5 tips for making better photographs

OK… so what actually makes a photograph better?
A good exposure… an interesting subject… a sound composition

Don’t drop the camera!
Blurry image = not good… unless you are the creative type
• Brace yourself and keep your fingers out of the way – gently press the shutter
• Let there be light – using your flash indoors and out
• Using the viewfinder = slow down and compose – use the framing mat
• Click… focusing, exposing, and recomposing

In or out – what to include in your image?
What to include in the image and where to put it within the frame
• Fill the frame but avoid amputation
• Housekeeping – clean up around the edge of the frame
• Leaving room to breathe
• Help… there’s a tree sticking out of my head
• Rule of thirds

Ho hum – same old same old?
How to make your photographs unique
• Zoom… zoom… electronically and manually
• Change the angle – shoot high, shoot low

Mug shot or portrait?
Avoiding the mug shot look
• How do you capture personality?
• Near or far? Posed or candid?
• Try to tell a story with your image
• It’s all about the person – lose the clutter unless it adds to the story

“Not I”, quacked the duck
“Not I” said the photographer interested in making better photographs when asked if they would use the automatic setting on the camera and merely “point and shoot”
• Aperture priority
• Shutter priority
• Get creative and be in control of the camera

- – – – – – – – – – – – -
Making portraits
Chose someone to make a portrait of and go to work. Be creative by getting in close, staying out wide, having your subject pose, catching them in a candid moment, learning about who they are, shooting from high, shooting from low… compose an interesting image and try to capture a little of who they are.

The vast majority of photographs in photo albums are of people… but just how challenging is it to actually make a good portrait?

Links for today:

• Wiziq - web conferencing for free
• Elluminate - web conferencing
• MEVL Moodle - online course management system
• CILC.org - Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration

As the online Web 2.0 course winds down, I am unsure as to the impact that our little adventure has had with participants. As with any class, there was a wide range of existing levels and abilities when we started… some who were already quite familiar with online technological tools, and some who were making their first foray into this exciting educational arena. Even though this was listed as an introductory course, I am hoping that everyone who participated was able to learn some thing new that they can take back into their classroom and use.

For me there were two main concepts within this course… the introduction and exploration of the actual tools… blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, RSS, podcasts and streaming video. What they are, how to use them, and then, most importantly, how to introduce them into one’s teaching. My hope was that the technical expertise needed to participate in this course would not be a significant hurdle for participants… though I think for some it was.

The second important concept was that of embracing the idea of students being creators of information… not just consumers. I was somewhat surprised by the apparent push-back by some on why a teacher would want to incorporate something like blogging into the classroom. I get the lack of interest from some in personally maintaining a blog – it just isn’t everyone’s thing – but to arbitrarily dismiss blogging (or any other aspect of Web 2.0) as educational tools… I don’t get that. Giving students a voice is always a good thing, and many of the Web 2.0 tools allow for that when incorporated into the classroom. Good teachers engage their students, motivate them to be curious, and inspire them how to become lifelong learners. To me it shouldn’t matter if you are having an in-person chat as you go for a walk, you are responding to a student’s blog post, or you are using streaming video as a discussion prompt… good teaching is good teaching regardless of the medium used. The Read/Write web has increased the availability and accessibility of resources that a teacher might employ, and should be seen as merely one more option in creating a learning environment that will foster student success.

Even though this was billed as an introductory course, my gut feeling is that some were still a little overwhelmed with the amount of information and opportunity available. For others who, for example, already had their own blog, the level of rigor involved in the course was likely minimal. It is challenging to differentiate and address everyone’s needs accordingly.

Most importantly, I was not interested in trying to tell people how they should teach. Most of the participants in this course have way more experience that I do in the classroom. My goals were simply to introduce some of the online technologies currently available and offer suggestions on how to use them. I wanted to create a professional learning community within the course, and introduce and discuss the philosophy of students becoming creators of information rather than consumers. After that it will be up to each individual to see the value that implementation of the tools and the philosophies might have in their learning environment.

Bottom line… I have thoroughly enjoyed both the content of the course and the interaction between myself and each of the participants. I have personally learned a lot myself, and I hope that my fellow Web 2.0′ers have also.

I thought I was doing the students in my class a favor by creating a PBWiki to use as a sandbox. The idea was that those who had not had a chance to experience using a Wiki could go there and explore.

Well… what a debacle. I started getting messages that some of them could not access the Wiki! Here’s me telling them that the technical aspects of creating a Wiki is relatively easy. No worries… just focus on the educational implications. I can understand the frustration of those who were unable to access the Wiki, and I could totally understand if they lost just a little bit of that faith in online technology that we had been cultivating over the past couple of weeks.

Baffled for a while, I decided to go back to PBWiki and try to figure out what I had done wrong. Having used PBWiki in the past with no issues whatsoever, I just knew that I had done something wrong – operator error.

