worked well but I may want a faster film and try flash in the future to really make the portraits pop a bit more.

I want to do more of these little projects to help improve my photography and will hopefully be going to Maker Fair in October and Supercon in November so get in touch if you would like maker portrait or just to chat about the cool stuff you make!

Published by tdsepsilon