Well I was totally blown away and honored to learn yesterday that I’d won an award from SF Weekly here in San Francisco for the best San Francisco Flickr account. I’ve been a huge fan of SF Weekly ever since I arrived in SF back in 1990 and it was really something to have a publication that I enjoy and have respected so much over the years recognize my photography. So I went to the awards party last night and in addition to receiving the award had an *excellent* time shooting portraits at the event.
One thing I’ve been trying to do lately is shoot more portraits of people. Some of this work I’m doing more formally through things like my $2 Portrait Project, but a lot of it is just street photography or shooting friends who know me or at events or other places especially where people might expect to be photographed and are more relaxed about things. So I spent a lot of last night just trying to find the best light at 111 Minna and work on shooting people. Most of the people that I shot were strangers, but I found most people very accommodating about letting me have a few seconds to shoot them.
I also enjoyed shooting alot of the art at 111 Minna last night. 111 Minna is a fantastic gallery and really focus on more cutting contemporary work. I especially loved seeing a Ron English Warholish piece there called Dead Andy.
I also got to meet Alexia Tstosis for the first time last night. I originally met Alexia a ways back in the hey day of FriendFeed back before Facebook had bought them. At the time she was a reporter for L.A. Weekly, but has since moved up here to SF and is now the web editor for SF Weekly. Alexia is a fun and connected journalist who does a great job keeping the pulse of whatever the next great things coming out tech are. I’d traded emails with her, but it was so nice to finally meet her in person as well. Thank you again for the award Alexia and I love the work you’re doing with SF Weekly.
My good friend Troy Holden (who is now working at Twitter) was also at the event last night where he and his cohorts Julie Michelle, Travis Jensen and Rumnose (really Stuart Dixon, but I like to call him Rumnose because that’s how I met him on Flickr originally in DMU) received the award for Best SF Art Blog. Troy, Julie, Travis and Rumnose run the excellent CaliberSF.com blog, which is really putting up some outstanding work these days, if you haven’t already checked it out, definitely do so! 🙂
My Pal Jeremy Brooks also came out with me to last night’s party. Jeremy shares a passion for neon signs like I do and is another great prolific SF shooter. Jeremy has recently developed the SuprSetr application for Flickr, which is by far my most favorite 3rd party app that I’ve ever seen developed for Flickr. If Flickr were smart, they’d hire Jeremy and have him build this technology for the entire Flickr universe to use as a feature rather than 3rd party app.
I also enjoyed meeting Aaron Durand, who shoots a lot of graffiti stuff that I love as well.
I met so many other cool people at last night’s party. So many interesting people working in tech or the arts and doing interesting projects and things in SF. I put together a set of images from last night on Flickr that you can check out here. I’m absolutely terrible with names, so apologies in advance to anyone that I photographed but didn’t get your name down or right. If you know someone in one of the photos, do me a favor and leave a comment or tag with their name so that I can identify them.
Congratulations to all the other award winners last night. Also thanks again to SF Weekly for the award, and also for all those free Asahi beers last night too!
You can find my complete set of images from last night’s event here.
Thank you, Thomas, for the kind words. It was great to finally meet you.