Last night the Dublin University Photography Association (DUPA) held a disposable camera pub crawl. Attendees met at the Pavilion Bar at 7pm, which was the first destination of the event. As it was golden hour on a Friday, the bar was a hive of activity, but this also made it slightly difficult to identify the DUPA cohort. However, the sixty-odd crawl attendees soon located committee members thanks to their DUPA logo emblazoned crewnecks.
The primary aim of the evening was a social one – to get general society members and committee members to meet and interact with each other. This was encouraged early on in the day through the organisation of a disposable camera pick-up hour in the Atrium, where a limited number of cameras were distributed. Given the high number of predicted attendees, members were immediately aware that they would need to share around these cameras for the crawl. When the official event began DUPA allowed groupings to form naturally, but it also provided material that would alleviate any overly lengthy pauses in conversation such as the setting of 12 photo challenges on attendees’ Instagram stories. These challenges doubled down on the social aim of the evening, with each one revolving around getting to know different committee members. For example, attendees were challenged to get a snap of one of their group members giving Ivan Rakhmanin, the chairperson of the society, a hug. A mysterious prize was promised in the weekly email for the winner of these challenges.
As the group made their way from the Pavilion Bar to Doyle’s, before taking up residence in Sweetman’s, the social side of the event only improved. The conversations were idiosyncratic among the photography-loving crowd, with one participant commenting that the name of a fellow participant sounded “like that Instagram filter”. There was also plenty of in-depth analysis being carried out regarding the best settings to use in manual shooting mode on digital cameras in order to become the ultimate photography snob. At this stage of the night, some people were still trying to complete the photography challenges, but many others had let them fall by the wayside in favour of drinking and conversing.
While the event was scheduled to end at 11pm, it showed no signs of stopping, with many participants heading on to O’Neill’s afterwards. The crawl destinations were familiar haunts for returning College students, but made for an excellent introduction to the inner Dublin pub crawl circuit for new students. Despite the event taking place on Friday 13, a date usually associated with bad luck, DUPA’s disposable camera pub crawl went off without a hitch.