I decided to create a new Wiki from scratch, and go through the invite process to try to determine where I had gone wrong with the original sandbox Wiki. Turns out the problem was that I had tried to create a Wiki password, and I had then emailed that and a link to PBWIki to the group. What I should have done was allow the automatic invite mechanism of PBWiki to generate a link that participants could use to access the site.

When participants in my course arrived at PBWiki through the auto-invite, all they had to do was generate their own user name and password. But I had confused them with my earlier email and my phantom password of “ayuh”.

The majority of participants were able to access the Wiki, and I think we all got a glimpse of what it is capable of as an educational tool. I do, however hope that my over-zealous desire to make things technologically easier hasn’t backfired and generated enough frustration to actually chase some people away from Wikis?

Wondering was the Wiki worth the wait?

I haven’t been able to post to my blog lately. As teachers I am sure you all experience those same periods where things get really hectic and there aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done!

In my real job I work in the Department of Education as what is affectionately termed an “Educational Specialist” – don’t ask me what that means  Anyway, one of the main projects I have been working on for the past year or so is a report on the status of distance education in Maine high schools. This has been quite a time-consuming enterprise, but sometime around the February vacation I was able to wrap it up and present it to the Commissioner.

The next step is for this report to then be presented to the Education Committee of the legislature. As I am sure most of you know, this is a particularly busy time of the year in state government, so getting on their schedule can be tricky.

This was to be the week… I was geared up to support Commissioner Gendron as she presented the report to the committee on Tuesday, but we got bumped to Wednesday, and then we got bumped again today. What this means is that I am (and have been) “on-call” to be available when the committee is able to re-schedule the presenting of the report… could be anytime.

Anyway… that has been my past couple of days… I have been able to spend some time in the Ed Committee room, and to be honest I have been fascinated to see state government up close and personal at work. Gives me a much greater appreciation of the work that is done on my behalf.

The point of my post? To apologize to my Web 2.0′ers for not being around in our online course as much as I would have liked lately. But I am back and excited to hear how we are going to tackle our next topic… Wikis. 

Now that we are past half way through the course, what has been the most exciting thing you have learned about Web 2.0?

I enjoy photography, especially landscape photography. There are many wonderful landscape photographers whose incredible work I admire… Galen Rowell - Marc Adamus - Mahesh Thapa - and William Neill among others.

I subscribe the old-fashioned way to “Outdoor Photographer” magazine. I eagerly anticipate my monthly issue arriving in the mail, and I thoroughly enjoy the wide variety of articles and imagery it contains. However, one of the first things I do on receipt of my issue is to flip directly to the column by William Neill. When I read his words and look at his images, I am always inspired and motivated to pick up my camera and go take photographs.

Just tonight I stumbled across his blog. I have long had his web site bookmarked as a favorite, but his blog is something fairly new. When visiting it, I wasn’t sure if I should leave a comment or not… after all this is someone whose work I have admired for a long time, and a world-renowned photographer who worked side by side with the master, Ansel Adams.

After thinking about it for a while (and what I would say if I did leave a comment), I came to the conclusion that if Mr. Neill didn’t want people to communicate with him, then he wouldn’t have started his blog. Armed with my rationalization and new-found appreciation of blogging in the Web 2.0 world, I plucked up the courage to try to put a couple of legible and coherent words together to wish him a Happy Birthday, and thank him for being an inspiration to me. I have officially taken the step from being a lurker to a commenter!

The photograph in this post is one that I made a couple of years back. Hopefully you recognize one of my favorite places on this earth… Sand Beach and The Beehive in Acadia National Park?

Are you a lurker/reader or a commenter?

Update: I just went back and checked out William Neill’s blog again, and he responded to my comment! Now if that isn’t a ringing endorsement of the free-flow of communication available, then I don’t know what is! By the way… here’s what he said, “Thanks, David. I was fortunate to know Ansel when I worked in his gallery in Yosemite, and he inspired me to always share my knowledge and experience as he did so much in his workshops and books. Glad that you enjoy my column… I have written 80 of them since 1997!”

Wow! Just think how inspiring this type of communication could be for a student of yours!

As I write this, my son the high school sophomore is upstairs in his room laboring over a “report” that is due tomorrow for a class. The poor kid is literally locked down in his own little world trying to generate this book report. Read the assigned piece of literature and then answer the following questions… yawn.

Of course he will complete the assigned task – and will likely get a good grade – (he gets his brains from his mother) – but I can’t help wondering what that grade means? The only person who will read the report will be his teacher. The teacher assigns the grade and then hands it back to him – I truly hope that for his sake when he goes out into the real world that she knows what she is doing. Who knows what he does with the report after he gets his grade, but I doubt if it will ever see the light of day again.

