Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

On today’s Flickr blog there is an announcement for two big upcoming Flickr photowalks. One is in New York on Saturday February 18th and already has 70 people signed up. The other is in Philadelphia on Sunday February 19th and already has 23 people signed up.

While these numbers are not as big as some of the photowalks that have been taking place over the past year through other sites, it is very interesting to see Flickr begin to get more active in the photowalking scene.

Even more impressive is what appears to be a brand new elegantly designed community page for meetups by Flickr at meetup.com. I played around a bit with the site and was very impressed — it’s much better designed than Yahoo’s own upcoming.com site and likely to attract much bigger participation in walks going forward — especially if promoted on the Flickr blog and through other official Flickr channels.

It’s also interesting to see that Flickr’s Head of Product Markus Spiering himself has organized and will be attending the two upcoming East Coast walks personally. Spiering is the guy who runs Flickr, so having him on the walks is a very visible way to show support for these kind of community events.

In the past I’ve been critical of Flickr for being out of touch with their users and the photo community. Earlier this year Spiering promised a “renewed focus” from Flickr this year and certainly beefing up community events, his own personal involvement, along with a page dedicated to these sorts of events by Flickr is a great way for Flickr to begin better re-engaging the photo community.

As a West Coast dude I won’t be able to attend these walks, but I love seeing this sort of community involvement from Flickr.

Today seems to be the first day that Flickr has blogged about the site — so far 142 flickr people have signed up from 33 different cities. It will be interesting to see what sort of momentum this site can attract.

Who: You

What: A DMU San Francisco Photowalk

Where: The walk will start outside the Civic Center Muni/BART Station.

We will shoot parts of the Tenderloin District making our way to Downtown to shoot the architecture and other street scenes.

We will plan on having dinner at the Embarcadero Osha.

After dinner we will walk along the Embarcadero towards the Bay Bridge and end up at the High Dive Bar along the Embarcadero for after shoot libation.

Why: To celebrate the arrival of our DMU Admin visiting from the Great Pacific Northwest Adameros.

When: Sunday, January 16, 4pm

You can get more information on the photowalk here (note: you have to have “safe search” turned off on Flickr to be able to see DMU)

Scott Kelby is out with his selections for the winners of this year’s Third Worldwide Photowalk that took place last month. He selected 1 grand prize and 10 honorable mentions from over 1,000 images submitted. Each walk’s leader submitted a single winner from their walk to compete for the prizes.

The image that I selected from our walk in Albany (above) was taken by Ivan Villa and it won one of the 10 Honorable Mention awards that were given. Congrats to you Ivan on winning in the contest!

You can find Ivan’s photography and design site here.

Thanks to all who came out last night for Scott Kelby’s Third Annual Worldwide Photowalk that we held out at the Albany Bulb in the East Bay. The weather was a bit chilly but it was a great evening to be shooting out there. We started our walk about 6:15 and headed back into the Bulb to shoot some amazing sculpture that local artists have sort of spontaneously installed there. We continued shooting around the Bulb, said hi to few local residents, and ended up at the Castle (this sort of man made concrete structure) where we shot the sunset. After the sun set a group of us headed over to Spenger’s in Berkeley where we had a few drinks and for some of us some dinner.

Overall I was pretty happy with how things went last night. I’ve led a lot of photowalks in the past, but this was the first time I’d led a Scott Kelby one. I thought Kelby and his team were pretty organized in terms of putting the basics together to help team leaders put on these walks. There were 1,111 different photowalks yesterday, all over the planet and over 33,000 different photographers participating. That’s huge!

Those participants who registered prior to the event will have until July 31 to submit what they feel is their best photo from the walk for the contest. Also if everyone who went on the walk could tag their images with worldwidephotowalk2010 that would be great. I’ve also started a group on Flickr for our Albany Bulb walk where those who came can post photos from the walk.

Several on last night’s walks were on their first photowalk. Others were photowalking veterans. It was great catching up with so many old friends and getting to meet some new ones as well. If you went on the walk I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. The Bulb is a magical place and I think we got it just right heading out there at sunset.

