After seven and a half years of running Camera Owners of the Bay Area, I called it a night on the user group Wednesday evening. It’s been an incredible ride, one in which I’ve made many new friends in the photography community. When I started COBA, there weren’t many face-to-face user groups focusing on Digital SLRs. Also back then, Digital SLRs were expensive, starting at $3000 for the Canon EOS D30. Now, you can get a quality DSLR for under $500, less if you buy used!
COBA has covered numerous topics over the years, camera announcements, software techniques, hardware reviews, trip reports, sensor cleaning, bags, do-it-yourself gadgets, RAW processing applications, and much more. I went through a presentation detailing all of the meeting topics from the entire history of COBA. 7.5 years in just 30 minutes! I was amazed by the breadth of topics covered; even in the sessions that repeated themselves over the years, people learned new things.
Moving forward, I’ll try to organize some annual gatherings of COBA members. I’ll see many of them at the local Smug user groups, also held at SmugMug headquarters in Mountain View.
Until the next COBA gathering, enjoy these photos taken by Rae, from the final monthly COBA meeting!
[smugmug url=”http://photos.tow.com/hack/feed.mg?Type=gallery&Data=9261628_yYo8L&format=rss200″ imagecount=”100″ start=”1″ num=”100″ thumbsize=”Th” link=”smugmug” captions=”true” sort=”true” window=”false” smugmug=”false” size=”X1″]
tow.com 
Adam,
Thanks for organizing COBA in the past 7.5 years! I enjoyed the meetings and meeting with you and other fellow photographers. Keep up the good work, and perhaps we’ll see COBA MK II in the future :)
martin