Karen Strunks Professional Birmingham-based Freelance Photographer

My lecture at Birmingham City University about the 4am Project

Monday saw me giving my first ever lecture! It was at Birmingham City University in Paul Bradshaw’s Online Journalism class, and I spoke about the 4am Project and using social media such as twitter and flickr.

I must admit, that in all my day dreams of imagining things I would be doing, giving a lecture at a university didn’t pop into the equation.

I haven’t attended university so am quite unfamiliar with that environment and when I thought about people who gave lectures they seemed all grown up and full of wisdom and clever. Well, that’s just shown me that you never know what the future holds, and what with this lecture and my recent attendance on the debate panel at the Authority 2.0 conference, which was also held at Birmingham City University, I am getting more familiar with a university environment.

Now I have a (much adored) iPhone I thought I would try and get a bit snazzy with technology and stream my lecture live via Bambuser. I did have a little experiment with Qik which also allows live streaming to the web from your phone, but couldn’t get it to work. I did a test run with Bambuser and it seemed to worked okay-ish. However, come the time to use it and connection was intermittent and the overall results weren’t all that satisfactory in picture quality or sound. Here are the results. If you want to watch it, I recommend turning your volume up! You can view it in a larger format over on Bambuser.

Despite it not being the best quality it’s great to see that 12 people tuned in as it was broadcast live and it’s been viewed 48 times (so far). It was definitely worth the interactive social media experiment and that is  just one of the reasons I got my iPhone. I want to be able to keep in touch on the go and to be able to make quick updates as I go along.

So, what did I talk about?!

I talked about the history of the 4am Project and how it began. I made some videos around this time last year on this subject which will give you an idea about how it all began.

Did you watch them?!

I mentioned why I chose flickr as a place to put the 4am Project photo submissions. It’s free (for a basic account), it’s easy to use, a lot of people are familiar with it already, it allows tagging and geotagging and gives people the space to add descriptions to their images. I want to make it as easy as possible for people to join in the 4am Project.

Then I talked about how I got people involved with the project. It’s a global project and I want it’s reach to find as many people as possible. Twitter plays a big part in the project’s social media campaign, as well as the website and blog. As people got to know about the project they started to tell their friends and wrote about it on their blogs, using word of mouth online. Also I mentioned how I the 4am Project received sponsorship from Rewired PR who did a wonderful PR campaign bringing in about £250,000 worth of publicity in just a few short weeks.

Statistics next! Since the 4am Project began in April 2009 almost 4500 images of 4am have been taken from approx 900 participants from around 40 countries.

I talked about using photography online in general. About why I use flickr – it’s another arena for me to display my photographic work in addition to my website. My friends, colleagues and peers are on there so I can keep in touch with them and up to date with their photographs. I also link my flickr images to my blog which creates links and we all know Google loves the old links eh!

Tagging and meta data: Why and how to use tags and meta tags (all the information that can go behind the scenes of your photographs). I’ll do a blog post about this at some point. Basically by tagging your images you are helping other people find them and in turn find your blog/website/work. Meta tagging allows you to put a lot more information on the image, you claim it as your work, you can put your contact details on there and your copyright.

I also explained how geo-tagging works and demonstrated that on Flickr by showing how to geo-tag images and how to search for images by location.

Next up….resizing images for use on the web. I mentioned why I re-size my images for the web. I don’t want to put the full high resolution images online as I want to protect my work. And I forgot to mention this part (doh!): by resizing your images for use on your blog/website it will help the pages to load quicker. The bigger the file size the longer it will take for it to download. You don’t want to loose visitors to your site because it takes too long to download. People will lose patience and click away – not something you want!

I also talked about how and why you should sharpen your images, especially when you re-size them. I wrote all about this in another blog post.

Which photo editing software? I use Adobe’s Photoshop CS3 and Paint Shop Pro (a fraction of the price of photoshop). However, depending on what you want to do with your images, there are some very good FREE photo editing software online such as GIMP and Aviary.

I touched upon Creative Commons and how to use it to give permission (or not) to people to use your images.

And that’s everything!

I think I talked for about 40 minutes. It was great to meet the students and they made my first lecture experience a good one, even asking some questions about the 4am Project at the end too!  Please pop over to students Emma Dando’s and Victoria Elmore’s blogs & have a read about their 4am Project class! If I have missed anybody out, please give me a shout and I’ll add you

A big Thank You to Paul Bradshaw and all the students!

