I find myself surprised to see people expecting rules and structure when not explicitly there- are we that “trained” to act by rules and expect rule makers?

Huh?

I am talking about the Daily Shoot, man. Frequent CDB readers will know I am an addict to the daily camer assignments- I’ve done 432 of ‘em (hey, did you know you get your own gallery on THEIR site? cool!) I love the challenge, and have ventured that is a supreme model of informal learning, of learning by doing, of working the 10,000 hour gig.

But I hear whinging (maybe I have muttered it myself) when assignments are repeated, even people saying it has caused them to quit. For example water- it was featured in number 9, number 51, number 293, number 479.

Keep in mind that just because YOU did the assignment once, does not mean some new person has. Keep in mind that you can interpret the assignment in a radically different way. It is a challenge, right?

And instead of complaining, why not contribute new ideas to the suggestion box?

But look at the premise of the site:

The Daily Shoot is a simple daily routine to motivate and inspire you to practice your photography, and share your results! It’s not a contest and there are no prizes. It’s simply about encouraging you to pick up your camera and make photographs.

…

That’s it. There aren’t any other rules. You aren’t going to get demerits if you miss a few days, nor will you get gold stars for doing every assignment. We’re just here to help you with a little nudge every day. The rest is up to you!

So when I hear people complaining about the assignments, it comes off as fomenting the traditional student-teacher role, the expectation that they leaders are responsible for your learning.

BS.

Look at the FAQ:

What are the rules?

This is your creative work – there are no rules.

And so I see too many people taking the whole thing too literally. Like they HAVE to do exactly what the assignment said.

I have a new idea.

cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by squacco

I am playing the anti Daily Shoot game- not anti like against it, just going opposite to the assignment. So for yesterday’s assignment about water, I shot the water defying cactus, “We Don’t Need No Stinking Water”-

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Today’s challenge was to go opposite to “Make a photograph of a beautiful simple shape, such as an egg, today. Utilize lighting and focus to make it sing.” – so I went for chaos and mess:

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Does this mean I failed? Does it mean I am not working on my craft? No. I am still practicing my photography…. every day.

I don’t know how long I will roll opposite, but its a new twist on the challenge- want to play? Add antidailyshoot to your tags — http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/antidailyshoot/

The DailyShooters addressed this issue of repeated assignments in a December 2010 blog post

Now, I know from my inbox that there a few folks that are unhappy about this. Somehow, the Daily Shoot has let them down by not meeting their expectations of what it was. To this, all I can offer is to repeat our mantra: we’re about getting you to pick up your camera and practice. Nothing more. Practice involves repetition. We’re going to have that from time to time.

I do not begrudge someone stopping or not shooting a while. It’s not about being obsessive about it (maybe, not… am I obsessive? no I cannot be obsessive…. I just think about it all the time… that is not obsessive, eh?) .

It’s not about the assignments, its about the creativity.

You dont like the assignments, interpret it originally. Or make up your own. Just make art, damnit!

I had way, way too much fun (as if there is really such a measurement) with my presentation yesterday for the ITC 2011 conference here in Florida. On the beach. Under the sun.

Maybe it was because this was all brand new material- or just it was because I got to talk about my favorite subject, photography.

I called this “Through The Lens” and you can find the various bits and links and slides and audio at http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/itc11.

Through the Lens (audio)

The things I tried to aim for were some really weak metaphor comparisons between both mechanics of cameras (aperture as being breadth of attention, shutter speed as time spent, iso as sensitivity) and the artistic ends (snapshots versus good photos, cropping, composition) etc and learning. I tossed in the notion of context via reference to the brilliant column by Errol Morris Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire — which sadly, is now tucked safely inide the paywall of the New York Times (may their plan go down in flames, please).

The other side of this was my piece on how on gets better at doing things– you do them. You get to be better at photography by doing the 10,000 hours at at (and no, Gladwell is not the source, only a referrer).

And really, at the end, the slides that only emerged at midnight the night before, is the piece we do not spend a whole of of ed tech attention to- the most powerful force in the learningsphere- motivation. Not posters or incentives- that deep seated drive that makes one want to go beyond average, to become better at X, to figure out what they want to/should learn that they are not aware of now.

I only resorted to one dog photo too, as duly noted by the eloquent EDUHULK

cc licensed ( BY ND ) flickr photo shared by -=RoBeE=-

and this really was merely to present the concept of aperture priority.

Thanks ITC for letting me take the stage to show and talk about the power of photography.

I’m doing a presentation at ITC 2011 on some parallels between photography and learning- a piece of that is using the independent learning, feedback, and regular process of The Daily Shoot is an example to look at.

In one part, I would like to show some examples of people who’s photography skills have improved just by the regular practice of doing daily photography via the Daily Shoot. If this is you, I will be looking for a URLK for a “before” shot (e.g. your early dailyshoot stuff) and an “after” shot (something more recent that shows how your photography has gotten better.

