Scott Fillmer

It has been a while since my last post but I still wanted to post a few of my favorites from Maximum Impact.  It was a great event and I am glad I was able to be in Atlanta for the live simulcast location.  One of my favorite photo shoots of the afternoon ended up being several different shots I got of Kevin Carroll.  He was great to put up with two different photographers hounding him and it made for some great images.  Some others posted below are Liz Murry from Homeless to Harvard and Mark Sanborn with his new book the Fred Factor.

If you get a chance to see any of these folks in person it is well worth your time, they were great inspirational speakers and have amazing stories to tell.

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I missed my Friday Feet post last week but today I am in the glorious city of Atlanta to do the photo shoot for the Maximum Impact Simulcast.  It has been a fast few weeks and in another two weeks Deb and I will make a trek out to Dallas for an annual Czech heritage festival.  I spent most of the day doing a walk through for the shoot at the Georgia World Congress Center and then made it over to the CNN Center to catch up on some reading.  I feel like I was just here (see posts from the Georgia Aquarium photos here and video here) but for totally different reasons.

I thought about doing a nice serious group of photos down at Centennial Park but opted for the shots below from the top of my hotel in downtown Atlanta.  Some day I will get back over here and take my camera to the park and get some of the fountains and all the many different people that are always walking around down here.  Have a nice weekend everyone.

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As some of you know, last week I went to Catalyst One Day to shoot the event for Catalyst (see A Great 24 Hrs with Catalyst One Day // Photos, and Off the Blogs Night at Catalyst // Photos).  It was a great day of worship, growth, and learning (even if you spent the day running around with a camera).  If you have a chance to go to Catalyst West Coast or the next One Day event in Dallas, go, you won’t be sorry.  Not only does Brad Lomenick, Ben Arment, and a whole bunch of other people over there put on an incredible production, but if you are at all interested in leadership in the Church body, this is the place hear current and relevant information on the growth (or lack there of) of the Church.

Here are a few more from photos from that day of the Steve Fee Band and some of the North Point worship band members who led all of us in worship at North Point Community Church last week.  I am about half way through the day’s edit and will post a few more tidbits before I send the final edit off to Catalyst.

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One of the special events last week when I made it over to Catalyst One Day was the Off the Blogs meeting that took place in Buckhead GA.  This event was hosted by Pete Wilson of Cross Point Church in Nashville and he was joined by Carlos Whittaker, Anne Jackson (both of which are on a blog break right now) Jon Acuff, and worship was led by Aaron Keyes.  I went into the meeting / worship time not really fully understanding what was going to happen, and went away with a new understanding of the real names and faces we each have behind our own Internet facade.

There were no laptops, no macbooks, no (or very little) twittering, and it was real, it was hard core, it was intense, and an offline time to unplug and take a look at what shapes our lives.  I went in with a few questions of my own.

1. As Believers, how are we allowing technology to control our lives?
2. How do we use it to further self and selfish ambitions.
3. What are we doing to use the knowledge of technology and understanding of how things work on the Internet to further God’s kingdom?
4. How do we balance our online lives with those we physically interact with on a daily basis (are those people become the same)?
5. It is really necessary for us to unplug when it is not a distraction in our lives, but it is how we live now?
6. How can we leverage technology for God’s purposes?
7. How much of our own lives do we share online?
8. How can I get more connected with leaders in the church through technology?
9. How do we connected with people outside the church?
10. What is the next thing in technology that is going to rock this world?

I left with more questions than I went in with but it was still a great night and well worth the extra time to get over to Buckhead.  Carlos, Anne, and Jon all shared some incredible stories of how they got where they are in their walk and the struggles they went through with and without God in their lives.  None of this had to do with their blogs, facebook, or anything technology related, but how God changed their lives.  We are all a work in progress and I am so glad I had the chance to get to listen to people I respect in the Church and online.

Here are a few pics from that night.

