Today was the Scott Kelby Worldwide Photo Walk held simultaneously around the world with more than 8,000 people participating. Well, let me rephrase that, 8,000 people signed up and if the turnout was anything like San Diego, there will be about 3,000 people actually photographing.
The signups for San Diego was closed weeks ago when the 50 people capacity was reached,and according to the walk leader, another 25 were added in the last few days, but out of that 75 total only about 30 people showed up.
We met in beautiful Balboa park at 8am in front of the Museum of Photographic Art and waited a while to see if there would be any stragglers showing up. Right away there were some great photo opportunities including a wedding photo shoot going on by the lilly pond.
We were met by our walk leader, Stephen Burns, who is the head of the San Diego Photoshop users group and author of the Advanced Photoshop CS3 Trickery & FX. Now since this was my first group photo walk, I had no expectations of the way things were going to be done.
Stephen started by giving up a guided tour through some of the areas of the park. The group included Nikon, Canon, Pentax, and Sony shooters with a wide variety of backgrounds, gear and goals.
After the tour through the park, the group split up so that the photographers could all go shoot their own thing. Since I shoot in Balboa park quite often I went and found other photographers to see how the park was treating them and tried to see what the other photographers saw. There were great photo opportunities no matter where you looked.
After shooting for a couple of hours we all met at the Prado restaurant located in the middle of the park to eat, drink and discuss the shoot. It was at this point that I saw the most incredible piece of home made equipment EVER. The home made cable release for the was awesome, it had the ability to focus and trigger the shutter and had a built in bulb switch. The best part was the fact that this gizmo had successfully made it through airport security and yet a bottle of water or a tube of toothpaste is cause for a full body cavity search.
I will have a full gallery posted from the walk soon.
On a whole the walk was great, I met new people, discussed photography, saw photo opportunities that I would have missed had I been there alone, and got to see the “Pentax Detonator”.
I hope that the walk becomes an annual event.
For more info on the walk: http://www.photoshopuser.com/photowalk/ and on Scott Kelby: http://www.scottkelby.com/blog/
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