My point? Couldn’t he benefit just a little from using a blog or some other collaborative tool to create these reports? The teacher can still give feedback, but if the report were blogged, other students could not only read his writing, but they could also benefit from connecting the quality of his work with the teacher feedback. Wouldn’t making connections between the teacher comments and his writing be of some value as a teaching tool? His peers could also provide feedback… the more the merrier I say. Isn’t it important to know how to communicate with others? Providing and accepting constructive criticism are important attributes in the world after high school.

And then there is the notion of progress… a blog would allow for earlier works to be compared, with progress in writing skills being evident to him and others.

If you took one look at him in his room right now, engaged and excited would not be words you might choose to describe him. My kid is fairly intrinsically motivated to succeed, so he gets it done… but I can only imagine the outcome of this experience with a less-motivated student. Am sure there are other potential benefits to using collaborative, digital tools…

Sorry for the rant, but I find it discouraging to say the least, that he is being taught in such an uninspiring, tired, and ordinary way. He may end up knowing (at least for a little while), the content of that book more than well enough to answer the assigned questions, but in doing so what is he really learning?

Do not teach him to merely be good at school… prepare him for more… college, a career, and to be a life-long learner in a society that will require a different set of communication skills. I don’t care if you use blogs, charades, or magic markers… just please teach in a way that inspires and engages my son and prepares him for something other than your small classroom!

Maybe I should send all of his teachers an invitation to “Learning and Teaching with Web 2.0 Tools”

How best to leverage Web 2.0 tools to engage students?

From Common Craft – this web site does a great job in visually explaining all sorts of common things. You can find them here: http://www.commoncraft.com/

How visual are you? Would you rather watch a video like this, or would you rather read an article?

I am not the most comfortable blogger. I am not entirely confident about my ability to write legibly and in a way that is grammatically correct. But more importantly, I just am not sure if I have enough to say that is interesting. So, as Session #2 of the Web 2.0 course gets underway and we tackle blogging, it is with some trepidation that I bare this blog to the group. It was created as a companion to the online course I am facilitating, and I myself am actually curious to see what the ultimate fate of this blog will be. I plan on sharing additional course resources here on this blog, and am hoping my “students” will interact and see this space as valuable. And since I am already baring my blog, I figured I might as well show my face.

Don’t get me wrong, I love reading other people’s blogs. You can check out my blogroll on the side of this page to see some of my favorites. I totally buy into the concept of the democratization of information publishing. Just as the teacher should not be considered the gatekeeper of information in the classroom, nor should the traditional media be considered the only valid source of news and information.

Ever since the summer of the shark attacks a few years back when we were all lead to believe that it was too dangerous to set foot in the ocean (when in fact that particular year was one of the lowest ever for recorded shark attacks), I have had a pretty skeptical opinion of mainstream news. There are both obvious and not so obvious biases (is that a word?) everywhere from the big-city newspapers, to the so-called journalistic (hah!) TV shows like 60 minutes. I guess what I am trying to say is that you shouldn’t always believe what you read – or see, and that I am intrigued by how the monopoly of publishing is no longer in the hands of the few. Power to the people and all that… but it doesn’t mean that my blog is relevant to anyone other than me.

Having said all that, I am quite excited to see how the participants in the course tackle blogging. I imagine some will take to it immediately, and others will be slower to adopt. I realize that as a medium it isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but I am very much looking forward to checking out the bloggers of Maine Web 2.0.

To blog or not to blog… why do you blog?

The Web 2.0 course is now up and running. After spending a week orienting ourselves to the course and Moodle, we jumped right in and have spent the past week exploring and discussing what Web 2.0 is, and potential ways to integrate some of the tools into our learning environments.

As expected, the group is diverse in both their experience in using some of the Read/Write tools, and also in their subject area and grade level backgrounds. It is pleasing to see 7 librarians in the group… especially since we will be dealing with some of the ramifications associated with the sifting, filtering and creating of information.

I am trying to resist the temptation of jumping in on every single discussion. I definitely feel the push-pull of wanting to be more directed in my facilitation, but also want to encourage the responsibility that each participant should have for their own learning. I want the group to develop a lively and interactive professional forum where we all both learn from each other, and recognize the value that individual contributions can have. By no means do I have all of the answers… many good suggestions and ideas will come from the collective sharing by the group.

We are off into the blogosphere this week… every member of the group will create their own blog, and we will discuss some of the benefits to blogging with regard to enhancing communication. It could just be me, but after the first week of discussion there seemed to already be a divide occurring regarding blogs… some participants had already decided that blogging wasn’t for them, whereas others were very much on board. Blogging is just one of many Web 2.0 tools, and I hope that by the end of this session we have at least provided everyone with a better understanding of the potential of blogging, and where appropriate that it “might” be a choice for some.

Do you have to be a good writer to be a good blogger?