Photography Meetup at the Paseo

Sometimes you get the opportunity to get together with people that you have never met to take pictures of things in the dark. Fortunately, when these occurrences happen, they usually don’t end being as creepy as that sentence would make them out to be. I had a chance to partake in such a group tonight via the site Meetup.com, and here are some of the resulting images.

The group in question, for those curious, is the Oklahoma City Smug group. Now, if you were to simply speak this name in passive conversation, the connotation that might come up in the minds of your audience would be that of a group of latte sipping, Vespa driving, tight jean wearing, thick glasses having hipsters holding Polaroid Instant cameras to attempt to replicate Instagram filters. Well, your audience would be wrong in that assumption. The “Smug” here comes from ties with Smugmug, a great resource for photographers to sell and manage their images. So if you happened so come across this group and turned away because of the name, I can guarantee that no one at this meeting wore a scarf and a V-neck while talking about how using a DSLR was selling out.

The topic at hand for the evening was, as you might guess by this point, shooting in low light or night using the existing light around you. The group leader (Holly Baumann) handed out some informational sheets on how to do just that using manual settings, and for a bit over an hour we all meandered around the Paseo District hoping to not be hit by cars while simultaneously hoping cars would get in our shots for that fun streaking effect. Then we all went to the bar and had some food and drink.

If you live in or around OKC and are hoping to meet some like minded people regarding photography, I would recommend trying out this group. They seem to have a gathering about once a month and cover a range of topics.