Get ready for 17th October and set your alarms and take part in compiling a picture of the world at 4am.
Thanks to the support and funding from Channel 4 and Screen WM I’ve been able to work on some exciting plans for the project that will make it sustainable.
I’m going to be taking the project over to NYC for this event, but will do my best to organise something special for Birmingham again.
Also there may be a couple of sponsorship opportunities coming up, so keep your eyes peeled here and over at the 4am Project for announcements!
After weeks of waiting and speculation, the results for the City Of Culture 2013 came in a few days ago with the news that Derry/Londonderry won the bid and the City Of Culture title. I lived in Derry when I was younger and my family are from there, so it kind of softened the blow Many congratulations!
Naturally there was some disappointment in Birmingham, but we seem to have very quickly gotten over that and recovered quickly and we are already making plans, with the word that the cultural events that were planned for 2013 will continue anyway.
I think the process of going through the bid procedure alone has been great for the city. It’s highlighted the cultural awareness of what is going on around us. We have tapped into creative talent and given it a space to bloom and I really hope that continues. The cultural creativity in this city is so vibrant and it deserves it shine.
I am proud to have played a part in Birmingham’s City Of Culture bid by organising a 4am Project event which was held at the Museums Collection Centre. This was part of the Birmingham 24 hour cultural blog. Thank you to the City Council for their support in making this event happen, and to Cllr Martin Mulaney for writing and speaking about the 4am Project too.
Birmingham may not have won the title, but we are still a City Of Culture. So let’s get on with getting creative and showing the world we have got to offer
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!
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.
Many congratulations!
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