Author: Chris

Teacher. Blogger. Podcaster. Asks way too many questions.
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A Photo a Day

The Twelve Apostles, taken on my iPhone using HDRI like photography. In fact I like imagery in general, which is, I suppose, why I enjoyed art school so much. The combination of not only interesting images, but also interesting ideas, made the four years I spent at art school some of the best years of my life.

However, it was only after I taught art for a few years that I discovered that, while I liked art, I didn’t necessarily like teaching art. I’ve since spoken to many people who proclaim that the quickest way to kill your passion for something is to do it for a living. I’m not sure that’s the case… what I do now, working with kids and technology and the future, is what I love doing. But I understand what they are saying… for many people, their passions need to be unshackled from the daily “must do” so that they can be enjoyed as a “want to” instead.

So, working with imagery and design and graphics and photography remains something I enjoy simply for the sake of it. I like to take photos, or mess about with Photoshop or Illustrator, but I like to do it on my terms not someone else’s.  And yet, with such a laissez-faire attitude to these things, it’s easy to let these interests slip away in the busy-ness of life, where they simply don’t happen with any regularity.

I’ve seen people doing the 365 Day Photography Challenge over the last couple of years, and I really like the concept.  Take a photo each day for a year and publish it online. It’s a nice idea.  I’ve tried to do it myself for the past few years, starting several times, but for one reason or another I’ve just found it difficult to maintain the momentum of doing it.  All that messing about, taking photos and uploading to the computer each day and then publishing to a blog.  Sure, blogging a photo is a pretty easy thing to do, but I’ve just lacked the discipline to do it every single day.

Coincidentally, I visited my buddy John Pearce at his home near Portarlington last week. John is a far more disciplined blogger than I am and over the last few years he’s been particularly good at taking – and blogging – a photo a day.  As we walked along the beach in front of his home, he was telling me what a rewarding experience he’s found doing his 365 Day Photos. He extolled the virtues of it forcing you to look at your surroundings a little more carefully, of the discipline it creates in doing something every single day, and his enthusiasm for the idea just generally made it sound like a good, fun thing to do.

Even more coincidentally, our conversation took place on January 1. The first day of the year. I mean seriously, if you’re going to start a 365 Day program for anything, is there a better day to start it than January 1?

The thing that really clinched it though, was John’s enthuiasm for a couple of software tools that would clearly make this a far simpler, more doable, proposition.

One was Posterous.  I’ve been dabbling with Posterous for a few other projects lately, and it really is a very impressive blogging tool. It’s ability to take content from something as simple as an email, and to manage any associated digital media files like photos, videos and audio is super impressive. It’s rather remarkable ability to then automatically crosspost to other services like Twitter, Facebook, Picassa, WordPress, Blogger – you name it and it probably crossposts to it – made the whole idea just too interesting to pass up.

Then John told me about an iPhone app called PicPosterous, which specifically uses the phone’s camera (and on the iPhone 4 it’s a pretty darn good camera!) to enable images to be sent directly to a Posterous blog from the phone.  Yes, I know it can be done with a simple email, or a dozen other easy ways, but I really liked the elegance of the PicPosterous solution.  I dabbled with it over our lunch, and was really very impressed with its simplicity and ease of use.

So. A good camera on the iPhone. Easy upload with PicPosterous. Nicely packaged into a blog with Posterous. Broad distribution with the crossposting options. Oh, and of course, it was January 1.  With all of that conspiring together, how could I say no? The fact that we were going to be driving the Great Ocean Road the following day – possibly one of Australia’s most photogenic areas – might have also helped!

So, I’m in. 5 days down, 360 more to go.  You can find my daily pics at http://365daysoflight.posterous.com, where there is even a nice RSS feed to subscribe to. I also send them to Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, Identica and Buzz. (I didn’t include Twitter… I figure I already make enough noise there)  It will be interesting to look back over the photos this time next year to a) look at a neat visual record of my year, and b) to see if my photography has improved any. I’m looking forward to that. Not to mention that it’s a great way to engage with new tools, new techniques, new ideas that I may not otherwise dabble with.  This is how you learn stuff.

As my own enthusiasm for the project has grown, I’ve found myself taking a lot more notice of some really interesting photography apps for the iPhone. Having a focus of taking a photo a day has made me much more interested in finding out what I can do with the iPhone as a camera. I’ll probably write a post in the next little while to share a few of the cool photography apps I’ve discovered, but one I’ll just mention now quickly is HDR Pro. With a hat-tip to Allanah King, another 365er, who showed this to me at ULearn last year, it really is a pretty amazing app. It uses HDR – High Dynamic Range – techniques to produce some stunningly good looking images. Shooting in HDR takes multiple images of the same scene, one underexposed and one overexposed, and then merges then together to form a single photograph with near perfect exposure in every part of the photo. The example you see above is shot using HDR Pro and I think it’s pretty good for a phone camera!  Even though it was shot looking almost directly into the sun, the exposures are still pretty good with plenty of detail in the shadowed areas. That’s what HDR does really well.

So, enjoy the photos on my Posterous site, and don’t forget the check out the blogroll as it links to a whole lot of other 365ers taking some great daily shots. And if you’re a 365er yourself, let me know so I can add you to the blogroll!

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Merry Christmas

As we celebrate Christmas and 2010 draws to a close, here’s a little video to make you smile.

Special Christmas wishes to everyone who has been part of my world for the last 12 months.  It’s been a wonderful year, full of learning, fun, travel, meeting interesting people, connecting with my network, and sharing ideas with each other.  I’ve had the good fortune to do some travelling this year and met many wonderful folk in person that I’ve only ever known online, as well as meeting a whole of great new people, and that’s been a real highlight for me.  You know who you are, and I feel so much richer for it.  Thanks!  