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Yesterday was about the longest 24 hours I have spent in a long time.  It was a last minute photo shoot request for Catalyst One Day in Atlanta and it was non-stop from the moment we left on Wednesday night until we got back home around midnight last night.  I am still processing what all happened.  This was a full packed day with Andy Stanley and Craig Groeschel as the keynote speakers led by worship with Steve Fee of the Fee Band and several other great musicians.  After Catalyst One Day was over we drove down to Buckhead to the Off the Blogs meeting with Carlos Whittaker, Anne Jackson, Jon Acuff, and Pete Wilson of Cross Point Church with worship led by Aaron Keyes, which was really an eye opener.

At this point I am not even sure how to start to digest the amount of great information that was given out on Thursday, not to mention the almost 4,000 images I shot for Catalyst.  I felt very privileged to get to be around all these minds and just tried to absorb all I could where ever I was at the time.

A friend recently asked if there is a movement going on in the church, and all you have to do is listen to what is going on with some of these churches and you can start to see signs of a broad movement in the Church Body.  Some churches will ignore it, some won’t and don’t know about it because they refuse to change, others are locked in cement and are dying a slow death, but there are churches who are embracing new ways to do things and look at “church” in a fresh new light.

If you missed Catalyst One Day, or the Off the Blogs event after wards, find the podcast, cd, or dvd, and just listen to the ideas and information these guys discussed.  I will set the stage with a few photos here with more to come in the upcoming weeks as I go through the complete edit.  Unitl then, here are a few opening shots of what happened yesterday in Atlanta.  This is the stage at North Point Church and a few of the band members (Steve Fee and Ashley on drums) back stage getting ready for the day.

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I am in Atlanta right now getting ready to shoot the Catalyst One Day event at Northpoint Church and later the Off the Blogs at Buckhead Church.  This was one of the most last minute shoots I was ever asked to do, but being that it was Catalyst (and the Off the Blogs) I was pretty excited about accepting the last minute offer.  Step one as a photographer is always always pack your film (or in this case digital compact flash cards).  Without a medium to record any images on, it makes your equipment and time pretty useless, and up until this month, over the last 10-12 years, I have never forgotten those precious cards (or film), but I did today.

I did the same thing a few weeks ago when we went to the Butterfly Day Center at Callaway and wanted to make sure I never did that again (same reason as today, I switched camera bags at the last minute) so I guess this makes number two.  Thank goodness there is a Best Buy in the same parking lot as my hotel and I can go pick up something I already have tons of, but can’t do the shoot without.

I am really looking forward to the day today and can’t wait to hear and worship with everyone at Northpoint.  I doubt I will be able to post any pictures throughout the day here but you might look for some over on Twitter, but I should have some shots of Andy Stanley, Fee Band, Carlos Whittaker, Anne Jackson, and several more posted here over the next few days.  Now off to our favorite neighborhood Best Buy.

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It has been a busy weekend but I did have time yesterday to finish up the video segment of the friday feet post  (see Atlanta and the Georgia Aquarium // Friday Feet) on the Georgia Aquarium.  So, this would be the Georgia Aquarium video from our perspective as we went through the exhibits on Friday.  A combination of videography and photography narrowed down to just around 3 minutes.

I love video editing almost as much as photography but one super expensive creative skill was all I could put my time and effort into developing over the last several years and my video skills are a little more on the amateur side than my photography so bear with me.  I would like to say we shot this with a Canon XH-A1 3CCD HDV Camcorder 1080i HD 16:9 or something a little more professional but it was with our JVC GZ-MG130U 16:9 Everio (which is not a bad little camera if you are looking for the highest quality and the cheapest price).

Anyway, point is, I always try to produce the highest quality whatever I can, and at the moment, this is it.  I hope to continue producing videos just for the sake of my blog so be on the look out for more coming up.  So here is a quick video view of the Georgia Aquarium from our perspective. (By the way, you can click on the photo above to see the larger size, and those white specs in the image are actually food that was being dropped down for the Jelly Fish while we were filming.)  If you are reading this via RSS reader, you will need to open this post title above to view the video or view the video directly on vimeo.  Enjoy.

Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta from Scott Fillmer on Vimeo.

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Today for my Friday Feet post we made the drive over to Atlanta and finally went to see the Georgia Aquarium.  It has been on the bucket list for a while and it was nice to get out of Auburn for a short period of time today.  It is easy to forget what kind of traffic issues we have here in Auburn (none unless a football game is going on) until you drive into downtown Atlanta.

Deb and I did make our way over to the CNN Center for lunch and walked around Centennial Park in Atlanta before making our way over to the Georgia Aquarium.  The Georgia Aquarium is a collection of several different displays totaling an 8 million gallon display of fish from all over the world.  It is the largest aquarium in the country (so I have been told) and well worth the trip if you are going to be in the Atlanta area.

I did think it would take a little longer to go through than it did.  All in all it was about 2 hours to walk through all the displays, and the jellyfish display was really the most impressive tank out of all the aquariums in the building.  It was a bit pricy to me at $27 a ticket and I wanted to see the new exhibit with the Titanic artifacts but for an additional $7 we opted out.  I actually would have paid the extra $7 to see the museum on the Titanic, but the kicker was I had to leave my bag outside and couldn’t take any photos in the museum.  Since I had all my camera equipment with me and was there to take photos, we decided to leave it for another day.  What I found really great is the Georgia Aquarium is actually on Twitter (as @GeorgiaAquarium), way to go.

It was nice to spend my day off with Deb, a long overdue few hours of time together today, and we managed to do something new for Friday Feet.  It does take some effort to get out of the house and do something.  One wouldn’t think so, but it is far easier to just sit and soak or just do more of the same thing each week, but why do what is easiest… but… coming up with new ideas is not always easy, so I may do what Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs has done and take suggestions from my readers.  Any suggestions for a Friday Feet post you would like to see?  Just let me know in the comments below.

Hope you enjoy the photos of the day.  You can see the full shoot I uploaded on the Georgia Aquarium and Atlanta on my flickr page gallery here.  Have a great weekend everyone.

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I have been waiting and waiting to get to this particular edit from Catalyst finished…so today I finally got around to posting these images from Catalyst08 in Atlanta. This is Caitlin Beidler from Redemption Art.  This very well could have been the greatest live acts of worship I have seen in a long time.  It took me by surprise and I came to find out later that not everyone there even saw the entire painting in worship as it happened.  It really was amazing to see a painting being created before your eyes, to music, in worship.

I did not get a chance to meet Caitlin but I appreciate the many different ways we were able to worship for those few days, and she was a big part of that.  The images below are a short progression of how the painting-worship to music went.  The very last photo was taken after they moved on to the next session and turned off the lights.  The paint is not a glow in the dark (as far as I know) or black light paint, this is just how it looked when the lights were turned off.  The glow of the white paint in the dark was amazing to me and to me it showed Christ at the Cross in the dark.  To see more of the painting from my photo perspective visit the Catalyst Gallery.

Coming up soon I will have a few more posts from Catalyst.  If you have a chance, run over to Caitlin’s website and see her other paintings.

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For those of you wondering if that was it at far as photos go from Catalyst, hang on, I am trying to get through the edit from the 2-3 days I was in Atlanta and will post more as I can get to them.  In the mean time, one really event we were able to attend while we were there was the Atlanta Bloggers Meetup, Blogger08, after the sessions were over on Thursday.  About 60 bloggers met at the Leaping Leprechaun, a restaurant just about in the parking lot of the arena.

I wish I had a chance to get around to meet everyone that was there, but I spoke with several bloggers I had not met before and had a great time.  Brad Ruggles was the host, you can see him in the group shot in the lower right corner.  We shared a nice meal with Ryan (who posted some great pics of this dinner, see Back in the Nati…) Jennifer Schuchmann (blog) who wrote Six Prayers God Always Answers (and got one of her new books too).  I also met David Daniels and another great photographer from Portland (I actually met two from Portland), Jordan Chesbrough, among many other people that night.  We had even had Zac doing card tricks.  Here are a few photos from the evening.

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