The weekend featured both Pixel Pyros and a Breakthrough Breast Cancer Bake Off event.

I’m always really jealous of the professional photographers when I go to any events like these, because they have a single focus (literally) and one aim – to get the best photographs possible with their epic equipment. I’m the girl with the camera talking to event organisers and customers whilst herding minions, trying to perform the actual task I’m supposed to be doing at the time, looking at schedules, answering questions, and tweeting…all whilst taking pictures and trying to think about settings, composition and where I should be standing/sitting/lying. Add nurses, witty comments from passers-by and alcohol into the mix, and it starts to become even more difficult.

But not impossible. And I feel honoured that I get to be involved in so many amazing things, and it’s all worthwhile every single time.

They were two of the most challenging things I’ve photographed so far, not least because I was running on very little sleep, I had a friend to stay over for a few days, I’d organised people from work coming, I’d managed to double book myself for the same event (who does that?!) and I was photographing a lot of people. For the bake off, this meant people were moving around a lot and I was saying, ‘Can you hold the tray *steady* and *straight*’ repeatedly. For Pixel Pyros, this meant crazy lighting conditions and people filming/photographing me photographing them. I also did a quick video interview, although from the doubtful ‘Well…we’ll see if we can use anything,’ that followed, I’m guessing that the harassed rabbit in headlights look isn’t what they were aiming for ;)

Here are some of the photos…

My kitchen looking absolutely trashed after spending a good ten hours baking over multiple days (I even had washing up stacked up all over the floor):

I made chocolate orange, lemon, cherry bakewell and chocolate fudge cupcakes…

…vanilla cakepops…(yeah, first time I made them and I need more practice!)

…mini doughnuts…

…and white chocolate chip cupcakes topped with marshmellow buttercream.

We got to the hospital and the people there were incredibly lovely and incredibly generous. Some people gave huge donations, and although we were only a small part of the bake off, the cakes got sold incredibly quickly and I wish I’d baked more. I got some really nice compliments from people, including a young girl who told her mum how ‘yummy’ her cake was, which made me feel all warm and fuzzy. Overall it was a fantastic event, even though it was pretty emotional. It restored a lot of my faith in the human race, put it that way :)

Things that other people made…

After that we headed back to work, where I caught up with emails, worked on preparations for our Halloween contest and a few other things before leaving to head to the GameCity launch party (yay free drinks). By that point I was really excited for PixelPyros; I’ve seen some of the things Seb’s done before and been to a couple of his talks, and they’re always amazing. He codes everything himself, and he’s hilarious.

Sadly there was no talking this time, but this event was a lot more public (read: in the city square and open to the general public rather than just web industry geeks), so all it needed was some loud upbeat music as a backdrop to the people-powered display and games.

I had the opportunity to play Space Invaders on the biggest screen ever with lots of other people.

Adding lasers into the mix made everything even more fun.

Overall, it was a really fun end to the week and I had a fantastic time :) And as always, there’s more where those came from.