Aaron Hockley isn’t just a man. He’s a legend! He’s also the guy behind an new innovative venture called WP Photographers (launching in August 2014) that marries the intersection of WordPress and Photography. How so? Well, there’s a staggering number of things to think about where it concerns photo usage with WordPress. WP Photographers steps in to fill the knowledge gap in that area with their vast expertise and advice.

WP Photographers is definitely stepping in an underserved area. Additionally, their service offerings aim to help people choose appropriate themes, hosting and more. Get on board and signup to get notified when they launch!

Aaron, the LA Community is just thrilled to have you as a sponsor. Your generosity makes this thing go and become an unstoppable Juggernaught of WordCampery-goodness!

Finally the mystery of the second half of our Saturday Sessions speakers is solved! Here’s our second round of speaker announcements – can you believe the awesomeness contained in this post alone?

Jonathan Tobin is a lawyer, a web developer, and a WordPress enthusiast. Seriously. All those things in one person. In his legal practice, Jonathan works with creators and creative professionals. He’ll be speaking to us on legal issues you should consider when working with your WordPress site including things like licensing, privacy, user-generated content, and e-commerce.

Chris Lema blogs occasionally. Just kidding – he blogs daily, folks. He also writes ebooks, speaks, works as the VP of Engineering at Emphasys Software, helps companies leverage WordPress and WordPress companies find leverage and on top of all that, still finds time to take a nap every day. He’ll be sharing several stories of people whose lives were changed by WordPress.

Roy Sivan has been using WordPress since something like version 0 and has built out his fair share of WordPress sites. Currently, he just likes to take WordPress and make it do incredible amazing stuff nobody else thinks is even possible. He’ll be speaking on using WordPress as an application framework to build out client-side and single-page applications. Maybe a little bit of his awesomeness will rub off on you.

Matthew Boynes is lead developer at Alley Interactive. He loves solving complex problems with WordPress and helping others to get more from WordPress. He’ll be speaking on turbo-charing WP_Query so that you can build complex queries and super amazing sites without taking a big performance hit.

Konstantin Obenland is really tall. And also probably really sick and tired of people talking about how tall he is. He’s also a core contributor and was backup lead and theme developer for some recent themes you may have heard of like Twenty Thirteen and Twenty Fourteen. And he loves Dr. Pepper. He’ll be speaking on the seven defined philosophies of WordPress core development and how these philosophies shape every decision made about WordPress.

Shanta Nathwani is an IT and Social Media Consultant and also an Instructor in Web Design and CCIT Capstone at Sheridan College. She’ll be speaking about how WordPress helps non-profits get the most out of their web site budgets and encourages members of their organizations to contribute content.

Dave Jesch, owner of one of the most amazing ‘staches this side of the Mississippi, is the Principle and CTO at SpectrOMTech.com. He’s a full stack developer who works with stability and scalability in mind. He’ll be speaking on writing code that scales for WordPress plugins and themes. His tips will come in handy for building out high traffic sites and also for developers who want to release plugins and themes.

Sé Reed has a special place in her heart for small business owners. In addition to her work helping out small business owners with their websites, she also does all sorts of WordPress-y stuff and is a musician. She’ll be showing us an awesome combo of plugins that small business owners can use to take their websites from basic to bada$$ without having to wrestle with code.

david t pisarra is a regular columnist for the Santa Monica Daily Press, a contributor to the Huffington Post and the Good Men Project, and author of 5 books. He’s also got a podcast – Men’s Family Law. No stranger to producing content on a deadline, he’ll be speaking on creating and using editorial calendars to take the hassle out of blogging and podcasting.

Trevor Wolter oversees all testing at Zeek Interactive. He’ll be speaking on testing for independent developers and freelancers. If that’s you, you know you’ve got to wear a lot of different hats, but Trevor will convince you that your tester hat is an important one for making sure your code works as expected and that client and user expectations are met and exceeded.

