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.

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.

I discovered a quick and dirty keywording method in Lightroom that has improved my workflow a great deal. Keywording photos makes it easier to find them later in Lightroom and better yet, if you are sharing your photos on Flickr, it will make your photos infinitely more findable for anyone who is searching.

Easy Tagging

I started using Lightroom because of the thoughtful, fast workflow it offered. Keywording in Lightroom is both quick and robust and the metadata I added was exported to Flickr as tags (thanks to Jeffrey Friedl’s wonderful Export to Flickr Tool).

Prior to Lightroom, I used iPhoto to organize my photos which has keyword support that was designed for people needing only a handful of keywords (if any).

iPhoto Keywords

I always expected more from iPhoto, but I imagine, for most people, tagging is a secondary feature. ¹

Why Not Just Use Lightroom’s Existing Keyword Method?

Lightroom’s keyword tool is great if you’re just typing in a few new keywords, but if you have many keywords to enter (with Parent categories and synonyms), it gets a little tedious. Lightroom requires you to switch back and forth from the mouse to keyboard a lot, which can really slow you down.

Second, if you already have a keyword data source that is a long list, you can’t just copy and paste that into Lightroom.

Finally, once you import keywords, it’s easier to keyword photos inside Lightroom through auto-completion (if you type them in) or dragging and dropping onto the keyword.

Getting Started: Export Your Keywords

If you’ve already been keywording your photos in Lightroom, you can get an idea of what your existing keyword data looks like by selecting Metadata > Export Keywords… The resulting file is a tab delimited text file that can be viewed in any text editor (TextEdit, TextMate, etc).

The keywords are structured something like this:

[Folder]
	Keyword
		{synonym, synonym, etc}

Creating a Text File to Import

I have a massive amount of keyword data in Lightroom and I’m constantly adding to it. On occasion, I know what keywords I’m going to add before a photo shoot.

Shortly before the last Ignite Seattle event, Brady had posted the schedule on the Ignite site, including speaker names, their Twitter IDs and the topic of their talk. This made for an easy copy and paste into Excel.

After a little data massaging, I saved the file as a .txt file that was tab separated and ready for Lightroom. It looked something like this:

[People]
	Hillel Cooperman
		{@hillel}
	Dawn Rutherford
		{dawnoftheread}
	Shelly Farnham
		{@ShellyShelly}
	Dominic Muren
		{@dmuren}
	Jen Zug
		{@jenzug}
...

Import Your New Keywords

Now, before you start importing keywords into Lightroom, I’d suggest that you first set up a new catalog to see what the results from the import will look like.

If you import a lot of new keywords and they aren’t structured properly, you might muck up your existing Keyword List. While you can “Purge Unused Keywords,” this might remove other keywords that you actually wanted.

Create a new catalog, by selecting File > New Catalog.

Select Metadata > Import Keywords and you are on your way.

Keyword entry

If you do type your keywords, type in the little keyword box, not the big one. If you enter keywords into the big keyword box, they don’t auto-complete whereas they do auto-complete in the little box.

That’s it.

Hopefully, this will help you as much as it has helped me. Having good keywords will help you find and organize your photos much more than without them.

Caveat – Don’t Move/Change Keywords

Sadly, what I really wanted to do was restructure my keywords without breaking my existing keyword set, but this is not possible with the current Import/Export tools. If you want to move a keyword into a category, you must use the Lightroom interface to do so.

For example, if you have a category “People” and a keyword “Randy Stewart” at the top level of your keyword hierarchy, you can’t move “Randy Stewart” under “People” in the text file.

Lightroom stores keywords as explicit paths. For example, you can have both

[People]
	Randy Stewart
Randy Stewart

which I think is a total pain. You can have the same keyword on multiple levels. Some folks think this is a feature, personally, I think that it is a bug.

It would be fantastic to edit this file manually although, I suppose if keywords didn’t work this way, they would have to store keywords in a database rather than a flat file.

Here are some of my favorite pix from last night’s npost event. Thanks Nathan for organizing gathering of so many good startups.

More pictures are in my npost Flickr set.

TA McCann points to the future

The Crowd

Jeff Lawson

David Jennings

Amplitude measures the response

More pictures are in my npost Flickr set.

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

My pix are below, but I certainly wasn’t alone in taking pix for the conference. There are lots more here and here.

Here are my pix from this year’s Wordcamp.

Long rumored and shrouded in secrecy, Flickr launched video today. Video is restricted to 90 seconds and dubbed ““long photos,” of capturing slices of life to share.”

I think it’s a great addition to the site and like the idea of short clips rather than long form amateur video. This will be a great way to capture the moment to share with friends, family and co-workers that are often so far away.

Video up above is from my friend Josh Ellingson, a talented San Francisco artist.

Click through for a completely ridiculous video of Olivia.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

I’ve been taking pictures of events for almost a year now and SXSWi was clearly the biggest event that I had undertaken. South by Southwest is both rewarding and grueling in the sense that meeting great folks, learning new things, trying to upload photos in somewhat real time while trying to get sleep is pretty difficult. You can sleep when you’re dead…

I’m not taking pictures for anything other than fun and personal enrichment (and to give something back to the folks who give so much of themselves to putting on these events). I really enjoy the work that Kris Krug [kk+] and Scott Beale [Laughing Squid] have been doing for years and hope to be as good as they are some day. I’m really thankful for all the tips and tricks that they have shared with me in the last year.

Not all the photos are gems, but I cut this group of pictures down from 700 pictures that I took down to about 160. If you want to see with folks on Flickr like best, go here for my 12 most “interesting” photos from South by Southwest Interactive 2008.

FYI – I’m shooting on a Canon Rebel XTi with mainly a Canon 50mm f/1.4 lens.

You can view the rest of my Flickr stream here.

I’ve posted my pix from last night’s Ignite Seattle event.

Ignite Seattle is a tech geek meetup held semi-irregularly that brings out some of the best and brightest in the Puget Sound region.

Had a great time and hope the next one isn’t so far off in the future. Wish my pix were better, but I’m still new at this whole photography thing.

Here is a link to my photos on Flickr – http://www.flickr.com/photos/stewtopia/

Feel free to use my photos in blog posts and what not, just link back here for attribution.