Knoll Showroom Opening

This past week I shot the grand opening of the brand new Knoll Showroom in DC, with the help of Armin and Paul. The place was packed with smiling faces and the atmosphere was electrifying! Their new showroom is absolutely stunning and I had a blast documenting the event for them. I wanted to share a little taste of the evening:

I don't drink on the job, but I heard these "Knolltini's" were fantastic

There were people all over enjoying the inviting spaces in the various workstation areas...

There were definitely a lot of funny photos from the "photobooth", especially later into the evening...

Armin snagged this great shot of Paul through the cutout for the photobooth

Update: just posted the slideshow, check it out!

Hail to the Chief

This past Tuesday I was there. Yes, I was in the the most crowded place in the world that day, Washington, DC. It was the 56th Presidential Inauguration Ceremony and I was asked to be the person to document an event sponsored by Best Buy at Constitution Hall. This event was offered as a free service to the community: seating for 3700 people to stay out of the cold as they watched the very memorable day on a 60 foot screen (and two smaller side displays). Geek Squad had a booth to burn people's photos onto DVD so they could free up their memory cards and make room for all the photos they wanted to take. Also Best Buy Mobile, Best Buy for Business, HP, Slingbox, Jawbone and Verizon had booths to do everything from hands-on demos of their products, to give away free souvineers to taking photos of guests with a cardboard cutout of Obama and printing it out on a HP printer. Best Buy also set up a charging station so people could charge their phones and cameras if they were running low on juice. All this completely gratis, with no sales pitch... pretty cool!

I was amazed by the huge crowds, you hear a number like 1.4 million and it doesn't mean much to you until you see it and are a part of it. Constitution Hall was packed wall to wall with people trying to get out of the 18 degree weather and avoid standing on their feet without access to restrooms for hours on end. It was simply non-stop all day. It would have been nice to be one of the official photogs for the inauguration itself, but there's always 2013! The full gallery is on noahhayes.net, but here's a little slice of history for you:

This girl was waiting for us to open up the doors at 8AM...

I dare you to count them...there's 3700, def..def...definitely 3700 (a little Rainmain impression if you didn't get that one...)

Mark "Voice of the Washington Redskins" Kessler was the MC for the event...

Slingbox and Jawbone representatives demoing their products (cool stuff too!)

I let Jon hold my D3 for this one...scary thought...LOL

Starbucks' new "grime the planet" campaign...seriously, can't DC keep it's streets clean?

Fresh Coat of Paint...

I recently decided my main website was a little bland and I definitely hated not being able to display my images at sizes larger than 800X450 (a non-standard aspect ratio for photographs). I've decided to rebuild my site and it now supports resolutions of 1200X800 (I could set it higher, but right now most visits to the page are screen resolutions of 1280X800 and 1400X900, so most will be able to view at almost full screen!!!). The actual interface design changes a bit, but it's more of an evolution rather than a complete top-to-bottom redesign. A lot of the visual elements and color scheme stays the same, just the content and the resolution of the content changes. Also now when viewing a gallery you have the ability to view a 'thumbnails' view or email a link of any image to friends or family, which is really cool! So if you see a picture on the site you just HAVE to show someone, you can email them a link directly to the one you want them to see! (Tip of the day for Mac users: You can select a portion of the screen for a "screen shot by clicking "command-shift-4", I've been asked about that numerous times...just figured I'd fill in everyone who didn't already know)

Here I've posted a quick screenshot of the before and after, see how much empty space there was around the old one? Keep in mind these images were taken on a monitor with a resolution of 1920X1200, so your display will most likely show less empty space.

Look at all that empty space not being used...so bland!

Complete redesign, menu options on the bottom, larger display, no more boring white background!

Thumbnails view inside of a gallery...

Email pop-up window for emailing images to friends and family!

So what do you think? I hope to be finished getting everything the way I want it by the end of the day (Friday) so I can go ahead and make it live, until I do the old site will still be visible.