My trip to OSAF last week was “bingo” kind of week. Not only did the week overlap with Macworld, but it also overlapped with the San Francisco Flickr (SFlickr) meeting. Of all the Web 2.0/social networking sites, Flickr seems to have done the best job of actually extending the network into the real world. There are a bunch of these local gatherings all around the country. We have one in Seattle, which I’ve gotten to once and almost gotten to a bunch of times.

This was the second time that I’ve made it to the SFlickr meetup, and I got to see/participate in the community a bit more this time. During the scheduled meeting there was the usual mad meta photographing, as well as discussion of people’s work, and equipment. Many of the people that I met last May were not around, but I did add a bunch of new people to my contacts list, and I found it just as easy to meet people as I did last time.

I was particularly interested in the ST-E2’s that Maximum Mitch and John Curley were using. I’ve been considering getting one of these to trigger my 580EX remotely. I’ve got my Strobist SB-24 and sync cord, but something is broken with that setup at the moment, and I need to sort that all out. But the corded setup is unwieldy for some of the situtations that I’d like to be in. After watching Mitch goofing around with it during the meeting, I am pretty sure that I am going to get one of these.

After the meeting ended, a group of us went to Skylark to hang out and keep on talking. Oh, and to shoot. The patrons at Skylark must have thought that they were the subject of some kind of magazine shoot. Flashes were going off all over, and a number of us were asked what magazine all of this was going to be in. There was also a scary kind of moment when an unhappy patron warned us not to take his picture, but the owner of the bar and the bouncers seemed to be totally into our presence, so we didn’t end up in any trouble. Mitch let me borrow his ST-E2 so that I could see for myself how it worked — which is to say very well. I didn’t have any flash failures except for the times when I covered the sensor on the 580 with my hand, and I forgot that the ST-E2 acts as an autofocus assist even if you don’t have a flash. John was using his mostly for this purpose and got some beautiful low light shots.

To top it all off, after we left Skylark and were heading back to the car, we encountered a band that was walking the street, on their way somewhere. We convinced them to stop and do some posing for us. Beware the SF Flickrazzi! Special thanks thanks to ms_trouble, tshane, maidelba (for the ST-E2 time), picsfromj (for the ride to Skylark) and jay_que (John Curley) (for making sure I got home)

My set from the night is here.