Tag Archives: Photography

No JavaOne 2026 Photos

I was at JavaOne 2026 in California last week. I participated onstage at the Community Keynote and also recorded some audio podcasts, which I’ll post over the next few months at Duke’s Corner. And since I’m on the team that produced the week-long event itself, I had many other duties to attend to throughout the conference as well. I’d say the Community Keynote took the most planning and implementation for me this year, where I hosted a short panel on the Java User Groups with some great JUG leaders. More on that in a later post, but here’s the live stream of the entire keynote that involved the entire team and community guests.

But one thing was missing from this event — I didn’t take a single photo! Usually, I take hundreds!

Instead, this year the Java Developer Relations team hired 3 photographers to shoot most of the event (except for the speaker dinner and the Day 0 events) plus a new feature for speaker headshots. And multiple team members showed up with cameras to shoot various bits as well. It felt weird to not have a camera glued to my face all day, to be honest, since I’ve shot so many events in the past. And I don’t know how I feel about it. On the one hand, shooting events has been a core part of my conference activities for a long time, but on the other hand it was nice to not have to lug around two big cameras and three lenses for 10 hours a day for 4 days straight and then have to edit hundreds of images afterwards. For example, last year I shot JavaOne 2025 all alone (including the speaker dinner and the Day 0 events), which was a challenge for sure. I didn’t shoot headshots because that does actually require another person and specific gear so we didn’t offer that service last year. And there was no room in the budget to hire a photographer to shoot headshots.

But the 600 images I did shoot took a few weeks to edit and publish. It was an enormous amount of work for one person that usually gets done via a small team of photographers and editors. But, hey, those images generated more than 80,000 views on Flickr so that’s cool and who knows how many views on various social media sites. Now, it turned out that no one at Oracle cared about that massive metric, but it’s surely substantial and meaningful to me. And the images are valuable to the Java developers who got them on Flickr via a Creative Commons license so they could be used elsewhere freely. That’s why I shot so many events over the years — to contribute the content to the developer community. Open Source conferences should generate Open Source content, right? It’s interesting that not everyone in the FOSS community agrees with that statement.

But this year? Nothing. I personally have no JavaOne 2026 photos to contribute. That was the plan for this year, of course, but I’ll have to digest that decision for a bit. But what about the many hundreds of images that were shot by the three professional photographers at JavaOne 2026 funded by Oracle? Nothing. I can’t find a single image online from the event. No websites. No social media. Nothing on Flickr under a Creative Commons license. One of the arguments I gave to my team in 2025 was that whenever Oracle hires professional photographers for events the images simply never see the light of day. What’s the point of just dumping them in some corporate database to rot over time behind the firewall? So, let me shoot the event instead so at least we have something to give to the community and for our own use on social as well. Sure, Oracle does post a few tiny low resolution images from their events on a few corporate websites for a short period of time, but even those vanish in mere weeks. Such a dumb waste of resources. And such a wasted opportunity to help build the community by offering massive numbers of free high resolution images from the world’s premier developer event. Sad.

Anyway, here’s something I noticed by NOT shooting images this year. I gave myself time to breathe! Developer conferences are challenging to manage under the best of circumstances. You can easily grind yourself into dust in no time flat working 12 hour days on site following months of planning. But I didn’t do that this year. In fact, I intentionally didn’t even attend all of the events throughout the week but instead chose to go back to my hotel room at times to rest. I could have spent the extra time recording dozens of podcasts, but I didn’t do that either. Instead, I recorded 6, which is a perfectly reasonable number. I did, however, talk to as many developers as I could find. Just hallway conversations. And that was a new exercise for me because in the past I used the camera to engage people. The camera was always my crutch. It was always my filter. This year, though, it was just me. I wasn’t that nervous and I really loved it. I got to know many more people this way since I was more present in every moment. I was there to talk to you, not shoot your photo. The whole thing felt different.

So, it was a good event generally. I may implement this system in the future and just leave the photography behind at this point. I’ve shot about 100,000 images at events since 2000 so maybe that’s enough. Maybe it’s time to just move on.

Japan Nuclear Protest

Here’s my full set of 161 images from the nuclear protests during the summer of 2011 in Tokyo after the massive earthquake, tsunami, and accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. I went to multiple protests but only shot a couple of them. For these photos I used my old Canon 30D and a 50mm lens and I intentionally got as close to each subject as possible. I like getting close so it’s obvious I’m shooting you and I’m in your space. I’ve never liked the concept of hiding in the woods with a long lens. There were hundreds of thousands of people at these protests and it was hot, sweaty, and intense. B&W seemed fitting given the situation.

Fukushima Nuclear Protest, Tokyo, Japan, Summer 2011
Fukushima Nuclear Protest, Tokyo, Japan, Summer 2011

Fukushima Nuclear Protest, Tokyo, Japan. Summer 2011. Full set of 161 images here.

Lucky Photo: Bullet Train at Speed

Here’s the luckiest photo I’ve ever taken. I was inside a bullet train stopped at a station. We were waiting too long so I figured an express train was coming. They are hard to hear coming because they are going so fast so I just clicked when I thought it would be there. Poof! Full speed ripping through the station! And what’s better is that image was shot with a Canon PowerShot, which is probably the slowest camera on the planet.

Bullet Train in Japan.

Being Polite

Hope they aren’t talking to each other! But give these kids some credit — they are polite enough to line up nicely tucked to one side to give people room to navigate the stairs. Moments earlier the scene was filled with people but they didn’t budge or miss a swipe. Their concentration is perfect. Never let anyone tell you that people can’t focus these days with all the distractions we have to deal with these days.

Being Polite. Seoul, South Korea.
Being Polite. Seoul, South Korea.

大浦天主堂, Ōura Tenshudō

Ōura Tenshudō was built in 1864 in Nagasaki and survived the nuclear bombing in 1945 and also 150 years of quakes. I spent a bit of time inside just sitting down and being in the space and thinking about all that history. What was it like to be there? After I took this image outside I had a fascinating conversation with an old man who grew up right there and who lived through it all. He was standing right by me as I shot the image. He was a kid in 1945. Later I went to his home and had some tea.

大浦天主堂, Ōura Tenshudō
大浦天主堂, Ōura Tenshudō

Four Girls in Ahmedabad

I was in Ahmedabad, India a few weeks ago and came by these four kids on the side of the street here. It’s actually a two-shot sequence. The girl in the red dress there in the middle off to the left actually made eye contact with me a couple of shots earlier. I was able to grab that. But the image didn’t really come out that well because there were some other things in the way. But then, just a split second later, I got this image. It struck me because these kids are my daughter’s age, and they’re obviously in circumstances that I can’t even imagine.

As soon as they saw me with my camera they gave me these three beautiful smiles right on cue. And especially the little kid in the purple shirt in the front there, she’s really hamming it up. And look at the expression on the girl on the left in the light blue pants. She looks a little shy as she’s holding her hands that way. But just four really, really beautiful smiles. And that was it. I only got two shots, one that didn’t work, and this one that worked well. I was thinking of cropping off the bottom a little bit there. But then I said, you know, I’m just going to leave the crop straight out of the camera because then you can see that they’re actually on the sidewalk.

I think about them. When I shoot people on the streets in circumstances that I can’t even imagine, I often think about them afterwards. I wonder where they are now. I wonder if they are ok. They seem like good kids.

Four Girls in Ahmedabad. July 2019.

Four Girls in Ahmedabad. July 2019.