The pictures I took for our first assignment and are already a million times better than anything I’ve ever taken before. The assignment was to take the camera off automatic, and in manual mode try different exposure, f-stop and shutter speeds. On my quest for some outdoor pictures where I could use a 400 ISO I went on an exploratory run during my lunch break one day and photographed all the interesting things I saw. Some of the photos are below.

Cintas truck on a coal barge.

Island Boat Club on the Northside. Want to hang out there sometime?

Telephone pole by the river.

Only in Pittsburgh would you see a Wonder Hostess Bakery Thriftshop and yes it is open daily offering bakery items at discount prices.

Overall I thought the conference went well, especially for it’s first year, but it started out a little rough. Lee Brimelow from Adobe was introduced with very little energy by Kromer. Brimelow’s speech was not to memorable and he didn’t have much energy either. Flashpitt needs to take a cue from Carsonified on how to start a conference.

Before the break we found out a speaker was delayed (and would eventually cancel), so the schedule was shuffled. Originally a technical speech was paired with a creative speech throughout the day, so if you were strictly creative or technical you were going to waste any time. With the shuffling technical and creative speeches were paired with each other and I felt that was a poor decision.

The first speech I when to was AS2 to AS3 Migration because I’m currently migrating a code base at work. I won an awesome book, The ActionScript 3.0 Migration Guide by Kris Hadlock, for answering a question. The book is short, easy to skim and a great thing for me because often times learning as I go means I miss some nuances of the language. It’s good to sit and read sometimes.

The next speech I went to was the best of the day. Craig Swann gave a speech titled Re:Discovery that was meant to inspire us to look at the world around us and how we interact with it. Craig plays with different ways people can interact with computers and technology, intergrating his love for music and obsession with time. He will wire chimes to play sounds from a computer and use color sensors to create interactive videos. It was cool too see someone just play with their computer and see what they could come up with.

Following Swann’s speech I attended For Placement Only by Zander Brimijoin. This was a tiring speech. Bimijoin talked to specifically and indepth about projects so the speech dragged.

After lunch was Stacey Mulcahy, who spoke about creating user experiences. She had more energy than most the other speakers combined. I enjoyed her speech, and she clearly ascribes to the 37 Signals of “Half, not half-assed”.

Next was Dan Mall from Happy Cog, one of my favorite companies. Dan discussed using, not abusing, Flash to enhance the users experience. I was exposed to some new ideas on ways to handle Flash content on the web, and handle the absence of the Flash Player on a users computer. So it was a worthwhile speech for me.

The speeches ended with a general session by Golan Levin. He does art installations similar to those of Craig Swann, but he does not use Flash. So the topic was similar but the content less applicable, and I thought it was a poor choice for a general session.

We wrapped up the day with a great assortment of prizes raffled off and a nice after party.

With Flashpitt the good was great and the bad was ugly. There were no mediocre speeches in my opinion, just the two extremes. I would recommend going next year if your a local. I would travel far for this one until it matures a little, and if the dedication is the same as it was this year by the team that won’t take long.