The first meeting of 2009 for the Camera Owners of the Bay Area (COBA) user group will be held on Wednesday, February 11, 2009, at SmugMug headquarters in Mountain View from 7:30 pm to 10:00 pm.
New Location
After several years meeting at Stanford’s SLAC and Cordura Hall, COBA is moving to where it all started, Mountain View! This month, we’ll be meeting at the SmugMug offices near downtown Mountain View.
SmugMug
67 E. Evelyn Ave, Suite 200
Mountain View, CA 94041
Agenda
- 19:00-19:30: Sign-in and mingling period
- 19:30-20:30: Emerging Trends in Digital Photography
- 20:45-21:30: Camera Bags
Emerging Trends in Digital Photography
Lloyd Chambers will discuss emerging trends in digital photography, followed by practical tips for attaining maximum image quality via appropriate choices in cameras, lenses, tripods, and post-processing, along with tips and tricks and “gotchas”, especially with today’s high resolution digital cameras. Lloyd will bring his suite of Zeiss ZF lenses, and if time allows, discuss the reasons you might choose alternative lenses to the standard Nikon and Canon offerings.
Lloyd Chambers’s diglloyd.com offers a wealth of material on advanced photographic techniques, and his Zeiss ZF Lenses is a reference work on those fine lenses. Lloyd is a lifetime photographer, having used a variety of formats including 35mm, 4X5, 6X7 and 617 film, as well as numerous digital cameras.
His web site, diglloyd.com, is targeted at photographers seeking objective and high-quality information which can be trusted to make buying decisions, to learn or enhance skills, or to find best-practices for a smooth photographic workflow. He also is author of the MacPerformanceGuide.com, a site dedicated to choosing a Mac and enhancing productivity.
Camera Bags
If there’s one constant in a photographer’s life, it’s that one can never have enough camera bags. Two and a half years have passed since our last showcase of COBA members’ bags. Be prepared to bring your collection of camera bags to the meeting. Bags come in all different shapes and sizes; some are best used for transportation while others are great to work out of but hard on the shoulders or back. Is there a perfect camera bag out there that can do everything for everybody? We’ll find out!
tow.com 
Key thing when choosing a bag is, perversely, to select one that doesn’t look like a camera bag, as such bags increase the chances that it will be stolen. Coats with large pockets – such as the Barbour Border coat – can actually discretely hold a camera and a lens or two during a photo shoot.
Many people at the meeting last night had camera backpacks, some like the Slingshot model with easy to access compartments (i.e. without having to take off the entire backpack). I demoed my line of Domke shoulder bags, which are discrete shooter’s bags. I think there’s still a lot of innovation that could be done in the camera bag realm regarding comfort and accessibility.