I feel like 2010 has been an amazing year of connecting with others, and it’s been incredibly rewarding on many levels.  To everyone who has left comments on the blog, connected via Twitter or Facebook or Skype or email or the many other ways we have of being connected (including face to face of course!), thank you… those connections mean a great deal to me.

Hope you all have a great Christmas with your families and friends, and that 2011 will be a great year for you.

Love, Chris

Thanks to ExcentricPT on YouTube for excellent video!

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A Remarkable Life

Nanna Brown and II know this rather personal post is out of character for this blog, but I felt I wanted to post it anyway…  I hope you don’t mind.

My grandmother died this week. The funeral was today, and it was a tough day to get through.  I was brave on the outside because my mum needed me to be, but on the inside, I cried a lot.

I really loved my Nanna Brown. She was an extraordinary woman who, at nearly 98, lived through most of the past century.  I had never really stopped to think about it, but when I looked at the list of world events she’d lived through it was astonishing.  I know we talk a lot about change, and the pace of change, and how important it is to deal with the changing world we live in, but in my nan’s lifetime she lived through both World Wars, as well as an assortment of other wars and a Great Depression.

She was just over 1 year old when the first transatlantic flight was made, 15 years old when Penicillin was discovered, 24 when construction started on the Golden Gate Bridge, and just a few months older when the Hindenburg disaster happened.

At 32 she saw the Atomic Bomb drop on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, she was 39 when the world’s first jet airliner went into commercial use, and 48 when the first human went into space.

At 50 years old, she watched the construction of the Berlin Wall, and at 77, she watched it come down again.  When she was 80 the European Union was founded, and she was 88 when New York’s Twin Towers were attacked on 9/11.

She grew up before television, before radio, before cars, before the Internet. While she was alive, so was Gustav Eiffel, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Sigmund Freud, Walt Disney and Henry Ford. She was born before, and died after, John F Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Benito Mussolini.

What a remarkable period of history to have lived through!

The last few conferences I’ve been to all had keynote speakers who repeated the same basic message… the world is changing and we better get good at dealing with change.  As much as we edtech types like to carry on about adaptability and the need to learn to deal with dramatic changes in our world, we sometimes tend to forget just how much the world can change in one person’s lifetime even if that person grew up before the invention of the Internet, Social Networking and the rise of China.

I was really close to my nan, and I’m glad I was with her just a few days before she died. She was a truly remarkable lady.

If you’re interested, this is the eulogy that I wrote and read at the church today…

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A couple of days ago, I was asked what I remembered most about Nan.  There are lots of memories of course, and although I’d not really thought about it before, I’m starting to realise that many of these memories have profoundly affected who I am as a person, the way I see the world and the way I’ve grown up.

  • When I was very young – before I started school – I remember waking up one morning to be told by Nan “we’re going to Japan this morning” and finding a little low table in the middle of the dining room floor.  Nan had set a Japanese breakfast on the floor and we had to sit on cushions and eat with chopsticks.  Nan taught us to have a sense of the whimsical, a sense of the unexpected, a sense of curiosity about the world.
  • When we were young, my cousins and I used to put on plays in Nan’s house.  We were often short of a character, so Nan would volunteer to dress up as an extra character in these childhood plays. The one that I think we all remember the best – because even to this day we still talk about it – was our production of Robinson Crusoe, and we can still see Nan playing the part of the savage boy, Man Friday, dressed in a leopard skin stole, her hair all messed up and her face painted black with boot polish.  Nan taught us how to have a sense of humour, a sense of fun and to never take ourselves too seriously.
  • When I was quite young, I remember going with Nan to the African Lion Safari in Sydney. There was a rather long, high swinging rope bridge there and as I walked across it with Nan it started to swing dramatically.  I was petrified and started to cry and scream. Nan calmed me down by explaining that it was ok, it was safe. That the people who built it obviously didn’t build it to fall down, so why would it fall down?  As she unfolded the logic of why the bridge was safe, my worry started to disappear and suddenly everything seemed ok.  Nan taught us how to have a sense of bravery, a sense of calm, and most of all, a sense of commonsense.
  • A couple of years ago, we took Nan for a drive down to Denman and Yarrawa, where she grew up as a child. She loved going for drives, and would always be pointing things out, telling stories, admiring the Hunter Valley landscape which she loved so much. She managed to find the house in which she was born and as we drove around the area she told us lots of stores from her childhood.  Nan taught us how to have a sense of history, a sense of self, a sense of heritage.
  • I remember sitting down at a family dinner one day, with the whole family there, and realising that there was one too many plates set at the table.  When I told Nan that she’d miscounted, she replied that, no, she just likes to set an extra place in case somebody unexpectedly dropped by… she wantedl them to feel welcome and to be able to join us without feeling like they were intruding.  Nan taught us to have a sense of welcome, a sense of pride, and sense of giving.
  • And that’s the thing that stands out the most about Nan to me… her love of people. In all the years I knew Nan, I never once heard her talk poorly about anybody.  She always seemed to find  the good side of other people, and always managed to find something nice to say about them.  Nan taught us how to have a sense of goodness, a sense of the positive.  A sense of humanity.

There are so many things that Nan taught us all. When we lose someone we love, it’s hard to not feel sad and upset and to grieve about the loss of what we no longer have. But I know that everyone in this room could come up with a list of their favourite “Nan moments”… those treasured times when she made you laugh, or made you think, or made you see the world a little bit differently to the way you’d seen it before.  Although Nan isn’t with us anymore, if we can remember back to those special moments she created with each of us, I’m sure we’ll find that there are ways in which they’ve touched our lives that will live on for a very long time.

I’d like to think that it’s those moments that are the real legacy Nanna Brown leaves with us.