I cannot offer anything but a little sunshine, and I will become one of your best friends in flickr.

If you can help, just drop some info in my form at http://bit.ly/better-via-ds

Nothing like a little WordPress hacking to get back in action.

A few months ago I registered the domain barkingdog.me as a place intended to set up a photo gallery, but decided today to finally get around to hanging something for real there. My goals were to have a clean site with ginormous images, and also something that would be little fuss to add.

On my NMC work in creating the MIDEA site I had set up an account to have access to the Graph Paper Press themes — yes, these are paid for themes, but are very elegant and sophisticated. I did moderate hacking to the Modularity theme for the MIDEA site, but was liking their photo gallery themes, and landed on Widescreen Fullscreen.

With a few hours tweaking and adding one moderate hunk of code, I have what I aimed for at barkingdog.me:

Widescreen Theme version, not used anymore

Fullscreen Theme version, current

It’s totally unblog. There is no sense at all of “posts” or chronology. The front is a rotating slide show (they limit it to 5 images, I think I know how to expand, but that’s later). I’ve arranged them via a few categories. like People, Places, Things.

The newer Fullscreen creates thumbnails for the recent upload, newer ones are large icons across the top, plus 20 more following on the bottom. When you roll over an icon, it lightens up. Its all automatic, so as new photos are uploaded, they rotate in at the top. I set the theme options to NOT out sidebars on the pages, to the version I embed now is the full width (950 pixels wide).

But here is the key thing. Because of the way I do my photo workflow in Aperture, I only have to upload the image in the post, and I used some code to embed the meta data that comes out of Aperture export and WordPress drinks in on image upload.

As I edit my photos in Aperture, I enter titles and captions as these are used when the photos are exported to flickr (using the Connected Flow plugin). I do this in Aperture because it gets saved as meta data (which has saved me lots of re-do if the export fails for some reason).

I’ve noticed when I import these images into wordpress that the metadata from aperture is carried into WordPress

That means the Aperture metadata travels with the image, and also includes things like shutter speed and aperture of the photo. It would be nice to bring that into my site!

After a bit of googling I found some code used to add and display geocode data to an image uploaded to WordPress that gave me more than enough to do what I needed (with some modifications).

So what I did was to add this code to my functions.php template file:

function insert_exif($pid) {

// insert EXIF data for first image uploaded to a given post $pid
// modified from http://www.kristarella.com/2008/12/geo-exif-data-in-wordpress

	if (is_single() || is_attachment()) {

// set up query to get the first attachment to a POST
// yes, this assumes that there is one image per post, but thats what I designed!

		$args = array(
			'post_type' => 'attachment',
			'numberposts' => 1,
			'post_status' => null,
			'post_parent' => $pid
		);
		$attachments = get_posts($args);

		// I really dont have to loop, but go ahead, its one loop
		foreach ($attachments AS $attachment) {

			// get the image id
			$imgid = $attachment->ID;

			// load metadata associated with image
			$imgmeta = wp_get_attachment_metadata( $imgid );

			// use caption as body text
			if (!empty($imgmeta['image_meta']['aperture'])) echo '<p>' . nl2br($imgmeta['image_meta']['caption']) . '</p>';

			// list for other meta data
			echo "<ul class='exif'>";

				// camera type
				if (!empty($imgmeta['image_meta']['camera'])) echo "<li><strong>Camera:</strong> " . $imgmeta['image_meta']['camera']."</li>";

				// aperture
				if (!empty($imgmeta['image_meta']['aperture'])) echo "<li><strong>Aperture:</strong> f/" . $imgmeta['image_meta']['aperture']."</li>";

				// ISO
				if (!empty($imgmeta['image_meta']['iso'])) echo "<li><strong>ISO:</strong> " . $imgmeta['image_meta']['iso']."</li>";

				// format shutter speed
				if (!empty($imgmeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed']))
				{
				echo "<li><strong>Shutter Speed:</strong> ";
					if ((1 / $imgmeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed']) > 1)
					{
					echo "1/";
						if ((number_format((1 / $imgmeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed']), 1)) == 1.3
						or number_format((1 / $imgmeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed']), 1) == 1.5
						or number_format((1 / $imgmeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed']), 1) == 1.6
						or number_format((1 / $imgmeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed']), 1) == 2.5)
						{
						echo number_format((1 / $imgmeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed']), 1, '.', '') . " s</li>";
						}
						else{
						echo number_format((1 / $imgmeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed']), 0, '.', '') . " s</li>";
						}
					}
					else{
					echo $imgmeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed']." s</li>";
					}
				}

				// focal length
				if (!empty($imgmeta['image_meta']['focal_length'])) echo "<li><strong>Focal Length:</strong> " . $imgmeta['image_meta']['focal_length']."mm</li>";

				// license
				if (!empty($imgmeta['image_meta']['copyright'])) echo "<li><strong>Rights:</strong> " . $imgmeta['image_meta']['copyright']."</li>";		

				echo "</ul>";
			}

	}
}

Essentially we pull the image id for the first attachment for a given post, then fetch its meta data, and walk through some steps to generate output. What I am doing is using all of the image meta data to compose the body of the post.

