“Mad dogs and English men go out in the midday sun”
Crikey, it was a scorcher on Friday in Birmingham!
I had a really fun day on this photo shoot for the PR company Cake.
Cake were touring the country promoting The Big Lunch. The Big Lunch was started by the Eden Project and is a lovely and very simple idea about getting together with your neighbours and having a lunch! It aims to bring communities together. How many of us know our neighbours? I know I don’t. That’s why I’m organising one where I live. If you would like to take part, you can see the lunches in your area here, or of course, you can start your own!
The amazing 3D street artist Kurt Wenner did the art work for the big lunch; A huge picnic blanket loaded with cakes, flans, sandwiches and more cakes!
I don’t know how Kurt did it, but his artwork was designed to spring into 3D on photographs with the use of a fish eye lens. I was delighted to hear this! I love my fish eye lens, and it was the first time it was specifically requested, a must, for a photography shoot. Yay!
My brief was to take some press shots early in the morning (using my lovely fish eye), and get them sent out to the press asap. Due to this, it mean I had no time to edit the pictures. I could only select the best ones and send them off. No tweaking, no cropping. They had to be perfect straight out of the camera. The challenge was met and my photos were whizzed out over the Internet.
The latter half of the day I changed lenses, so you will see a mixture on lenses on these images.
Everyone was in a great mood and lots of people were happy at my request to pose for photos.
Pretty in pink ( one of my favourite films btw!)
And check out this little star! She need no direction at all – she just walked on up and struck a pose!
I didn’t get this chaps name, but you can find him cycling up and down with his ice cream treats along New Street. He admitted it was a struggle cycling in such heat. I can imagine!
I couldn’t help but notice star in the making, Bobby Dazzler dancing along the square with his band of merry men and women with his new song blaring out from his stereo! He was out on the streets promoting his new football song. Now, I must admit, I can’t abide anything football related at the best of times but I’m slightly biased on this occasion at my friends Julia and Nat from Aquila TV were involved in directing and editing his video. Take a watch of it over on youtube! I think it’ll make you smile
Thank you to Birmingham City Council for giving me access to the balcony area on the Council House! Whoo. Great views! I’m going to try and stitch together some photos to make a big panoramic shot. If it works out I’ll put the results up
Despite me putting on factor 50 in the morning, I still caught the sun. I was rather hoping to go for the pale and erm, interesting look this summer haha.
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.
The Authority 2.0 Conference is a half day event for police officers, local neighbourhood community managers, councillors, voluntary sector group leaders, members of the public, academics and press – anyone wanting to share and expand their knowledge on social media communications, and how organisations in authority communicate using these platforms.
It was a fascinating and insightful event. One of the highlights for me was a talk by student Jennifer Yang from Beijing about how the police in China use social media and police the Internet. It seems most of the social media tools that we are used to here, and take for granted, such asFacebook and Youtube are not available in China and they have their own social media websites. I found it quite disturbing that the Police in China use animated cartoons that pop up when someone visits a website that they deem illegal.
I was very much looking forward to the Photographer or Terrorist debate. The debate opened with this video.
I have been fortunate in that I haven’t had any negative encounters with the police whilst I have been out and about taking photographs. In fact, the only time I have been spoken to by a police officer was last weekend when I was taking photographs outside of Gatecrasher nightclub in Birmingham. I just happened to be standing next to the police officers whilst I was taking photographs and one of them just casually asked me what I was taking photos of. I think it was just more out of curiosity than them being suspicious of me. I simply explained I was on a photo job for a mobile phone company who booked me for some nightclub shots. Nothing more was said, though I did continue the conversation by explaining that I was going to be on this debate panel and asked them if they had ever stopped a photographer in Birmingham. They just shook their heads, shrugged their shoulders and said it wasn’t something they had done, or were bothered about.
I’ll tell you who does question me the most though. Members of the public.
With counter terrorism posters popping up, it is making the public more suspicious and I’ve lost count of the number of times that I have been approached by someone on the street who think they have the right to questions me; “What are you doing? Why are you taking photographs of xyz? Where are the photographs going to be used?” All of which I am under no obligation to answer and is a bit of a pain. It distracts me from my work, takes up time and even if I answer their questions it’s of more benefit to them than to me.
I felt the debate went well and Chief Inspector Mark Payne and DCI Ian Grundy responded positively to criticisms, agreeing that the way police officers and community support officers approach photographers could be done in a more tactful way and that there was some misunderstanding on occasions about when to use Section 44 of the Terrorism Act. As Christian Payne pointed out, if a terrorist really wanted to scope out an area, there are many other ways for this to be done without them going out with a camera. It is also a very positive move that the West Midlands Police are starting to take more steps in engaging with people via social media and they are making plans to expand on this.
You can watch the full Authority 2.0 conference here, and the Photographer or Terrorist debate begins 2 hours 36 minutes in.
Well done to the Event With Me team for flawlessly streaming the event live online. I believe the live stream attracted nearly 400 viewers!
Pretty in pink ( one of my favourite films btw!)
And check out this little star! She need no direction at all – she just walked on up and struck a pose!
I didn’t get this chaps name, but you can find him cycling up and down with his ice cream treats along New Street. He admitted it was a struggle cycling in such heat. I can imagine!
I couldn’t help but notice star in the making, Bobby Dazzler dancing along the square with his band of merry men and women with his new song blaring out from his stereo! He was out on the streets promoting his new football song. Now, I must admit, I can’t abide anything football related at the best of times but I’m slightly biased on this occasion at my friends Julia and Nat from Aquila TV were involved in directing and editing his video. Take a watch of it over on youtube! I think it’ll make you smile 
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