Pictures

Diving – close up, originally uploaded by whiteafrican.

Coming back from the Web 2.0 Expo, I happened to be seated with a number of the Humboldt State University rugby team. They mentioned that the US Division II rugby playoffs were taking place this weekend at a facility near Orlando, Florida.

Realizing that I didn’t want to see a computer, blog, check email or think about the web at all, I set off for the pitch with to try out my new camera in a real “sports” setting.

The image above, of a guy diving to tackle as the other dives for the try, is my absolute favorite of the whole day. I took about 1400 pictures in the space of 3 hours and came out with 250 decent pictures. Of those, only 50 would I consider “good”.

Today I’ve learned a few things about sports photography:

1. It seems to take a lot of luck
2. Having a massive zoom lense makes your life easier
3. It’s NOT easy
4. It’s a lot of fun

The rest of the set can be found here

Microsoft = Internet’s Rectum, originally uploaded by whiteafrican.

There are more pictures and slides from my Web 2.0 Flickr set for it, this one just happens to be my favorite. David Hornik, of VentureBlog, gave the talk, which was BY FAR the most entertaining one yet. (Update: In context, it’s not as bad as it sounds, more on the presentation)

Other highlights have been the Eric Schmidt/John Batelle interview, the presentation by Technorati’s David Sifry and Hitwise’s Bill Tancer, and of course, meeting up with Colin Daniels of the Sunday Times.

All together, it’s been a really good conference. Some of the sessions have been a little dry, but the conversations and ideas are as rich as ever. One day left on the agenda, hopefully more good stuff will come from that.

Here are some great pictures of Africa as seen from above. The pictures are by Michael Poliza.

Shovel in the Sand 2, originally uploaded by whiteafrican.

I’ve been wanting to get a good digital camera for a while, and was finally able to snag a Nikon D50 from Amazon.com for an acceptable price. This weekend I took it out to see what kind of damage I could do with it.

Let me just say that the camera makes up for my hack photography skills in so many ways. I can take questionable shots in bad lighting and it makes me look like Ansel Adams (okay, not quite).

I’ve realized that I don’t really know how to frame a good shot, or even what good composition of a photo is. One of my plans for the next month is to learn about that type of thing so I can put this camera to good use. I can see how photography can become addicting.

This shot was taken at Cape Canaveral, Florida near where the space shuttle’s take off.

[BABY ALERT: Blogging friend Kenyan Pundit has had a baby girl - Congrats!]