Under the Coverslip 2006

I've been going increasingly crazy for the last few months trying to do experiments while at the same time organising the UCS2006 competition. This all came to a head on Monday when it opened and Tuesday when I had to deal with the wash up. All in all, despite the huge stress and the fact that the committee (of two - me and Ash) had about two months to organise it when in the past it took a larger group who started begging for money from about April, I think we did a-ok.

There were some problems - not getting the official go-ahead from the Uni until September, getting a fraction of funding compared to previous years, completely blowing our budget, getting a phone call at 8:30am from the person who was giving the Opening address saying he didn't know he was giving the address and could I give him some dot points, etc. etc. - somebody told me that knowing the chaos that went on in the time preceding the opening made the exhibition more successful in his opinion. (Personally, I would have liked to have budgeted for more wine at the opening.) After receiving all entries on Friday 10th, Ash and I spent Monday morning furiously getting the images ready for the judging at 10am, and with Fowler at 3pm furiously getting them ready for exhibition. Or at least I was furious - damn Ash was pretty calm! And despite all my fears: no one would enter, no one would turn up, too many people would turn up, not enough food or wine, it was all good. We had 40 entries (although some got disqualified for various reasons), a good number of people turned up, all the food was eaten barring some nuts and dip...I still think we needed more wine.

And so here are some photos from this afternoon when Ash, Adey and I went to take it all down:
The exhibition space.
The first and third winning entries.
The popular image winner - it wasn't just my favourite! Mmmmm, donuts....

Adey giving his entry the thumbs up.

The view from the lectern where I did my welcoming and MC duties. Sure, it looks ok now, but I had to fortify myself with a glass before and after talking!

I mistakenly thought that since the big stuff was on Monday, Tuesday would be calm enough for me and Erica to do some experiments (more on this another time!), but I instead spent the day dealing with the media unit of the uni about publicity of the event and publication of the images in between exps. But everything went awesomely. So yeah.

Start getting your entries for UCS 2007 ready now!