Photowalking Santa Monica Style

Photowalking Santa Monica Photos clockwise by, noeltykay, Trevor Carpenter, Alexisjoy and leahpeah.

Well I had a *great* time catching up with everyone and photowalking this weekend down at the Santa Monica Pier. We had a nice turn out of about 25 people or so and shot first around the Promenade and then down at the beach and on the Pier. The highlight of our shooting of course was the beautiful Santa Monica Pier in the dark night and we got lots of great shots of it.

This was my first Southern California photowalk but it certainly won't be the last. Trevor Carpenter who runs photowalking.org was there (who is going to make zero money on his I'm a Thomas Hawk fanboy t-shirt by the way ;), along with Zooomr Evangelist Randy Carranza and his daughter Alexis.

Noel Kleinman, aka noeltykay on Flickr and Zooomr has long been one of my favorite shooters. Noel has some of the best Santa Monica Pier shots you'll ever see and was actually my inspiration for wanting to shoot it. Noel joined us and helped lead the expedition over the territory that he seemed to know like the back of his hand. He got us to just the perfect spot for shooting the pier in the night.

Film maker Mike Hedge came out as well with his video camera and got some good coverage on the video side. He said he'll put his footage up later at Vimeo so I'm looking forward to that. He got a great group shot of us all jumping.

It was nice to finally meet Karoli in person. I've followed her blog odd time signatures for a while. I got some great silhouette shots of her in the reflections off the surf of the pier.

It was also good seeing Leah Peterson again and meeting her family who she brought out with her.

Douglas Welch came out and has the first video from our afternoon up. Bob Sachs also came out and brought a bunch of friends that he works with.

There were lots of other people there as well of course and I'm sorry if I can't remember everyone's name exactly. Drop a comment on a photo if I don't have you're name and I'll fix it. Also let me know if you have a post up on the photowalk and I'll link it here.

We shot pretty much everything. Skateboarders, concession stands, sailboats, nature, neon :), and of course we got plenty of shots of the Pier and especially each other.

I love getting together for these photowalks. I find that I always learn so much from other people and there are so many new ways that I see the same things. So much camera geek stuff, talking about card readers and Pownce and Twitter and blogging and video and lenses and pretty much anything tech or photo related that you can think of.

Photowalking is good exercise, healthy, social, and a great way to get out there with your camera and get more and more of the photos that we all love.

You can check out some great shots under the photowalking080407 tag on Zooomr. I've also got a set of my images up here.

Update: A post from Bryan Villarin here. Another post from Brian Auer here. Trevor Carpenter's wrap up here.