SXSW Interactive apparently had over 12,000 attendees this year, more than this year’s SXSW Music. And I still had just as much fun this year as I’ve had any year. It was great.

Once again, Grant Hutchinson helped organize a “Found Type Photowalk” around Austin. Ostensibly, it’s about typography—and there is quite a bit of typography talk—but it’s also a fantastic mid-conference respite where photographers of all types can enjoy a leisurely walk around Austin while taking shots along the way.

I brought along my trusty Canon 40D and it held up pretty well. If anything, the one thing I noticed is that even an image-stabilized lens (like the 17–55mm f/2.8 IS that I was mostly using) can’t save every shot—several of my shots during panels ended up around 1/13sec (at ISO 400) and shots that slow just don’t have a great chance of coming out sharp. (I could have theoretically bumped up the ISO to 800 or 1600, but my 2007-era doesn’t do that well at high ISOs.) Maybe I’ll consider Canon’s rumored 60D if that comes out in time for next year?

I wouldn’t be surprised if there might be even more attendees next year. And that’s okay. I’ve made so many great friends at SXSW over the years and I wouldn’t miss the chance to hang out with them again.

I look forward to SXSW every year—it’s heaps of fun. Sure, there’s the web-stuff learning (which is good), but it’s also nice to be able to see friends again that I’ve made over the years. (For instance, that shot above is with Kevin and I—I can’t even remember how many years ago he and I had met, but it’s always good to chat with him again.)

In all, I think I took around three hundred fifty photos and I believe I’ve posted around twenty five. Last year, I had rented Canon’ 17–55 f/2.8 lens and I was really pleased with how it worked out. I just happen to have bought one a couple months ago, though, so I didn't need to rent one this time around.

My new photography gadget, though, was a Lumiquest Softbox. Unlike a traditional softbox that one might have off-camera on a light stand or the like, Lumiquest’s Softbox is designed to attach right to one’s flash. Granted, there’re about a bajillion flash diffusers/bouncers on the market (and many an online discussion thread on which one is “best”), but the reason I went with this particular product is that I was pretty sure I wouldn't have much in the way of ceilings of which to bounce off.

I’m still getting a feel for flash photography and the nuances of manual exposure toward balancing one’s ambient light with the light from one’s strobe, but I think I’m getting closer. On the other hand, I’m sometimes unsure about metering modes (evaluative/matrix, center-weighted, spot, and so on) and which ones may be most suited for flash photography.

Part of me wants to lean toward spot-metering, but on my Canon 40D, the spot metering is always done off the center focal-point (as opposed to the active focal point). I’m sure that’s messed up my exposure more than once, but I haven't quite decided if maybe I just need to learn how to use spot-metering better or if another metering mode would be more worthwhile.

In all, though, SXSW was awesome. Part of me was a little worried that it could have been even more crowded than last year, but whether through room rejiggeration or maybe scheduling tweaks, the organizers seemed to have largely taken care of some of the crowding issues that had crept in last year. Plus, this year, my brother and I had a chance to get dinner together on the Tuesday night as I was heading out (from Interactive) and he was heading in (for Music). What a great way to round things out.

As I do every March, headed down to Austin earlier this month for SXSW. I also brought my new camera along, a Canon 40D which I’ve had since around February. To go along with that, I rented Canon’s 17-55mm f/2.8 IS lens from lensrentals.com (an awesome online lens rental shop, if you ever need that kind of thing).

I had always heard generally good things about image-stabilization including some reports of being able to hand-hold shots down to 1/8 sec or even 1/4 sec. Given that I seem to encounter a fairly average amount of camera shake (as opposed to an extraordinarily low amount of it), I was cautiously optimistic about how much the image stabilization system might be able to help me.

In short, I couldn’t be more pleased. If the phrasing wasn’t so religiously-exclusive, I might even be tempted to call this the Jesuslens (see also: Jesusnoun.) Or, put another way, if this lens wasn’t around $1,000, I probably would have bought it by now. But, I’m getting ahead of myself. I knew that I’d be hand-holding shots at SXSW and I was hoping that this lens would come through for me — it sure did. I managed several keepers at 1/8 sec. and even down to 1/6 sec.

