Guido Van Nispen makes the expensive Canon 5D that Thomas Hawk uses look cheap. He is shooting the LIFT conference on a Leica with a 50mm f1.0 lens. Results? Fabulous. Price? Around $10,000 for body and lens. Whew!

He caught an image of me shooting expensive watches yesterday. Disadvantage of such a fast lens? Depth of field is only a couple of centimeters, he says, which makes it hard to get a sharp image.

Maybe we should do a Photowalking here in Geneva with him?

Speaking of Photowalking, I hear the video of our walk around the Sacramento Train Museum will be up tomorrow or Friday on the ScobleShow. As for LIFT, I’ll put the best stuff up on my link blog (which I have been keeping up to date even while being a tourist in Europe). Or, you can follow along on the LIFT blog.

The political bloggers are working overtime (see Memeorandum’s coverage) because of John Edwards’ missteps in hiring bloggers for his campaign.

I link to this for a couple of reasons.

1) I was on his plane six weeks ago.
2) The lessons here for corporate blog teams are many.

Some lessons here:

1) Hire people who the community will defend.
2) If you want a job as a blogger for a political organization, or a business, you better worry about all those “out there” posts you made.
3) Firing people just makes the problem worse. If you hire them, defend them cause it’s your own idiocy and lack of due diligence that got you here.
4) I’d be more transparent about moves regarding bloggers than either Edwards or, say, Microsoft was when it sent out review laptops to bloggers. Transparency — before a decision is made — will help the community vet moves like these.

What would I do now?

Take the heat and overcommunicate. The more insular the campaign appears the more people will get turned off. It’s time for John Edwards to show up on Daily Kos and take his lumps.

UPDATE: Dave Winer wonders when the New York Times will call off its war on bloggers.

Today was a lot of fun. Got a tour of master Swiss watch maker Franck Muller. Cheapest watch? About $20,000. Most expensive? A million. Whew. Elton John supposedly owns more than 100 of these watches. Watching them build these watches was like going back in time. No pun intended. One watch has more than 1,000 pieces. I can’t imagine building these buy hand.

Anyway, I have another tour up on ScobleShow. This one is of Stanford Linear Accelerator’s computer team. These guys built the first US Web site. I have three separate videos up:

1) A talk with the team (includes Tim Berners-Lee’s PR guy who didn’t understand what Tim was saying when he came in one day and said “I think I’ve done something interesting.”). These guys are freaking smart.
2) A meeting with Paul Kunz who built the first US Web site. He didn’t think it was that big a deal. How do we know that? Cause he assigned the task to someone else (who didn’t get the job done).
3) Bebo White gave Shel and me a tour of the visitor center and a lesson in particle physics (surprising what they found when they were building it).

Funny enough we ran out of time to actually get a look at the accelerator. Bebo is meeting us later this month to finish the tour.

Hope you enjoy these. The Stanford Linear Accerator is one of the longest buildings in the world. If you visit Silicon Valley you’ll probably drive over it and if you come and pitch a VC here for money on Sand Hill Road you’ll be sitting right next to it.