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.

Ignite’s Seattle 2.0 Award

Mark Selander

Matthew Inman – “The Oatmeal“

Andy Sack

Matt Harding – “Where the Hell is Matt?”

Speaker Wrangling

Beth Goza’s Boots

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.

Photos from 140tc

Needless to say, I snapped a few pix that I’ve posted below. Naturally, there are more on Flickr.

Biz Stone of Twitter

Tony Robbins

Veronica Belmont

The Iron Sheik

Guy Kawasaki

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.

Portraits in a Dark Theater

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.

Looking over my shoulder

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.

Words, rather than photos

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.

• Derek Miller (penmachine) has summaries of both day’s talks
  (Day 1, Day 2)
• Kris Krug wraps his prose in between his photos in his Gnomedex 9 Human Circuitry
• While not strictly about Gnomedex, Betsy Aoki crosses over into my other love, Ignite with her post on “Giving an Ignite Presentation – What I learned at Gnomedex 2009.”

Gnomedex 2009 Pix

Here are my favorite pictures from this year’s Gnomedex (some of which have been posted over on my photoblog).

Frank Eliason – ComcastCares

Betsy Aoki

Printed head from Bre’s Maker Bot 3d printer.

Lee LeFever and Kris Krug

Danielle Sipple (@fiercekitty) and Buzz Bruggeman

Mark Horvath

Amber Case

Beth Goza

Thanks

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.

The Big Picture

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.

Photo Blog, but BIG

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.

Had a great time at last week’s Social Media Club Seattle meetup. Met lots of interesting folks and took a number of photos.

Little known fact – I was the first to give it a go as a Social Media Club organizer here in Seattle, but life got in the way of me doing it as well as I could. Glad to see so many good folks taking the ball and running with it.

Chris Pirillo

Kevin Urie

Vanessa Fox – "Oh, really, Chris?"

Showing Jeremiah the love

More pictures after the jump

Here are some of my favorite pix from the Seattle 2.0 Awards on May 7, 2009.

Jonathan Sposato

Glenn Kelman

Danielle Morrill

John Cook

Greg Huang

Here are my favorite pix from April 29th’s Ignite Seattle 6 event.

How and Why to Give an Ignite Talk – Scott Berkun

Intangible Method – Scotto Moore

The Psychology of Incompetence – Ron Burk

Geek Girl: A life Story – Maya Bisineer

Decoding Sticks and Waves – Ken Beegle

The Sanity Hacks of a Stay At Home Mom – Jen Zug

Public Library Hacking – Dawn Rutherford

Click below for all of my Ignite Seattle 6 pictures.

So, as I was planning a separate post about the parties at SXSW I realized that it would be dominated by one as I had the most fun taking pictures of folks at Happy Cog’s karaoke party.

I’ve done karaoke (badly) and I’ve taken photos at parties before, but this party was special as they had fantastic lighting and super campy performances.

Here are some of my favorites:

Tara Hunt channels Styx.

Haveboard’s Humpty Dance

Feel the Power of Schlomo Rabinowitz

David Armano lays down some Skynyrd.

Sarah Harrison had a story to tell about her little cat.

Happy Coggers Rob Weychart and Kevin Hoffman gave us the time of our lives.

Lauren Isaacson’s spot on Winehouse brought the house down.

Aaron Brazell represents. ‘Nuff said.

Thanks Happy Cog for a great party. Let’s do it again next year, shall we?

More Happy Cogaoke pictures here.

I upped my photographic game this year with some new camera gear in hopes of documenting SXSWi as best I could. Here are some of my favorites from the keynotes from this year.

Tony Hsieh (and his Zappos crew) want YOU to have good customer service.

Kathy Sierra and Gary Vaynerchuck

Gary Vee of Wine Library TV

Kathy Sierra points to something that kicks ass

Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com

Stephen Baker (Businessweek) and Nate Silver

Tony Hsieh of Zappos.com

Lawrence Lessig talking about Change 2.0

More pictures in my Flickr stream

This is the start of more photos being posted here on the blog. I’m taking lots of pictures and most of them just end up in my Flickr feed, but what fun is that?

Here are some of my favorites from Northern Voice 2009:

Nora Young

Eagranie Yuh

Kris Krug

Dave Olson

Roland Tanglao

Chris Heuer and Kim Cathers (not technically @Northern Voice)

Robert Scales

More Northern Voice 2009 Pictures on Flickrh5

Hey everybody, look at me, look at me (or rather look at Vanessa). A pic of mine appeared on CNN yesterday.

While it was uncredited (and unlinked), my personal photography policy dictates that the subject of the photo can do with it what they like. Only fair, I suppose, as it brings up all sorts of issues of “ownership” when it comes to photos.

Here’s my policy:

(CC) Randy Stewart, blog.stewtopia.com. Feel free to use this picture. Please credit as shown.

If you are a person that I have taken a photo of, it’s yours (but I’d still be curious as to where it is).

Sounds fancy and complicated, right :-) ? I also allow for commercial use of my images with accreditation.

Legally speaking

We had a great conversation last year at Mind Camp around the legalities of taking photos and who owns them. I spoke with someone (sorry… forgot his name) who used to work for Getty Images about this topic in particular. The long and short of it is that if I were doing this professionally (read:for money), I’d have to get Vanessa to sign a waiver saying it was ok for me to publish the photo and relinquish all rights to her image.

So, who owns your picture?

So, that’s the legal side of things (and I’ve really oversimplified it), what about the philosophical side? My feeling is, if I take and publish an photo of YOU, you can print, publish, distribute that image however you like.

You can even tell me to take it down and I’d do it, it’s a picture of you. Beyond any legalities that I don’t completely grok, generally I think of photo ownership as 51% you and 49% me. Meaning, you get final say.

I’m ok with it, but it could be better

I take photos for fun and I love taking pictures of people. It’s also a bit of fun to see my pictures in use, whether it be on other blogs or on news sites. Part of that fun is seeing how many people have viewed an image of mine.

That’s the bummer about CNN not linking (or having a counter as Espressobuzz suggested), I like to know how many people have seen a picture I’ve taken. Given the low cost of links, it seems like very little to pay.

[Editor's note: CNN didn't link to Vanessa either, which given her Googly background, bums her out too. Hopefully, just being mentioned will throw some links from other folks her way.]