With the aid of the back of a chair in my hotel room for additional sturdiness, I was also able to work through a set of four 1/2-second exposures of the Austin skyline which I then was able to stitch together to form a panoramic. (Incidentally, Photoshop CS3 is more intuitive than I thought it’d be for making panoramas. They’ve really improved that functionality over CS2.) I may have to try that panorama-thing more often — that was kinda fun.

I’m going to SXSW this year (in fact, this weekend) and I was looking around for an online calendar that might help me plan which panels I was going to. (South by Southwest, in case you might not be familiar with it, is a music, film, and interactive festival/conference in Austin, Texas.) The sxsw.com website usually has a semi-usable calendar, but I just couldn’t get it to work this year.

Some friends of mine mentioned a third-party calendaring option, Sched.org, and I thought I’d give that a shot. I must say, I was pleasantly surprised. In fact, it’s great — it’s easy to use, intuitive, and uses just enough Ajax to be helpful without getting in the way. Anyhow, I’ve worked out my calendar and I think I’ve figured out most of the panels that I’d like to go to. As you might guess, if you see two panels listed for the same time slot, it means that I like both of them and just haven’t yet figured out which to go to. For instance, like these:

• Saturday, March 8: Getting Unstuck: From Desktop to Device vs Opening Remarks with Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson (both at 2 p.m.)

• Sunday, March 9: Scope Creep and Other Villains vs Wireframing in a Web 2.0 World (both at 10 a.m.)

• Monday, March 10: Targeting Your Web Site: Accessibility Litigation Update vs WaSP Annual Meeting: Don't Break the Web (both at 5 p.m.)

Of course, I’m open to ideas if you have any suggestions on resolving those stalemates. One way or another, I’ll figure things out :).

I had a great time at SXSW and I was able to take a bunch more pictures. I’ve finished processing those and I’ve posted those photos on Flickr. For those who may be curious, I took 43 photos, chose to process 20 of those, and posted 8 shots.

For what it’s worth, I made use of raw mode this time (well, RAW + JPEG Fine) and I my shots seemed to have a better resistance to having their highlights getting blown out (a reoccurring problem that I was running into as I was taking shots during my trip to South Africa in February). Then again, the lighting was almost completely different between those shots and these; in South Africa, I was mostly dealing with either bright sunlight or incandescent light, while in Austin I mostly had cloudy days (not that I'm complaining — cloudy days can be very handy for their diffuse light!).

Standard photo-entry text: All my photos are released under a Creative Commons license which roughly states that you’re free to “copy, distribute, display, and perform the work”. One exception, however, is this shot of the Q & A session after Helvetica — Andrew Dupont was trying my camera to get a feel for it; that’s one of his shots and he mentioned to me ahead of time that he’d like to place that under CC-Attribution license.

Saturday

• 10:00 am — A Decade of Style (with Eric Meyer and Doug Bowman)
• 3:30 pm — Stop Designing Products (with Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path)
• 4:05 pm - Ruining the User Experience: When JavaScript and Ajax Go Bad
• 5:00 pm — From Tags to Riches: Life After Code

Sunday

• 10:00 am — Accessibility Wars: A Report From the Trenches (with Sharron Rush of Knowbility)
• 2:00 pm — Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Mobile Web…but Were Afraid to Ask
• 3:30 pm — Accessified! Practical Accessibility Fixes Any Web Developer Can Use (with Ian Lloyd of accessify.com)
• 4:05 pm — The Future of JavaScript (with Andrew Dupont)

Monday

• 10:00 am — Ajax Kung Fu Meets Accessibility Feng Shui (with Jeremy Keith and Derek Featherstone)
• 12:45 pm — The Weblog Awards, Trade Show Day Stage
• 2:00 pm — The Growth and Evolution of Microformats (with Tantek Çelik)
• 4:05 pm — Javascript: The Big Picture (with Peter-Paul Koch / ppk)
• 5:00 pm — WaSP Annual Meeting: Takin’ it to the Street