Some of you on the walk asked about the history of the Bulb. The following is taken from the Bulb’s wikipedia page:

The Bulb was created in 1963, after the City of Albany and Santa Fe, which owned the land, signed a contract for the disposal of construction debris. Lawsuits against the landfill operator brought the dumping to a halt in 1987. Following the lawsuit, the shoreline associated with The Bulb became part of The Eastshore State Park, while the City of Albany maintained ownership of The Bulb itself. Today, 99% of The Bulb is owned by the City of Albany, the other 1% being owned by East Bay Regional Park District.

There is a site albanybulb.com devoted to news on the Bulb here.

I’ve posted my set of images from last night’s walk here, I’ll be adding more to it in the days, weeks and months ahead. For those of you who are interested in doing another photowalk next month, Invisible Cirkus is coming to town from Miami and we’ve got another one scheduled in San Francisco’s Mission District on August 22.

This past weekend I had a great opportunity to co-host a photowalk with photographer Marc Silber down at the Peninsula School in Menlo Park. We put the photowalk together as part of a video interview that Marc was doing with me about my photography including lots of tips, techniques and comments by me on my own personal photographic style.

SanDisk is sponsoring Marc’s show and in addition to my own interview, Marc has 29 other great interviews up with some of the top photographers out there shooting today in pretty much every genre. The interviews are generally short, 5 to 10 minute in length and offer you wonderful insight and tips on how to improve your own photography.

Thanks again Marc for having me on your show. You can check out the video we did together here. If you have any questions feel free to post them in the comments and I’ll answer them there.

I’ll be leading a photowalk on July 24th at the Albany Bulb near Berkeley, CA as part of Scott Kelby’s Worldwide Photowalk. The walk is limited to 50 participants first come first serve and has 19 spots remaining of the 50 at present. You can register at the link I just posted. I’ve set the photowalk up to start at 6pm to take advantage of the sunset over the Bay. We’ll shoot until about 8:30pm or so when the sun goes down and then head over afterwards to Spenger’s to grab some drinks or food.

I attended the San Francisco Kelby walk last year and had a great time. This year there are already 897 photowalks set up with over 18,000 photographers participating. After the walk photographers will be able to upload their shots to the Worldwide Photowalk website and be eligible for prizes.

The Albany Bulb is an interesting Bay Area shooting spot with great views of the San Francisco Bay and Bay Area bridges. There is also a lot of art and natural beauty out there. You can find out more about the Bulb at the wikipedia page for it here. Here is a set of my own images from the Bulb. Looking forward to hanging out with everyone who is able to make it.

For the past two years Robert Scoble and I have been attending and shooting the Pacific Coast Dream Machines Show together in Half Moon Bay. It’s one of the best car shows in the United States, but is not just limited to cars. There are fire engines, trucks, airplanes (and airplane rides), steam engines, just about every kind of mechanical machine you can imagine.

Anyways, we are going to hang out and shoot the event again this next Sunday, April 25th, 2010. The show starts at 10am. Both Scoble and I will have to leave in the afternoon a little early (he’s going to Israel and I’ve got my son’s baseball game) but I’m looking forward to shooting the morning and part of the early afternoon down there with anyone else who can make it.

If you like shooting cars this is one of the best places to shoot cars I’ve ever been. Everybody is totally cool with open photography and are happy to have you photograph their vehicles. They also do a monster truck show (photo above) which is great to shoot as well.

I set up an upcoming page for the photowalk here. Come on out if you can make it!

More details on the event can be found at the event’s official website here. The event is $20 per adult, $10 for seniors, $10 for 11-17 and free for kids 10 and under and includes parking. The event is a fundraiser for the Adult Coastside Day Center.

You can check out my Flickr photos of the event from the past two years here.

Had a great time last night photowalking San Francisco with a great group of photographers. Flickr Pal Tom Harrison was in from New York and so some of the folks in DMU decided to put together a walk around the City.

We started at Union Square at 6pm and shot from there through Chinatown, up to North Beach, and ended up back downtown at the Embarcadero Center and Hyatt Regency. A great group of about 15 or so came out. For the most part the walk was pretty hassle free, although we did have a few people hassle us a bit about shooting from the sidewalk (a guy at Prada got wound up at me when I was shooting their mannequins and another shop owner in Chinatown also didn’t like me shooting his mannequin either).

We stopped off at Enrico’s in North Beach for a little pizza and beer and it was great to catch up with everyone. Thanks to everyone who came out last night. It was great catching up with old friends and meeting some new ones. If you went on last night’s photowalk, don’t forget to tag your photos with photowalking021610.

Here are 10 of my shots from last night. I’ll upload some more later this afternoon and tonight.

Stanford Theater, downtown Palo Alto

I’m looking forward to shooting and hanging out with a bunch of great photographers next Friday night in downtown Palo Alto. My Pal Trevor Carpenter, who does the great site photowalking.org, is organizing the walk which will start at 6:30pm in downtown Palo Alto. We’ll probably shoot the area there for a while and then end up at a watering hole or what not somewhere later to hang out and geek out about all things photography.

Bring your DSLR, your point and shoot, your Hasselblad, your Holga, your iPhone, or whatever you like to take photos with these days and come on out and join us. It should be a great time for all. This event is open to everyone regardless of skill level, etc. More details from Trevor here.

You can RSVP for the event at upcoming.org here. See you there!

My Palo Alto set on Flickr here.

I had a great time this afternoon hanging out with my Pal Tom Hogarty, Product Manager for Adobe Lightroom, on the 2nd Annual Scott Kelby NAPP Worldwide Photowalk in San Francisco. Tom led a great two hour walk around the Adobe’s San Francisco offices which included lots of modern architecture, old cars, graffiti, and some really cool warehouse grit that you find around Townsend Street there.

After the walk Tom and the staff at Adobe invited us into their offices for pizza and beer/soda and took questions and solicited feedback from the photowalk participants about Adobe products. Tom couldn’t really get into future plans for Lightroom specifically, but he did mention a few of his own personal favorite plug ins including something that I hadn’t heard of before called Mogrify. The plug in seems to be in part about watermarking and borders which I don’t use so I’m not sure it’s for me, but it was nice learning about that. Tom also took feedback from people in the room about what they’d like to see in the next version of Lightroom.

It was great shooting for a bit on the photowalk with my Pal Ivan Makarav from DMU on Flickr. Ivan is currently putting together a DMU photography magazine that I’m really excited to see develop. This is a magazine that I’ll be contributing my own photography to and will blog more about it once the first issue is out and available for purchase. I think it’s going to be about 60 pages and include a lot of the photographers that are currently participating in the Flickr DMU group.

It was also good to finally meet Stephan Shankland face to face. Stephan writes for CNET and has been a reporter I’ve admired for a long time. Stephen covers a lot of the photography and photo sharing tech stories and blogs at CNET’s Underexposed blog that you can read here. It’s definitely one you’ll want to follow if you are interested in good photography tech related reporting. Here’s a meta shot of Stephan from the walk.

It was also good to catch up with Ziv Gillat, one of the Founders of Eye-Fi. Eye-Fi is doing really interesting stuff with wifi and geolocational information built inside memory cards. Eye-fi recently came out with a new 4GB card for the Pro Photographer that for the first time writes RAW files for wireless delivery. I was excited to check out that card but haven’t tried it yet because they didn’t have a CF version of it out.

In addition to meeting and socializing with a bunch of other great photographers and Adobe staff I had a great time shooting myself. I found this old Ford car that was so much fun to shoot. I couldn’t figure out what kind of Ford it was. If anyone can identify it from my photos please let me know. I think it might be a Galaxie 500, but the emblem had been removed so I’m not sure. I also loved shooting the condominiums with all their crazy cloud reflections near the Adobe campus.

Thanks much to Tom Hogarty, and everyone at Adobe for hosting a fantastic walk today. I’m definitely looking forward to next year’s 3rd Annual Worldwide Photowalk. This photowalk by the way was held today in San Francisco was merely one of 900, yes 900, photowalks held all over the world. Here is a map of where all of the photowalks were held. You can learn more about this photowalk here.

You can see my complete set of images from this photowalk here.