TED Community » Duncan Davidson

More About Me

I'm passionate about

Photography, people, technology, and the connection between all of them.

Talk to me about

Photography, people, technology. I'm interested in anything that involves an intersection of these three things.

People don't know that I'm good at

Being able to follow hunches to answers. It made going through the American public education system a nightmare, but has served me well ever since.

My TED Story

I've wanted to attend TED since I first heard of it in the late 1990s. Over the years, I've been happy to see its visibility rise and the ideas shared at it get broader recognition. Several years ago when I started photographing events professionally, I asked myself what one event did I absolutely aspire to shoot. What one event would I be most proud to bring my skills and my visual creativity to. The answer: TED.

In 2007, I got the chance to meet June Cohen at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. During an excellent and wide ranging conversation, I every so gently mentioned that if there ever was an opportunity to photograph at TED, I would be there and left it at that. No hard sell. Just a hope that I could have the opportunity someday. Two years later, I was a photographer at TED2009 in Long Beach. Then TED called me back for TEDGlobal 2009 in the UK and then TEDIndia a few months later. I've since photographed every major TED event since.

Comments

• TEDCred score: +151.30 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

• +1

  A comment on Conversation: What would be some good ways to effect a cultural exchange between Long Beach and TEDActive?

  Mar 6 2011: I've not been to Palm Springs to observe TEDActive, but I have seen a bunch of TED events at many scales and sizes. My first guess is that the phenomenon observed is probably related to size and space. The Long Beach event is the largest of all the TED events and it takes place over a big footprint with many opportunities to split off and out. There were people I knew were at TED this year that I didn't see--and part of my job to look at the audience and make photos. :) TEDGlobal is half the size. It's still been spread around Oxford a bit, but the opportunities to split off are more limited. I'd guess that the same kind of effect, but more magnified, is happening at TEDActive. You guys are all together in one venue and the number of people is such that it's very much more intimate. Less opportunity to split off changes the dynamic a lot.
  
  They're all great for different reasons. Maybe the best advice for repeating TEDsters is personally directed cross-fertilization? IE, for those that feel stratification to shake things up year to year. Try out other events. Go to Palm Springs instead of Long Beach. Or head to Edinburgh for TEDGlobal.

• A reply on Conversation: If you were a developer of 'TED Conversations', what features/functions would you like to add to it?

  Feb 24 2011: Email notifications on updates to conversations that I've participated in would be my #1 feature request as well at this point.
• +1

  A comment on Conversation: Is what and who we are looking for right under our nose?

  Feb 24 2011: That's what I'm desperately hoping is the case. I honestly believe the way through the challenges in the years ahead is going to be lit by the passion of people who come together and trade their ideas--combining them and forming new ones in the process. In the few years that I've been in the TED orbit, I've already had the privilege of watching amazing things happen by the connections that are being made.
  
  For example, on the Mission Blue Voyage last year (part of Sylvia Earle's TEDPrize), I watched as people from all over the ocean community came together and made new connections, formed new plans, and crafted new projects. Most of these are now happening outside the TED or Mission Blue umbrellas and maybe aren't as visible, but they are happening. For a small example, two of the Mission Blue attendees have since worked together to connect with scientists in Central America and provide them additional resources to tag sharks so that they can better understand how wildlife in the ocean moves around and between the existing marine wildlife protected areas. This understanding will eventually help shape both efforts to figure out additional areas to protect and recommendations to make to shipping and other ocean-based industry to help protect the wildlife when they are moving between protected areas.
  
  Obviously, face to face meetings are where this happens best. But hopefully the TEDx events that happen all over the world on an almost daily basis are providing a forum for even more people to make these connections. And hopefully this online forum can also help feed the process.
  
  Anyway, that's a long way to say, YES, I think everything we need is already here. We just have to make sure to nurture it and let it emerge.

• A comment on Conversation: Why does TED.com have so little focus on open-source (software/hardware/ideas)?

