Here are my favorite photos from Ignite Seattle 12
Buster Benson
Karen Cheng
Adam Philipp
Joel Grus
Gregory Heller
House of Cards
Here are my favorite photos from Ignite Seattle 12
Buster Benson
Karen Cheng
Adam Philipp
Joel Grus
Gregory Heller
House of Cards
Here’s a few pics from last night’s Ignite Seattle. Feel free to use any of my photos with attribution and a link back to where you found them.

Matthew Inman – “The Oatmeal“

Matt Harding – “Where the Hell is Matt?”
You can find more in my Flickr stream.
I was down in LA for the Twitter Conference, 140TC, last week. The conference was slated to be the intersection of Hollywood and Silicon Valley, which might be two of the weirdest places on earth. The conference didn’t disappoint. I mean, where else could I meet Tony Robbins, The Iron Sheik and Biz Stone, all on the same day?
Huge thanks to conference organizers, The Parnassus Group (and my pal, Jason Preston) for putting this fantastic conference together.
Needless to say, I snapped a few pix that I’ve posted below. Naturally, there are more on Flickr.
What do I do with all those photos? This is a question that I frequently get asked from folks at events I photograph.
At the last Ignite event, I took 1600 photos and posted 46 of them (just about 3%). Not all of the unposted photos were duds, but they weren’t as good as the photos that I did post. While I want to thoroughly cover an event, I try to post only the best photos of the night.
Taking pictures at many events (especially Ignite) are challenging due to unique and difficult lighting situations. Couple that with people who are moving around a lot and talking about something that they are passionate about, capturing a passable photo, let alone a good one can be hard.
I aspire to always 1. make the person look as good as possible and 2. capture the essence of the speaker and their material. Occasionally, I succeed.
Here’s a quick, three minute video (really a super-fast slideshow) that shows you the photos I posted among all the pictures that I took. Hopefully it conveys the pruning and curating process I go through before I post a photo set.
You can watch the HD version on YouTube and the final photo set from Ignite Seattle 7 is here.
Filed under: better late than never.
Gnomedex 2009 marked my 4th Gnomedex and it seems that they get better every year. Gnomedex has always made me think in ways I hadn’t thought, meet people I had not met and do things I wouldn’t otherwise do. I view going to Gnomedex as a kind of engineered randomness with known constraints.
Gnomedex is also a place for me make new friends and to catch up with friends that I don’t get to see all that often. This year was no different (although I did miss one person in particular). Drop me a line if I haven’t said hi after this year’s Gnomedex.
If you’re looking for a wrap up or summary of Gnomedex 2009 in words, rather than pictures, here are few of best that I’ve read.
Here are my favorite pictures from this year’s Gnomedex (some of which have been posted over on my photoblog).



Lee LeFever and Kris Krug

Big thanks to Chris Pirillo and all the folks that put on Gnomedex every year. Their tireless hard work that makes Gnomedex very special to me every year is very much appreciated.
More photos from my Gnomedex 2009 photoset
When I edit my photos, I view them on a 24″ monitor full bleed. Once I’ve picked the photos I’m going to use, I upload them to Flickr where they are chained for eternity at 500 by 333 pixels. Sure, you can go to the bigger size, but Flickr doesn’t really encourage it.
About a year ago, I discovered a wonderful site, The Big Picture, curated by Alan Taylor at Boston.com, the online home of the Boston Globe. If you haven’t been to the site, I apologize for ruining your productivity for the next couple of hours.
The basic idea behind the Big Picture, is that photos that might only be shown in small form on a newspaper cover or Web site, are blown up to about 1000 by 660 pixels. Certainly big enough to see the details, but more importantly, big enough to see what the photographer saw and hopefully, to tell their story.
In my humble way, I’m imitating the Big Picture at least in that I wanted to display my photos in large form. Many pictures I take are dark, as I eschew flash (mainly because I don’t have an external one), but the details are there, provided the image is large. The photos load quickly (thanks, Flickr) and I’ll only be posting a maximum of one a day.
So, with that, I give you, in all it’s pixel wasting glory my new photo blog at photos.stewtopia.com. This week, in honor of Gnomedex, I’ll be posting some big pictures from past events.