It’s 5:30 in the morning Pacific Time, and I’m the only one in the house who hasn’t gone to bed, including the cats.

It was a day of photography on Saturday, that’s for sure. Kevin and I hit Treasure Island for photo ops before heading over the bridge to San Francisco for the afternoon and evening, to attend the Flickr Turns 4 Party at 111 Minna Gallery. We arrived early, which was a good idea since more than 500 people RSVP’ed on Upcoming.org and the venue maxes out at 500.

Since Kevin works for Flickr, I was introduced to other “workrs” at the company and met a bunch of local Flickr users as well. If any of my contacts were there I didn’t notice, except some were in costume, so maybe I just couldn’t tell!

A few people looked very familiar, but I must’ve stumbled across their profiles elsewhere on the site.

I even got to inspect tychay’s Nikon D3 — a monster of a camera — up close. First of all, that camera is 10x the price of the one I shoot with — it’s worth more than my car. But amazingly, Terry generously let me (and others) shoot with it, switch lenses, and play around with it. He even has a Leica M8 and more equipment than I’ll ever buy in a lifetime. But Terry was amazingly casual about letting other people try it out. Especially people cashed in on their two free drink tickets at the door and made frequent visits to the bar!

I submitted this photo for the photo wall, but I couldn’t find it! I looked EVERYWHERE, but almost 3,000 photos were printed, so maybe I just didn’t search hard enough… the photos that were on the wall looked amazing, though. These weren’t even curated, they were just ones submitted that met the size criteria by the deadline.

Stewart Butterfield (in pink) co-founded Flickr with his wife Caterina, and his memory amazes me. The last time I saw him was nearly three years ago, at the Flickr Farewell Party in Vancouver, May 2005. With Caterina and Stewart.

I spotted Stewart talking to someone so I waved, and he recognized me and gave me a big hug. My name tag had already fallen off, but he remembered my name, anyway, and David’s story without any memory jogs from me. I was so impressed, but he said he remembers the original Flickr folk (I joined in 2004, before I met David). Still, that’s impressive!

After everyone got booted out of 111 Minna at 9pm to prepare for a Burning Man fundraiser, people headed in all directions. Kevin and I went to the House of Shields with other Flickr employees, and that group splintered off when the international Flickr employees wanted to go to a place near their hotel and the rest stayed. I didn’t want to drink anymore, just take photos, so I went on a photowalkabout for a couple of hours downtown and met up with Kevin again by the parking garage where we left the truck. It’s been YEARS since I drove a standard transmission, but I got us home safely with Kevin giving me directions and now it’s time to hit the sack before the sun begins to rise again…

The Flickr Turns 4 pics uploaded thus far can be viewed as thumbnails, a slideshow, or in the PictoBrowser: