So in no particular order, here’s some thoughts on what happened in Austin over the past week:

• this year was way bigger than last year – lots of people guessing on the numbers so take this with a grain of salt but it’s ‘supposably’ 50% bigger than last year. So that puts it somewhere between 5000 and 10000 geeks in one place. This was especially evident since previously, you’d always run into people you know but this year, I know there were people I knew in Austin and yet I never managed to see them in the halls/panels
• I wished I made it to the I Can Haz Cheeseburger panel – they were actually giving out hamburgers to the audience
• 12 sessions per time slot does not work
• 10am panels are very hard to attend
• there needs to be more technical panels. Of all the ones I attended, only two could be considered (by me) technical and they were incredibly well attended – as in standing-room-only-geeks-sitting-in-the-aisles-fire-hazard kind of well attended. Of course since there was 12 sessions in every timeslot (plus other stuff in and around the convention center), it’s entirely possible there were more technical sessions.
  
• the panel rooms need to be reworked (again). Nothing sucks more than having to go from room 18ABCD to Room C – it’s like walking to Surrey from North Vancouver. I’m all for the walking but when you consider that a panel ends at say 11am and the next one starts at 11:30am, it doesn’t give you much time to actually talk to the panelists afterword, or with friends about the panel before you have to start hoofing it to the other end of the convention center to get a decent seat for the next session
  
• Twitter stayed up during the whole conference which is a huge deal since it was probably the number one web site talked about (yes, even more than Facebook and the infamous interview). Impromptu ‘Tweetups’ happened everywhere and were awesome. Your twitter name should be printed on the badge next year (everyone just wrote it on theirs this year)
  
• Internet access generally seemed better this year…except at my hotel which crawled. The convention center’s wifi was much more robust this year and they had a 802.11n access point which was great. Also more and more venues had free wifi so it made using Twitter and checking Google maps a breeze. My prepaid AT&T sim also got a good workout and thanks to some flaky hotel access, ended up costing more than it should have – see my $12 flickr photo for one example:
  
• Apple should have sponsored a shuttle to the Apple Store…there was a convoy of cabs there from the convention center on a daily basis.
• Canadians showed up in force this year. Not just the 20-30 Vancouverites I knew were going either….great folks from across this great land came down and had a great time
  
• Once again, the Raincity Studios crew had the best, most coveted t-shirts (read about it in the L.A. Times) and hosted the best party at the Iron Cactus. My second favorite shirt (after the Space Invaders RCS shirt) is the “Hacking is not a crime” shirt I picked up from the MAKE booth
• in Austin (and probably just for SXSW) the term ‘Ranch’ can mean many things. What I didn’t expect it to mean at the Pure Volume Ranch (home of the huge Digg party among others) is dirt floors covered in wood chips and port-o-lets. Moby and Kevin Rose didn’t seem to mind.
  
• Finally had a chance to visit the Salt Lick BBQ in Driftwood, Texas (outside of Austin)…been coming to SXSW for three years and always heard about it but never had the chance to make it out there. It lives up to the hype
  
• you can buy iPods at the Houston Airport from a vending machine
  
• iPhones were everywhere and mine at least was indispensable during the trip. From the wifi that was available everywhere, to the Google Maps locate me feature, it was easily the most used item I brought. Using the sched.org tool to make a customized calendar of sessions/events/parties to attend, it was easy to see where to go next or what our options were if we decided to change our minds.
• I was able to get a tag for my camera that I should have exploited more. Strangely, I saw all kinds of cameras (not just DSLRs) with the tag, including a tiny little lipstick-sized webcam. There also seemed to be some discrepancy as to who should get a tag as Peter was denied just minutes after I got mine.
  
• If you don’t like Rockband, be glad you weren’t at SXSWi….every second booth in the Trade Show had it setup and many events used it as a focal point
• Adobe had a sneak peak of their new Adobe Media Player in a bar with a live band and a skateboard halfpipe. Nothing kills a party faster than trying to demo your software on a projector in the middle of a bar AFTER a decent local band played while skateboarders used the halfpipe in front of the stage. Still surprised about the presentation’s inappropriateness and the fact they thought they had to explain RSS feeds to a room full of geeks. The Media player actually looks decent (if not a little iTunes-ish) but they really need to work on the promotion side of things and figure out who the people that attend Southby are
• Most heard/overused word/phrase I heard this year: ‘Fail!’ or used in a sentence: ‘Epic Fail!’. #2 was ‘iPhone’. #3 was “I’ll have another Shiner Bock”.
  
• There wasn’t as many MacBook Air’s there as I would have expected. Consensus from those I talked to about it was they were hoping for more from Apple – or technically less as they wanted a true replacement for the 12″ Powerbook in screen size (or even smaller). It definitely got a lot of looks and was asked to hold it many times. There were a ton of eeePC’s in attendence which was cool to see.
• I managed to head over to BarCamp Austin between sessions at the convention center and sit in (briefly) on the iPhone DevCamp. As if the fact there was too much concurrent content at SXSWi, the fact that an awesome BarCamp AND iPhone camp was going on at the same time. Too much to do, not enough time to take it all in.
  
• As if you aren’t already tired of me talking about the BBQ, all the food was amazing…well except maybe not that late night pizza from 6th street
  
  
• as I write this post, there are over 12,000 SXSW related photos on Flickr. I have about 200 in there.

That’s pretty much it for me and this post…as I said at the beginning, there is still a lot of digesting to do (bbq and otherwise) so I may add to this once I’ve had time to take it all in.

See you next year, Austin!

Andrew Ferguson started things off by giving a talk about running a photography blog and the amount of effort it takes to keep an audience – basically you have to post daily or at least regularly because there are so many photography related sites out there, fresh content is (and always will be) king. I just started reading Andrew’s blog as a result of PhotoCamp and he’s got a lot of great stuff for photo geeks on there.

Matt Trentacoste was up next and gave a talk on ‘Computational Photography’ which was very interesting. He talked about what advantages digital photography gives over traditional, film based photo editing. While I do love messing with photos in Photoshop, most of my stuff is left untouched. I did love playing in the darkroom back in high school (where I first fell in love with photography) but like Matt says in his slides(PDF), darkroom work is hard work….and also quite expensive compared to the cost of decent photo editing software. He also talked about different software that can help correct issues caused by optical distortion or noise. His last part was about wavefront coding which (if I understand it correctly) is basically the ability, in software, to correct things like blurry images – basically (or maybe optimistically) an unblur filter that would allow you to fix blurry images (assuming you had the right camera gear to take the image in the first place) without affecting other variables in the image. Really cool stuff.

Duane Storey gave a talk about his HDR photos and went through the process to get the great shots he does like the one above. He does it via post-processing software called PhotoMatrix. I still haven’t had a chance to really play much with HDR yet but want to even more now.

Kris wrapped up the session with basically an open Q&A about various software and camera techniques, managing your photo workflow (Lightroom, iPhoto, etc), what lens to buy, etc…too many nuggets that I didn’t capture.

All that got squeezed into just over an hour and a bit. Seems to me there is probably enough cool stuff to talk about, smart people to give presentations and interested people to have a stand alone/full day event for photography geeks.

Thanks to kk, Andrew, Matt, Duane and everyone else for a great session.

Friday night was the ‘bar’ part of BarCamp which comes before the main event all day Saturday. Got to meet and talk to a ton of cool people, some of whom I’ve only known via their online presence so it nice to actually chat over a drink with everyone…although it was unbearably hot in there.

You can check out this episode Tod Maffin’s Todbits.tv video show (direct video link) which he broadcast live from the bar….I make a brief appearance around the 8 minute point with my iPhone.

I stumbled home after the open bar closed up and got a good night sleep.

Saturday morning came pretty fast and I decided once I arrived that I’d try my hand at giving a presentation. The spirit of BarCamp is that everyone that attends should contribute to the event. I knew from the night before at the bar that there was a lot of interest in the iPhone and specifically how it can be used in Canada, not to mention the hacks that I had done to it – this is after all a pretty geeky crowd.

So I threw my name into the ring (actually onto a post-it note on the board).

You need to give your presentation a title and choose a room size (small, medium or large). I titled mine “Hacking the iPhone in Canada” and chose the small room. Then each potential presenter has 30 seconds to pitch their idea to the crowd and they determine where it should fall in the schedule and helps decide the room based on level of interest. When it was my turn to pitch the session, I just said my name, held up the iPhone and was barely able to say my session title, there was more than a few ‘ohs’ and ‘ahs’ from the crowd and then Kris said I was done and that I’d be in the large room. I figured it would be a topic of interest but was actually surprised at the level….well, maybe not surprised….I know how I was after seeing/using one the first time.

