James Duncan Davidson is a photographer, author, and software developer. Duncan has been a photographer for TED since 2009, was the photographer for Mission Blue, and led the TEDxOilSpill Expedition.
I’ve been lucky enough to be one of TED’s photographers since 2009; I’ve spent most of my time during hundreds of talks standing, crouching or sitting on the floor at the front of the stage, getting as close as I can to make the perfect photograph of a speaker in motion from exactly the right place. […]
A monumental amount of effort goes into setting up for TED. This year’s iteration in Long Beach is no different. Construction of our stage started on Wednesday, and it wasn’t long before the entire Long Beach Performing Arts Center was full of the buzz of technicians, workers and artists getting ready for next week. […]
All photos by James Duncan Davidson, who writes: In the lower right photograph, there are twelve 12TB Pegasus R6 arrays. That’s 144TB total. It’s a tenth of a freaking petabyte of usable space. Backstory: During a TED conference, we create a lot of data — five days of high-res video from nine cameras, tens of […]
To document TED, the photo team uses every camera at hand. Big digital SLRs with huge lenses are perfect for photographing the stages, but some moments can simply sing when captured with an iPhone and processed with Instagram. Here are a few of my favorites from TED2012 that I collected while in between sessions. Duncan […]
Keeping with the spirit of the Full Spectrum Auditions earlier this week, TED photo editor Mike Femia and myself—photographer Duncan Davidson—decided to add something a bit new and different to our photo coverage of the event. The result is a set of speaker portraits that we made in the break between the afternoon rehearsals and […]
In the middle of TED, I’m almost inseparable from my big Nikons. In the spirit of continuing my little lo-fi TED photography project, however, I kept snapped off a few frames every time I pulled out my iPhone to stay in touch with the rest of the media team during the event. Here’s a batch […]
Usually when I’m photographing at TED, I’m using heavy digital SLRs with lots of lenses. This year, however, I’m also making a few fun photos with the most modest of cameras, my iPhone using the Instagram app. Here are a few of my favorites so far as the team gets the venue ready for TED. […]