Ok, I’ll be the first to admit it: Setting wheels in motion to pull of a new event in Vancouver only to go on a 6 week road trip around the USA and completely forgetting about everything might not be the best idea. But now I’m back and all set to go. The organizing committee (consisting of Benjamin Luk, John Biehler, Allan Schroeder and myself) is now hard at work not only get this thing up and running but that it will be a great event with many more to come.

How did this thing come about anyway?

I won’t pretend I was the inventor of the Photo Marathon – the concept has been thoroughly explored in countless cities on many continents. My first encouter was at the University of Oslo back in 1999 or thereabouts. The photo group at the student union put on a small photo marathon last minute during the first week of school. It was a really cool idea and hugely challenging for the photographers and it didn’t take long for the event to really take off. The small event spawned a bigger one and soon there were hundreds of photographers running the streets of Oslo trying to interpret vague themes like “(t)urban” and “full”.

When I moved to Vancouver I started thinking it would be cool to create a similar event in this fantastically photogenic city. But how do you pull something like that off when you don’t know anyone? Easy: You forget all about it and file it under “dreams never fulfilled”. That was until this summer when I decided that I didn’t like that folder very much and wanted to empty it. Cue Twitter and the many excellent photographers in Vancouver who can’t stop talking about all the great shots they get in the city.

What I discovered was that Vancouver has a huge and diverse group of photographers; from amateurs to professionals, trained and self-taught, photo bloggers, advertising photographers, nature photographers, baby photograpers, boudoir photographers, bad photographers, you name it. Problem was (at least this is my understanding) that these different groups have very little connection with each other. So wouldn’t it be cool if we could put on an event that brought them all together under the same roof so to speak? To get all these fragmented groups of lens hugging trigger happy individuals to meet up for a major challenge? The answer, needless to say, was yes!

So I sent out a bunch of tweets to people with no connection to each other and asked if they were interested in kicking this thing off. I’d been brooding over the concept for too long and needed new and fresh ideas, and quite frankly there was no way in hell I would be able to pull it off all by myself. Enter Benjamin, John and Allan.

So one night in late September at a rather noisy bar downtown that was holding a taco eating contest to the tunes of Jethro Tull we all met up and started hashing out the details. The result was this web site, the Twitter account and the Facebook Page. And in time the event itself.

Your move Vancouver!

So what happens now? Well, we’re working to put everything together. All you have to do is sign up for the event once we get the Eventbrite page up and running and show up with your 35mm camera. We’ll provide the 12 exposure films and at 8am on Saturday December 12 we’ll start announcing one theme on the hour every hour for 12 hours. At 8pm the same day we’ll collect all the films and have a party. The next week we’ll develop all the photos and put them on Flickr for all to see. Then a judging committee (TBA) will go through all the pictures and select the winners. A couple of weeks later (TBA) we’ll have a showing of some sort with awarding of prizes, drinks and whatever else we or you can come up with.

So, if you want to participate, if you have ideas of what we can do, where we should have the parties and the show or you just want to join in on the fun, join our Facebook group, send us an email or drop us a line right here in the comments section. This is an open community event in every sense of the word and we’ve set out to make it as fun and interactive as possible so any input will be greatly appreciated.

Get your camera ready and stay tuned!