Now I had to put together a presentation (or least flesh out the idea beyond a title) in short order. I decided to just put together a Keynote presentation of the screenshots I had taken of the various apps and hacks and would just wing the speaking part.

Once again, Rebecca did a great job of liveblogging the event so check her site for the play by play of the other sessions. I spent most of the morning splitting my attention between preparing for my session, taking some pictures and soaking up the morning presentations.

I was glad to finally get to meet and chat with Lee Lefever on Friday night as I’ve been a big fan of the amazingly clever Common Craft videos he does with his wife Sachi. Lee gave a talk about the process they go through making the videos and some behind the scenes stuff. They should totally put out a dvd of all their shorts. His session is particularly interesting to me as I’m working on some similar video projects trying to help explain some of the complex insurance systems to others outside my team at work.

My session was on right after lunch and it was pretty well attended. I basically detailed the steps I went through to activate and use it along with the more recent hacking parts which definitely interested more than a couple of people. I expect at least a few new iPhones in the Vancouver area soon – let me know if you get one and need help or just want to geek out with our iPhones (this means you Robert and Tod!).

(Thanks for the pic, Duane!)

The session immediately following mine was PhotoCamp put on by Kris. I was actually worried that the schedule would have my talk happen at the same time as Kris’ as it was the session I most wanted to see.

I didn’t know that Duane was going to talk about his HDR photos and it was cool to see him go through the steps to end up with his great shots. Check out his HDR tutorial to see what I mean.

Next up was David Drucker’s talk on Effective Animation in User Interfaces which was very interesting. He compared different approaches Apple and Microsoft took in designing some of their on screen effects as well as a number of third party applications. Great discussion from the other attendees as well. I had dinner with David after BarCamp and we talked about different ways for him to post his presentation online (with lots of embedded video) so when it’s available, I’ll link it here (or you can/should subscribe to his site feed).

The last block of the day was all about Facebook. First Phillip Jeffrey gave a talk on customizing Facebook, privicy issues and related topics from the audience. Then Greg Andrews spoke about developing applications for Facebook and the upcoming Facebook Developer Garage which i might be attending if I’m settled enough from my upcoming move.

After BarCamp ended, David and I had dinner and then I met up with John (who had to work so missed BarCamp but was rockin his shirt from last year in support) and Rebecca to finally catch The Simpsons Movie which was a great way to wrap up a couple days of geeking out. Of course, we had to have a post-BarCamp/pre-movie beverage:

Thanks to all the organizers and sponsors that make great events like this happen.

As usual I have a pile of photos of the event and you can view the Flickr stream of everyone’s photos with the barcampvancouver07 tag.

So that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. Fortunately I read about a possible inexpensive solution on the Flickr discussion groups. A company called Bower makes a kit of close up lenses that screw onto the filter ring of most cameras and seemed to provide pretty decent results. I was able to track a kit down on eBay for about $25 delivered which is a lot cheaper than a $700+ macro lens.

The kit consists of three separate lens (really just clear filters) that have different magnifications on them: +1, +2 and +4. The cool part is that you can attach them to each other and vary the level of magnification up to +7. The filters come in an old school faux leather pouch with red velvet-like lining. This actually fits quite nicely in my camera bag.

The downside (or upside depending on your perspective) with these filters is their very shallow depth of field. This can give a very cool result but it is harder to capture as you have to physically move the camera closer (or further) to the subject in order to get it in focus. I’ve also found that the camera’s autofocus has trouble locking on at +7 since it’s so shallow.

That said, I’m extremely happy with the results I’m getting with these filters and they are completely worth the money if you’re looking for an alternative to spending the big bucks on a macro lens.

My next step is to start playing around more with HDR and maybe even photoshopping some of my images with different effects like cross-processing…check out my friend Duane’s photography site for some great examples of his work along with some how-to’s. So much to experiment with and so little time to do it in.

I still need to play around with the raw versions of these pictures and see if I can get some cool HDR photos out of them. Note the yellow ‘dashed’ light on the first one – someone taking a bit too long to get off the highway.

There are a few others in my Flickr set…including a couple at the waterfront in North Vancouver…but some kind of lens flare happened on a few of them…not sure how to fix that. A lens hood maybe?