Photographing the iPhone 3.0 Event

I was at the iPhone 3.0 event today at Apple’s Town Hall this morning, covering the event with John Paczkowski for AllThingsD.com. I ran into a number of people that I know from both development and media circles, including Raven Zachary and Eric Savitz. The crowd was comprised of about 60% developers and 40% media.

When I shot the MacWorld Keynote this year for All Things Digital, I was missing a critical piece from my computer and photography kit, a BixNet battery to power my Cradlepoint EVDO/Wi-Fi router. Without the battery, I had to manually transfer images from the camera to the computer to SmugMug. At the time, I was pretty efficient, but I wish I could have removed those extra download and upload steps.

With battery in hand today, however, everything was in place for me to become a wireless mobile photographer! Earlier in the day, I set up my Eye-Fi wireless memory cards to upload photos directly to our D SmugMug account. With the system powered on, I just shot my photos like I normally did. The cool thing was that I didn’t have to do a thing to get the photos uploaded to SmugMug and posted on AllThingsD.com!

Well, not exactly. At one point, I noticed that my photos weren’t being uploaded. I figured out that my laptop, which was resting on top of my Rickshaw messenger bag — and consequently the Cradlepoint — was causing enough interference to prevent the Eye-Fi card from talking to the router. Removing the laptop was the trick; I immediately saw photos start to upload from the card to SmugMug. So, lesson learned, don’t put a big slab of metal on top of your Wi-Fi router!

Aside from that hiccup, everything went very smoothly. Shooting with two cameras, I was able to get wide shots and telephoto shots throughout the event. One thing that I had to be careful of was choosing my shots carefully. The Eye-Fi card doesn’t allow selective uploading; it uploads every new JPEG it finds on the card. As a result, I had to be careful with what I shot; I couldn’t just fire off a burst of photos like the photog in the back of the room were.

Without further ado, photos from the iPhone 3.0 event at Apple today:

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