Gary Magnone loves craft beer, cocktails, and coffee, but more importantly, people, he’s a digital marketing consultant and entrepreneur. He launched Highrise in 2012 and helps his clients drive traffic, leads and revenue. He’ll be speaking on search engine optimization in 2014 – a world where Google is constantly changing and SEO is more nuanced than ever. He’ll also cover some WordPress-specific tips, tools and tricks for maximizing your site’s reach.

Joe Chellman thinks he probably started using WordPress before Roy Sivan. He’s an experienced builder of themes and plugins, author of Introducing WordPress: Learn by Video on Peachpit, and author of several JavaScript titles on Lynda.com. He also chose the title of Supreme Dictator for Life to describe his role at Shoofly Development and Design. He’ll be talking about version control, specifically Git, and why you should be using it.

One again, if these were the only twelve speakers we had, we could easily sell out. But combine these twelve superheroes with the twelve we’ve already announced, and that adds up to a day of Saturday Sessions that will blow your mind. As if these 24 speakers weren’t enough to convince you to attend, we still have the Foundation Friday speakers to announce. What the what? Stay tuned for more awesomeness than you can shake a stick at.

We’re sure you’re wondering what awesome speakers and topics we have in store for you at WordCamp LAX 2014. Here’s our first round of speaker announcements – these peeps will be dropping knowledge on us during Saturday Sessions:

Sarah Wefald is a front-end web developer and digital marketing specialist who co-facilitates the OC WordPress Web Designer meetup group and does tons of other awesome stuff too, like playing music. She’ll be speaking on content strategy and will show you how and why content marketing will help build your business and strengthen your website.

Jason Cosper is the Senior Technical Advisor for WP Engine and star-crossed Lakers fan. He’ll be showing some strategies for combatting spam with his patented one-two punch of plugins and WordPress configuration.

Jarrett Gucci, founder and owner of WPfixit.com, will be giving a tremendously helpful talk on what to do when you don’t know what to do. Advice on troubleshooting all sorts of wierd and bizarre issues that can occasionally crop up with WordPress sites.

Cal Evans, international man of mystery, has been working with computers since he was 14 (we’re not telling you how many years ago that was, folks). Cal hails from Nashville, Tennessee and will be speaking on NONCE (Numbers Used Once) and explaining what they are and how to properly use them.

Louis Reingold, brave man who wants Alex Vasquez to write his official biography, will be speaking on how developers can turn their skills into cash by building a WordPress plugin.

Joseph Karr O’Connor is the WordPress Accessibility Team Representative and an invited expert on the W3C HTML Working Group and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group. He’ll be speaking on how to make your WordPress site accessible without sacrificing design or innovation.

Nick Halsey is a WordPress core contributor, plugin and theme developer, a WordPress Google Summer of Code student and a student at USC studying Civil Engineering, Architecture, and Music Composition. Phew. He’ll be speaking on the WordPress Customizer API so that plugin and theme developers can implement previewable options in their themes and plugins.

Denise VanDeCruze is a trilingual programmer, designer, and entrepreneur who has a passion for travel. She’ll be speaking on building multilingual sites with WordPress, including good and bad examples, plugins that are available, and properly handling things like SEO.

Jennifer Bourn, creative director and digital strategist at Bourn Creative and a Genesis recommended developer, will be speaking on blogging to attract new prospects and clients. She’ll cover how to get maximum visibility for your blog posts and how to get them in front of the people who need what you offer.

Derek Springer is a San Diego-based Code Wrangler at Automattic. He’ll be covering easy tips for taking your blog from good to great – and we all want our blogs to be the best they can be, right?

Christopher Frazier has studied type design, illustration, user interface design, programming and more. He’ll be speaking on WordPress for enterprise, and giving practical tips on how large organizations can transition to using WordPress.

Mika Ariela Epstein is a WordPress Support Specialist and Manager over at Dreamhost. Maybe better known to you as Ipstenu, Half-Elf Support Rogue. She’ll be speaking on how anyone can make their WordPpress site more secure.

I mean, let’s face it, people. If we just had these twelve amazing peeps giving these talks, we could pretty much sell out our tickets and call it a day. But these are just half the sessions for Saturday. We’ve got twelve more speakers for Saturday on the way, and also the big reveal on those Foundation Friday speakers, so stay tuned!