Tuesday

• 10:00 am — Browser Wars Retrospective: Past, Present and Future Battlefields (with Brendan Eich of Mozilla)
• 2:00 pm — Music From the Masses: The Remix Revolution
• 3:30 pm — How to Make Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Usability Work Together
• 5:00 pm — The Ultimate Music Recommendation Smackdown

The interactive conference runs this Friday through Tuesday (March 11th-16th) and their schedule of panels is online. Here’re some of the panels which I’ll be attending:

Saturday March 12th

• 2:00 pm — Opening Remarks: Jeffrey Zeldman. With all the useful links on Zeldman.com, his site is almost like a mini aggregator for the web coding world.

• 5:00 pm — How to Make Big Things Happen With Small Teams. I work at a small company and I thought I might be able to get something out of this. And it's presented by Jason Fried of 37signals, so it’s hard to go wrong.

• 6:00pm — WaSP/CSS-D/WD-L/WSM/AIR Meetup for SXSW Interactive. Hosted by James Craig, this could be a good opportunity to meet other standards-minded web coders.

Sunday March 13th

• 10:00 am — Emergent Semantics. It had “semantics” in its title and it’s presented by Eric Meyer. I needed no further convincing ;).

• 11:30 am — How to be Beautiful: More Hi-Fi Design With CSS. This panel also has some of the big names in CSS, including Doug Bowman, Dan Cederholm and Dave Shea.

• 2:00 pm — Keynote Speaker: Malcolm Gladwell. I’ve enjoyed Gladwell’s work ever since discovering his article on the Science of Shopping. In this keynote, he'll probably talk about his new book Blink, which I’ve also heard good things about.

• 3:30 pm — How to Use Accessiblity Guidelines, Standards and Testing. I try to stay current on web accessibility and this panel particularly interested me as it appears to focus on real world testing with (free) tools.

• 3:30 pm — The Elements of Meaningful XHTML. Yeah, so I have two Sunday-at-3:30 panels on my list. It's really hard to decide between these two as this one is also right up my alley. And, while I’ve been to panels where Tantek Celik spoke among other panelists, I haven't been to one where he spoke as the sole presenter.

• 5:00 pm — How to Build Your Brand with Blogs. The company I work for (RD2) also has a corporate blog and this seemed a useful panel to get the most out of that.

Monday March 14th

• 11:30 am — How to Inform Design: How to Set Your Pants on Fire. Jeffrey Veen is one of the panelists on this one and, even though I’m not an information architect, his panels which I went to last year were so engaging that I couldn’t resist going to this one as well.

• 3:30 pm — The Semantic Web: Promising Future or Utter Failure. This looks like it could be one of those debate-panels where experts discuss opposing sides of an issue — sometimes it works out while other times it falls flat. Here’s to hoping this one is lively and interesting.

• 5:00 pm — A Sample of Style from the Homestar Runner Folks. Homestar Runner is an amusing online Flash animation series which can only be made better by puppet versions of their characters (w00t!). Oh, and I’ve discovered that there’s also a Homestar Runner Wiki. Who knew?

Tuesday March 15th

• 11:30 am — Notes From the Underground: The Rise of Remix Culture. I get a kick out of mashups — an art form where someone superimposes one song on top of another to form a brand new song — and I’m looking forward to seeing what they cover in this panel.

• 2:30 pm — Accessibility Shoot-Out. In this panel, URLs are thrown into a hat and then accessibility experts look over the site and give advice. I’m concerned that I may not learn much new out of this one, but you never know.

So, those are the panels which I’ve penciled-in so far. SXSW is a great time every year and I can't wait to get to Austin!

I ended up taking most of my photos on the last day, Tuesday, as I didn’t really need my PowerBook during any of the panels that day (it seems that the last day’s panels are always a bit on the fluff-side). After the morning’s panels, a bunch of us went to eat at a Vietnamese restaurant and that’s where I got most of my photos.

