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I am quickly becoming a big fan of Northern California. I first went out last year for my birthday, had a blast, drank lots of wine. This was my second trip up to SF/Sonoma – Hung out for a day or two in the city, then drove up to the wine country. Only carried my GF1, but it served me well. (although my buddy who isn’t a photographer himself had an old Hasselblad 503cw from his dad, which we took out for some shots!) Early winter seems the perfect time to go as well – the countryside was a rainbow of reds and yellows… the vine covered hillsides were shockingly bright, especially when viewed from afar – the highly maicured vines created an almost solid carpet of color across the rolling hills.

Lots of pictures, lots of wine… what more could you ask for? (slideshow below)

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F/1.0

I’m super excited to be heading out to Austin on Thursday to shoot Austin City Limits’ Music Festival going on this coming weekend.

In addition to ACL we are going to do a fun photowalk on Saturday. There are already 91 people signed up for Saturday morning’s walk! Wow! If you live in the Austin area or will be in town for ACL definitely come on out and join us for a morning walk. We’re going to shoot some of the great Austin bridges over the Colorado River and some of the great scenes along Zilker Park.

Check out this photo of the Stevie Ray Vaughn sculpture in Zilker Park taken by Peter Tsai. Peter did a coffee table photo book on Austin and is one of the photographers helping us lead this walk.

This photowalk will be an official Dell / Google+ Photowalk and joining me in leading it will be my pal Robert Scoble; Richard Binhammer (aka RichardatDell) from Dell; Chris Chabot, Natalie Villalobos, Vincent Mo, and Dave Cohen (all from Google); local Austin photographers Lotus Carroll and Jack Hollingsworth; Alvin Toro is also flying in from L.A. to help run the walk.

What a great group of photographers! If you are on Google+ already I’d recommend circling all of the folks linked above. If you’re not on Google+ yet you are missing one of the best parties on the web right now — what are you waiting for? GET ON THERE! — oh and you can find me on Google+ here

By way of disclosure, Dell (the power to do more!!!) is flying both myself and Robert Scoble out to the Festival for the weekend — they’re paying for our airfare, hotel and have arranged the weekend media passes for us to shoot ACL. Thank much to Dell and their generosity.

Part of the reason why Dell wants us out there is that they are showing us a lot of the cutting edge tech that they are using to run a lot of the behind the scenes at ACL. I’ll get lots of photos of this cool tech stuff too. Dell is responsible for live streaming the two biggest stages at the festival this year on YouTube using their Dell workstations and AMD FirePro Graphics.

Dell also did all the streaming for Lollapalooza earlier this year as well as U2′s most recent tour.

Previously the video production for ACL used Macs and Final Cut Pro but this solution didn’t work so well for actually streaming it live to the web. ACL’s new setup is using this Dell workstation, editing with Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects, and then streaming it back out live to YouTube with another of the same model workstations. It will be interesting to watch them do this in real time.

Dell also will have a “video village” where roaming videographers out in the field doing interviews with bands and musicians and capturing other video will return with their memory cards to have the edited video clips quickly converted into more YouTube content.

I’m also going to be working with the Google+ and Google Photos team over at the Google+ stage at the festival. They are going to be signing up people for Google+ right there at the Festival and taking portraits of people who sign up for a live photo feed / slide show there at the Festival.

I’ll post more about what I’m doing in Austin once I fly into town, but I’m super excited to be hanging out with the cool folks from Dell and Google and getting to spend a weekend shooting some AWESOME musical acts at Austin City Limits’ Festival.

Thomas Hawk Digital Connection