Watford Digi-Cluster – Networking Event at University

Tuesday afternoon I set off south to meet up with Product Designer and friend, Peter Carr to head on down to the Digi-Cluster at the University of Hertfordshire. This is a networking evening for Creatives with some excellent speakers, Josh and Ollie Bolland of JB Cole, and Julian Morency, in this instance to cover the inspirational story of the Agency called Browser and its metamorphosis into a Product company Twine, though Browser actually survived the transformation; to continue, having facilitated the birth of Twine. Another speaker, Ollie Bollond, discussed the values of APIs in the creation of efficient software. The evening was organised jointly by JB Cole, Clock and the University of Hertfordshire to promote creative collaboration through Local Enterprise Partnerships or LEPs, Paul Witcombe explained their role in that context.

As is often the case at such meetings the number of questions asked at the end was bordering on minimal, but nevertheless meaningful and answered expansively, setting the scene for much informal discussion whilst partaking of the generously supplied refreshments and pizzas.

I met up with some familiar faces from past events, such as Nick Rayner of Image 2, and Richard Allibone of TheWayForward.Com, and shamefully someone whom I had met before, but had forgotten, Paul Meyler; he had to jog my failing memory! During my trying to record the event in photographs, I was able to engage in conversations with  some new characters, from whom I took business cards to assist in retaining their details beyond the evening!

I was using my recently acquired wide aperture prime wideangle lens on the full-frame Canon 5D MkIII camera body. The room is entirely black-walled offering minimal lighting, which is challenging photographically, and I term this as 'unavailable light photography' but I find this to be intrinsically less intrusive and a more honest representation of the reality and atmosphere of such an event, and I hope this will be seen in the subsequent gallery of images that I post on the blog. It was very warming to be thanked by Syd Nadim of Clock for taking photos of the evening; I hope he is as pleased, when he sees the results! I was certainly most satisfied by the opportunity that the evening offered in listening to the speakers and chatting afterwards. I don't think I was alone in feeling this was a successful networking event from the animated conversations I spotted through my lens.