I love the variety of life the internet brings, the opportunities and the people you get to meet online and offline. I can’t rave about social media enough.

To give you an example of social media in action; no sooner than I had returned home from the lecture, I found an invitation on twitter asking me to speak at the Exposure photography conference in Leeds in October! How quickly would that have happened without social media and the internet? Would it have happened at all?

I remember when I first got my first computer and got online about 8/9 years ago and I honestly can’t remember what I used it for. Sending the odd email and doing  a bit of research I think. It didn’t occur to me to use it to connect with people. Fast forward a few year and I practically live my life online.  

What does social media do for you?

Say hello! Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | Youtube

Please vote for the 4am Project to win it’s first award!

Hi Everyone!

I need your vote! Or rather, the 4am Project needs your vote!

The 4am Project has been nominated for a Midland Media Award in the Online Campaign category.

I would really appreciate your vote – it would be the 4am Project’s first award!

I made a little campaign video Please vote for the project here! http://birminghamnewsroom.com/?p=10125

This is what I submitted for the nomination:

The aim of the 4amproject is to capture a view of the world at the magical time of 4am.

Although its roots lie in Birmingham, the project is a worldwide community experience and aims to capture a time of day that many people rarely see. Building on the ever growing phenomenon of social media, the 4am Project is an exercise in global solidarity to encourage the sharing of visual imagery that reflects the world we live in.

The idea was born out of my ‘Birmingham At 4am’ project, where I have been going out at 4am to take pictures of the city. I wanted to share this experience and get other people involved.

I knew it would be a big task to get the word out worldwide and that social media tools would play a huge part in this. The social media tools I have utilized are a website, flickr, a blog, facebook, and twitter. By doing this I have taken an online idea and made it into a shared offline event. By using these online tools the project is an ongoing success.

4am Project participants have been using social media to make contact with other photographers in their area and have arranged their own 4am photo walks.

Since the 4am Project began in April 2009, over 4000 photographs have been submitted by participants from over 40 countries, including Singapore, China, Australia, Ireland, Hungary, Philippines, & South Korea to name just a few.

I have received so much great feedback about the project. From people saying that they enjoyed experiencing theirs streets at a different time, to others saying it has helped them learn more about their cameras. Some said it has helped them embrace photography again.

Others enjoy the global collaboration and also like the opportunity to meet and connect with other photographers.

The beauty of the project is that anyone can take part. All they need is a camera. And a willingness to get up a 4am! It’s a simple idea that has spread like wild fire and is capturing peoples imaginations worldwide

Thank you to everyone who has taken part and joined in the 4am Project and thank you for you vote!

4am Project at the Museum Collections Centre! 4am on 24th April

The 4am Project will be hosting a special 4am event this Saturday 24th April (at 4am!) on behalf of the Birmingham City of Culture bid!

The event will take place at Birmingham Museum Collections Centre. This is a rare opportunity to photograph the wealth of archived articals and artifacts that are not on show to the public at the Birmingham Museum. From classic motor vehicals, to stuffed animals and interesting curiosities! It’s a huge place, with plenty to see and photograph. The Museums Collection centre usually only lets the public in 2 or 3 times a year, and have been kind enough to open it’s doors to the 4am Project this Saturday!

From the Birmingham Museum Collections Centre website:

The 1.5 hectare site, close to Duddeston Station, holds hundreds of thousands of objects. Among the collections are steam engines, sculptures, an entire collection of Austin, Rover and MG motor cars, a red phone box and even a Sinclair C5

THERE ARE ONLY 30 TICKETS AVAILABLE on this occasion. Get your tickets now, first come, first served, and don’t forget to set your alarm clocks!

NOTE: Please upload your photographs to flickr and tag them 4amproject and for this occasion, please also use the tag bmag as the City Of Culture bid team would like to showcase some of the photos from the event. For more instructions about flickr and tagging, please visit the 4am Project website.

There is a car park on the site, but please be on time as the car park will close and be locked for the duration of the event.

Please visit Eventbrite to register for you free ticket!

I hope you can come along, experience the 4am Project and meet other photographers!

Follow the 4am Project on twitter!

Follow me on twitter!