Standard photo-entry text: All my photos are released under a Creative Commons license which roughly states that you’re free to “copy, distribute, display, and perform the work”. Also, I’ve resized all the images to 1024-width before uploading them as it can be a bit hard to get your head around a full 5 MP image. However, if you want the full-resolution version of any images, just ask.

Saturday:

• Accessibility is for Everybody — a general web-accessibility panel[3:30 - 4:30]
• Web Navigation Without A Guide Dog — accessbility techniques with JavaScript, Flash and CSS [5:00 - 6:00]

Sunday:

• Virginia Postrel Presentation — she wrote The Substance of Style about the look-and-feel of people and places [10:00 - 11:00]
• Red Vs. Blue Case Study — Red vs Blue is an amusing set of animated shorts created with the Halo game engine [11:30 - 12:30]
• Wikwiki, What? — a Wiki is a collection of Web pages which can be edited by anyone [3:30 - 4:30]

Monday:

• Hi-Fi Design With CSS — with Doug Bowman [10:00 - 11:00]
• CSS: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly — with Tantek Çelik, Eric Meyer and and Doug Bowman [11:30 - 12:30]
• The Frontiers of User Experience — on information architecture and user interaction [3:30 - 4:30]

Tuesday:

• I haven’t yet decided on the panels for Tuesday.

I had a cheeseburger one evening, but only after ensuing that I could get it with blue cheese ;). The burger arrived quickly and they weren’t stingy with the blue cheese — there was about a cue-ball sized mound of crumbled blue cheese on the side.

I had trouble piling on all the blue cheese, but I was only too pleased to have such a problem. The patty was moderately thick and warm (though it could have been a touch hotter). Upon taking a bite, I was delivered a massive blue-cheese-and-beef sensation. It was incredibly delicious and among the top three burgers I’ve ever had.

On another occasion, I was in more of a sandwich mood and I went with a turkey club (with avocado, natch). The turkey was succulent and piled high, and the bacon — an often overlooked component — was well cooked with a satisfying crunch.

It was a tasty sandwich, decidedly above-average as club sandwiches go, but the bread didn’t seem to live up to its potential. It was wheat, I believe (a good thing), but it tended to slightly dry out my mouth. Usually, mayo or other condiments in the sandwich would counteract this effect, but not so much this time.

And, just last night, I went after the DFWBlogs / H-Town Blogs Cocktail Event. I wasn’t counting on fitting in a proper dinner that evening, so I had a few protein bars earlier in the evening (Zone bars, specifically).

Nonetheless, I was a tad peckish by the time we arrived (which was close to midnight, if I recall). On previous visits to Katz’s, I had eyed their dessert menu but I hadn’t had room — but now was my chance.

At first, their ice cream / brownie caught my eye, but it had both vanilla and chocoalte ice cream. Not being a fan of chocolate ice cream, I crossed that off my list. Though I don’t like chocolate ice cream, I’m still a raging choco-fiend in general — so, I went in search of other chocolatey items.

Quickly, I narrowed it down to two chocolate cakes: “Chocolate Eruption” & “Death by Chocolate”. A food’s texture lends to its enjoyment for me, but that’s where both of those fell a bit short…

The Chocolate Eruption was described as chocolate-cream cake with nuts and chocolate shavings, while the Death by Chocolate was made up of white & dark chocolate mousses. Chocolate can be delicious in many forms, but I never had much of a hankering for squishy chocolate (well, except for ganache, I suppose). Really, a chocolate cake would have been perfect.

Of the two, I settled on the Chocolate Eruption; I figured that the crunch of the nuts would play well off the soft chocolate cream. The slice arrived and, though it was tasty — I had no trouble finishing it — the creaminess was almost overwhelming. Of course it was probably no creamier than most other chocolate-cream cakes, but that evening I had a yearning for a Real Cake cake which this slice didn’t entirely fulfill.

With so many good dishes, Katz’s is probably one of my favorite restaurants in Austin. I look forward to eating there again next year.