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Did anyone take pictures of the Cartography Salon and of some of the prized maps last week in Texas? Are they posted somewhere?


Luc Le Blanc

I asked about this in one of the NSS forums, Luc; in keeping with the general workings of the organization, each salon's winners and information will slowly trickle onto the internet with no timetable, rhyme or reason. I gave up volunteering to help after two or three rejections, and now just periodically check the salon pages. The last two years, it's taken weeks (or months) for each salon to post the winners.

Guys,

Most of these maps don't really lend themselves well to photographs. For that matter they don't usually do the cartographer justice by the time that they are run through the necessary shrinky-dink process for printing in Compass & Tape or the NSS News.

Jeff, I guarantee you that if you had been at ICS and volunteered to take photos of the winning maps, SACS would find a way to get those photos online pronto.

Cheers,

Aaron

Aaron Addison wrote:Jeff, I guarantee you that if you had been at ICS and volunteered to take photos of the winning maps, SACS would find a way to get those photos online pronto.

Well, as the only NSS member who owns a camera, I consider myself personally responsible for this failure.

@Jeff - You miss the point. It is not about whether or not you personally took the photos, but the fact that no one volunteered to do so.

No one is more/less responsible for it not happening than you or I.

AA

Aaron Addison wrote:@Jeff - You miss the point. It is not about whether or not you personally took the photos, but the fact that no one volunteered to do so.
No one is more/less responsible for it not happening than you or I.

Yeah, I don't mean to come across as a dick, although I'm quite sure I often do on this here internet. I guess I'm just pretty bummed out about how some of this stuff goes down. Last year I had an entry and couldn't go, and it took a while to find out the results. Then it took a long time for them to be posted online. I offered to help maintain the SACS and Carto Salon sites, which at the time were kind of a mess, in multiple emails but was told my help wasn't needed.

I get the impression that no one particularly cares about this stuff once the convention is over, and no one particularly cares if people who missed convention get to see any of it. Not all of us can afford the cost to register for (and travel to) convention, and not all of us have an extra week of vacation kicking around. I don't want to have to wait until the November issue of the News to see the winners of half of the salons, you know? That may have been OK before the internet, but it seems lethargic these days.

I get the impression that no one particularly cares about this stuff once the convention is over, and no one particularly cares if people who missed convention get to see any of it.

I care, and that's why we have salon winners pages (check out last year's). You'll note that as the chair of the Video Salon, I had the 2009 video winners posted on the Friday morning after the Thursday night announcements. But I had the advantage of having the videos judged prior to the ICS; many salons were judged during the event, and their chairs are still recuperating, or are still off on post-ICS trips. I know Carto Chair Jim Kennedy is. I also know that the SACS webmaster, Pat Kambesis, was also the ICS webmaster; she's been put through the wringer, and I'm sure the SACS pages have suffered as a result.

As webmaster, I will post images of all salon winners as quickly as they are provided to me. I have the Photo Salon winners already, and am working on them as we speak. It doesn't happen overnight -- thumbnails have to be created, and linked to larger images (still smaller than the originals) on separate pages, and I must be careful to get it all right the first time, or there'll be hell to pay.

The ICS had several official photographers, and I'm sure they captured all the winners of all the salons and will get them to me as soon as they can. I hope we can also post the great candid shots they took during the week and showed during the banquet.

Yes, it's hard to do justice to a large map on a 1024x768 screen; in many cases, only a small portion of the map is used, so that the detail can be seen and appreciated. There is software now that allows a large file to be compressed to a small size, and zoomed in and out; it was demonstrated at the ICS. That would solve the map dilemma, and I'm looking into it.

Hold your water folks, most of us are just now getting home. If you just want to know if you won something, write the salon chair; I'm sure you'll get a quick response. Remember the part about us all being volunteers, with families and jobs?

xcathodex wrote:

Aaron Addison wrote:Jeff, I guarantee you that if you had been at ICS and volunteered to take photos of the winning maps, SACS would find a way to get those photos online pronto.

Well, as the only NSS member who owns a camera, I consider myself personally responsible for this failure.

So you're the one...