It’s been a year and a month since Moment Junkie launched. It started in November 2010 as an idea bounced around in the best photographer community I’ve yet seen, SWPB (now-named Succeeding as a Wedding Photography Business) on Flickr. Erin Lassahn, Alex Blackwelder, Kyle Hepp, and Ryan Brenizer were key in crystallizing the idea. Wedding blogs and wedding photography blogs have a great and vast audience, but they were about planning a wedding and the details. But couples and their photographers alike care also about the human element to the day and celebration. Does it matter that your chairs were silver or that your napkins were origami animals? (Okay, yes, somewhat.) But what matters more is that two people are starting off on an incredible journey and decided to bring along their friends and family to share in the celebration. Where was a blog to focus on that part of wedding photography?

My contribution to the discussion was “Is momentjunkie.com registered?” And so it was. (After a bit of domain name brainstorming anyway, which is rather amusing after the fact.)

Moment Junkie launched last February and has taken off beyond expectations. Two months in, last April, Kyle and Ryan asked me to help out with social media presence. Man the Twitter and Facebook accounts, I was told. No problem, I thought. My role started with that, basic administration, and technical fixes. I’d leave the submissions unread in the inbox. “Who am I to be curating?” I thought. Eventually I started opening them and marking them as unread, as if I were a kid sneaking a peak at presents squirreled away in a closet.

You know how some jobs have “other duties as required” at the end? This expanded really fast. Today I wrote a few longer emails as Moment Junkie. Part of this is because Kyle is out of country and Ryan is teaching a workshop. Blogger Dooce noticed us and sent us a crapton of traffic, followed by Design Mom. We’ve been getting attention and traffic and it’s been growing.

All this time, still not monetized. Where do we go from here?

For Spring Spectacular, student engineering societies from the Cockrell School of Engineering hosted a public outreach fair for Austin-area children.

ASME’s booth had kids build a structure to protect a water balloon from bursting after a drop.

As usual, hit the thumbnails for larger versions.

ASME’s booth had kids build a structure to protect a water balloon from bursting after a drop.

Not all designs protected the balloon sufficiently:

It’s a week of craziness. There were two major service/outreach days: Engineering Day at the Museum and Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day. Each of the student societies competed in and hosted competitions, including capture the flag, Rock Band, talent show, lip-syncing contest, and a canned food drive/building contest.

Throughout the whole week, student societies also scrambled to complete scavenger hunt items like “Make an origami zoo (at least 20 different animals)” and “Make UT clocktower out of legos.”

The student chapter of ASME at UT competed, and won its sixth consecutive year. See the official writeup, Engineers Week — 18th — 25th February, 2011.

Most creative picture with the “Clock Knot” involving only a society’s members. Originally I wanted to do a flash composite, but this was deemed to be too time- and labor-intensive. So instead, we used the geography to our advantage. Inspired by “I Should’Ve Had a V8″ by Ryan Brenizer.

All of one’s society officers with Alec (bonus for another organization’s officers picture)

Sometimes it’s strange that these are still some of my favorites. Three years later, it is funny how little equipment I had and how I would have exposed differently. ISO 200 indoors, even with lots of windows? Was I afraid of noise or what? I used my 50mm prime lens the whole day and carried just camera and lens. At this point, I didn’t even own an external flash.

Some of them are curiously specific:

• Close-up of groom’s adorably nervous mug waiting for his other half
• Bride with her happy, proud parents and/or stepparents
• Groom with his happy, proud parents and/or stepparents
• Bride/groom with college alums

Others rather obvious:

• Exchanging the rings
• Close up of hands
• The Kiss

It’s like a scavenger hunt! I propose the following items:

• Overzealous guests with cameras, attempting and failing to hide in the foliage.
• Guest annoyed that other guest is blocking his/her line of sight.
• Bride jumping out a window
• Keg stand
• Members of the bridal party propositioning each other
• Bored guest checking facebook/twitter on iPhone 3G
• DJ doing something embarrassing
• Guests clinging to the wall to avoid the dance floor just like in sixth grade
• Guest leaving who’s totally going to get arrested for drunk driving
• Best man flirting with bride
• Maid of honor flirting with groom
• Women fighting over bouquet
• Bloody nose after bouquet toss fight
• Group shot of all ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends
• Kid trying to drink ‘adult beverage’
• Kid with “it wasn’t me” look on his/her face, while another kid cries
• The rings… somewhere on the floor after dropping them while setting up a cool ring shot
• “We’re so not getting back the damages deposit.”

So yeah. Shot lists are silly.

This is a photo I took in 2007 at a crawfish boil my friend Bruce had at his house in New Orleans. Like the mannequin photo, it’s in my desktop wallpaper rotation.

This is through the windows of the then-unopened Levi’s store. The mannequins are not yet set up and dressed.

It’s on rotation as one of my desktop backgrounds. After fellow photographer Christine Tremoulet saw my laptop desktop background and asked if I had taken the photo (it was a Mac one included with the OS) I decided to actually use photos of mine instead.