  Feb 24 2011: Having been very involved with the Open Source community in the past, I find it interesting that I've not been concerned with this issue very much. I should qualify that I'm very much of the BSD/Apache open source mindset in which pragmatism plays a large role, not the GNU/GPL side of the open source house which actively promotes a 100% open source world. I respect that viewpoint, BTW, but I don't share it.
  
  In the world of software, I see open source is very much about the open communication and collaboration of ideas expressed in source code. This source code is run on proprietary platforms (most of the time) and is often used to build proprietary systems (Facebook, Google, etc) but the benefit to increasing the leverage of the collaboration of the ideas is the key benefit of Open Source.
  
  Applied directly to ideas, I think TED is already there. The ideas are openly expressed and if you watch over time, you'll see that the speakers do influence each other greatly. Ideas are combined, re-expressed, and re-cast all of the time. Even the quality of the talks is going up as the speakers unconsciously hold themselves up to higher standards.
  
  And even though TED events themselves are highly curated, that's not so different than the role Linus plays in Linux. He—and more accurately the rest of the team working on Linux—are themselves curators. And for those that dislike the particular blend that TED provides, there's TEDx.
  
  TED's highest goal is to amplify ideas. The pragmatist in me isn't concerned about whether or not the software platform behind the website has its code published somewhere or what codec is used. The concern is to make sure that as many people on the planet have access to the raw ideas as given by the presenters so that they can listen, use, and combine them to make the planet a better place. PDF, H.264 and more have a place in that currently. As long as the TED tech team remains nimble and adopts new ways, I think we're good.

• A reply on Conversation: How is Quora any different/better than TED Conversations?

  Feb 23 2011: It's interesting, because I find TED to be more intimate than Quora. I will admit, however, that I have a large emotional and time investment in things TED related, so that probably explains the difference in my own viewpoint.

• A comment on Conversation: How far would you travel for a TEDx event?

  Feb 23 2011: Depends on the event. For a general one, I'd try to hit one as local as I could. But for one on a topic, for example TEDxOilSpill—which I was part of—I travelled across the United States from Portland to DC. For the right single topic event, I'd go anywhere in the world. But only because the topic itself was powerful enough to pull me.
• +11

  A comment on Conversation: Has a TED Talk ever influenced you? How?

  Feb 23 2011: Liz Gilbert's talk at TED2009 hit so close to home, it's scary. When she said, "It's exceedingly likely that my greatest success is behind me." it hit me like a ton of bricks. I remember the moment well. I was transiting the back of the theater and it her words stopped me in my tracks. I almost dropped the camera I was carrying.
  
  It took me a few seconds to realize that the reason it smacked me so hard was that it's the same thought (said much more eloquently than I could put it) I had been wrestling with for over a decade. I've watched people try to put my career changes and life path in context of a few bits of software that I created in the late 90's that have done quite well. As my public career has morphed from software to photography and now settled in a world somewhere between, I've watched as people explain it. And it always came back to stuff that happened ten years ago, not now or not the path that I'm currently on. And, quite frankly, I hated that. I despised it, in fact.
  
  But then, as she went on with her talk and argued that it'd be much better to think about creativity as something that flows through us, I was able to start changing my thoughts on the matter—in real time as she continued to talk, and I somehow managed to keep making photos of her with the camera I almost had dropped a few minutes before—and start recasting my view on it.
  
  Instead of trying so hard to live up to something in the past that I happened to be in the right time and place for, Liz's words guided me to consider a different view on it of being a conduit for that creativity. Maybe that would be enough. Furthermore, if I could indeed follow her advice and be the best conduit for my own creative spark, maybe I would be that much more ready for the next right time and place and prepared to apply everything I could. And if that time never came, well, I'd done my part.
  
  By the time she finished, I was both emotionally spent and at peace with the idea. Thank you Liz

• A comment on Conversation: Should anyone be able to upload their TEDTalk to TED.com?

  Feb 16 2011: No. I think that curation is a big part of the value of TED. That said, I think that a feeder system of sorts—some sort of nomination process maybe by site members—could be incredibly valuable to help surface those hidden geniuses.