Category Archives: Photography

From the Twitterverse

Photography, social networking, ,

I am quickly approaching my 30th day of blogging every day.  I want to continue to incorporate blogging in my daily routine. One strategy I’m considering is having a meme for each day, much like Should Be Reading, one of the book blogs I follow. MizB encourages others to share in the meme on their own blogs or in the comments.

Here’s what I’m thinking about:

  • Monday Musings: A take off on Should Be Reading where she asks and answers a question
  • Tuesday: From the Twitterverse: a post about something I found on Twitter
  • Wednesday: Mid week news roundup from Google alerts
  • Thursday: Thinking Out Loud: a post on some topic generally related to teaching, learning, technology and education
  • Friday: Fun
  • Sat/Sun: Just one post on the weekends and it will be more arts related

So, from the Twitterverse today: an article identifying real and fake Hurricane Sandy photos. I got the link from one of my graduate students.

It’s a reminder of how easy it is to make and widely distribute photographs these days. Civil War photographer Mathew Brady was known to rearrange battle sites but he couldn’t do any post image editing and create a scene from whole cloth. And then have it shared instantaneously on social networks where there seems to be little thought about the veracity of the image.

What did you find in the Twitterverse today?

Warming Up the Creativity Muscle

creativity, ds106, Photography

I joined ds106, the open online digital storytelling course, almost on a whim this week. I was vaguely familiar with it, having seen some of the projects that were created last semester. It just seemed like the jolt I needed to reacquaint myself with the creative potential of my computer, which lately seems more like a productivity tool.

I’ve done two of The Daily Create assignments, both related to audio. When I set about to to do the first one yesterday–combine two sounds that wouldn’t normally be heard together–I knew what I wanted to do, but it had been so long since I had done anything with audio that it took me some time to figure out what tools to use for capturing and editing my audio. I ended up using my flip camera and then importing it into GarageBand for the mix down called Chicken TV.

Today, I did break the rules a bit as I did not capture any new audio. I had so much excess from yesterday and I spent the whole day in a meeting so I pulled some different clips and applied some effects to create my answer to the assignment to make an audio recording using an everyday object as a musical instrument. Probably many people would not consider chickens as everyday objects but I feed and water them everyday so I’m counting them. And somehow, I think breaking the rules is all part of the ds106 experience. Plus, I’m having fun so I don’t really care. I have fulfilled the fundamental mission of The Daily Create: Make Art Dammit!

I’m also participating in the 365 Project, taking and uploading a picture every week. So far, my photos have been fairly pedestrian, documenting my life. But I’m about ready to start experimenting with the Retro Camera app I downloaded some time ago to do some post-photo processing. Here are 12 of them:

Mosaic

1. Barn at Sunset, 2. Chair Decoration, 3. Chandelier, 4. Insulator, 5. Cabbage, 6. Chicken and Bottles, 7. Major the Puppy, 8. Smokehouse, 9. Happy Snowman Globe, 10. Virginia Statue of Religious Freedom, 11. Flocked Wallpaper, 12. Dottie

Using Digital Photography to Fight Torture

human rights, Photography, politics, technology, Video

A colleague posted a link to the TED 2008 video about the Worldwide Telescope. What a fabulous project!

Her video led me to the TED website. What an amazing collection of videos of smart people thinking about the issues of our world. I chose the technology topic and found this video of Peter Gabriel from TED 2006. I’ve been a Gabriel fan since his Genesis days, and he is the reason I’ve been an Amnesty International member for some 20 years. In this video, he describes his WITNESS project, which trains people to use digital cameras to document human rights abuses. The group also works to get these videos distributed and provides a hub where visitors can upload their own videos and view others. It’s a different take on how technology can change the world:

These stories always push me towards those big life questions: why me? why here? My video camera is usually right beside me on the desk, not to capture torture, but to capture birds. What a bucolic life I lead. But, I can add my voice to those who say that this is wrong and who are finding ways to use these collaborative technologies to make it impossible to hide human rights abuses.