Thursday, February 24, 2011

Terry Fallis @ Ron Joyce Centre (February 24, 2011)

Today I was lucky enough to catch a talk by author and PR practitioner Terry Fallis at McMaster's Ron Joyce Centre in Burlington. Introduced by Master's of Communication Management program director Dr. Terry Flynn, Mr. Fallis discussed his experiences using social media (primarily podcasting) to find a market for his self-published first novel, "The Best Laid Plans". He also touched on the implications of social media for public relations practitioners.

Below: Preparing to speak to students of Communication Management.



Mr. Fallis won the Stephen Leacock Medal for "The Best Laid Plans" in 2008, and just last month for the same novel he also won the national "Canada Reads" contest run by the CBC. He's since had a sequel published, "The High Road".



I always enjoy taking pictures of people "performing" (to me, public speaking is always performing, just as much as acting or singing would be). Below: This particular speaker used a lot of hand gestures (as I know I do too), so I tried to capture that in the pictures. I'm not sure exactly what's being referenced in the one below, but it looks significant!



Below: a rapt audience (the rest of the class is out of view).



Below: This was one of my two favourite pictures from the talk. I love how the camera just focussed on his hand (also the microphone), I think that happened because I moved the camera and it didn't have time to re-focus on his face. A great effect though.



Below: This was my other favourite picture. I'm not quite sure why, it just has a nice feeling to it.



More hand gestures--I had quite a few more shots like that, they turned out surprisingly well. I decided not to go overboard and post a whole slew of them here. Taking photos like these reminds me of the 30-second gesture drawings we used to do as warm-ups in figure-drawing class at NSCAD. The photos turn out like those drawings did: many of them slightly "off", some that look pretty good, and maybe a few that "catch" something really interesting.

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