Then in my single.php template, I added somewhere below

<?php the_content(); ?>

this one line to call my function

<!-- photo meta data -->
<?php insert_exif(get_the_id()) ?>;

And thus for this uploaded photo all I did was upload the media in WordPress, add some tags and categories, and publish. The results use the image meta data to add the bits below the photo:

Note: This is a screen shot from my first effort, for some reason I am no longer getting the rights meta-data, need to make sure I am including this in Aperture….

Another nice feature of this theme is that I can create a page (or post) to hold a gallery of images- like this one of Icelandic Horses. All I had to do was upload all the media to the page, and write my body text, and the published page is a new slide show. The new theme does not have this; I have not tweaked all I want to do with the categories and tags yet.

I’ll likely keep tweaking this, but as far as adding new photos to my site, it takes about 2 minutes. If I can figure out how to export more metadata fields from Aperture, you will see them here soon (apparently you cannot!)

No matter how many titles I created for this post, all of them went the wrong way down innuendo lane.

This morning, at 1:00 AM local time on Brisbane, Australia, I gave an online presentation for the KU Village conference… from bed. I agreed to do this almost 9 months ago, not knowing I was going to be over here- at home it would have been a more humane 8:00 AM slot so I would have managed to be sitting at a desk.

But really, with all the trite sayings of working online and sitting there in your underwear… this is pretty much true. Suit and tie not needed. I can say this is the first presentation I have done from bed, and it is pretty comfortable (thanks to Phil Long for hosting me and providing the podium in his guest room).

And what irony for this conference- I was not the only keynoter presenting from Brisbane- Steve Wheeler is visiting the University of Queensland did his KU Village tale from Brisbane yesterday.

At this conference organized by Kaplan University, in my talk Say it in Photos, I opted to expand a bit more on some ideas about both the power of communicating via photos, but also on the realization that the process of doing a daily photo project is a powerful lesson in informal learning- that there is something you find you want to get better at, you focus attention on doing it on a regular basis, you join a group of others doing the same, you get feedback from that group (sometimes), you give feedback to others in the group (sometimes), but very importantly, you do some amount of reflection on what you’ve done before as part of the improvement process of learning to do something like take better photos.

It also fits nicely with the “it takes 10,000 hours” to get good at something, as popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his Outliers book. Even if I am spending 2 hours a day doing daily photo activity, its going to take me more than 14 years to reach that mark. That does not send me into a depressing spiral of “I cannot do this”- it just re-iterates to importance of keeping at the practice.

I also took the audience through the fun bits of flickr-y creativity- Five Photo Stories, phrasr, and leading in the end to a live demo of Five Card Flickr Stories. I had the conference organizers send out a call for participants to tag some photos with fiveku, so there would be a special set of stories that could be done for KU Village.

The slides are posted on Slideshare (I plumb forgot to record my own audio, so I have no sound to sync).

I wonder if my next one I can do from a hot tub?

Start the innuendos now….

Wow it has been so nice to be lazy, to be spending what feels like more time offline than online. All of the tech todos on my list for the holiday vacation remain undone (the list crumpled up and is burning in the wood stove now). The plan to to the Epic Year End Blog Reflective post? Never drafted. The list of predictions, dreams, resolutions for 2010? Not happening.

But without dropping the intent to do something to wrap the year in a bow, is to say that the 2009 thing that has kept my sanity and sense of purpose on track has been for a second year doing the Post a Photo a Day Thing on Flickr started in 2007 by D’Arcy Norman.

People like D’Arcy and Dean are resilient enough to put their 365 photos into video form; I’m too lazy, so instead use the flickr slideshow embed.

I’ve been at flickr posting since 2004, but this year have felt a surge of re-inspiration for photography, especially after getting back into using a digital SLR and using my new lenses purchased in the summer… I’m trying many new things, angles, low light action and more. The other new driving force is participating in The Dailyshoot, a new “:thing” which sprouted in November 2009. Every day, the site tweets an assignment, and participants merely tweet a reply with a link to their photo.

Since doing this pretty regularly since the end of November, I am finding it sometimes driving the direction of my daily photographic action, and its a secondary photo (not necessarily a lesser one) that becomes my 365 photo shot. But having a specific assignment helps drive my action, and can save me on days when my inspiration is waning.


cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Of course, this becomes Yet Another Thing to Do Every Day– but I can vouch there is a reward in the doing- and discovering- and connecting with others…

I could wax a lot on my own reflections on looking back at people, places, and unusual objects photographed, but its really my own story for myself- but still, the regular exercise of finding a photo that represents your day, activities, feelings, or just plain experimentation, does for me what no medicine or meditation can ever do. Its not for everyone, and lots of people talk about not being able to maintain the pace for a year– that’s okay, there is no failing grade here.

These kind of “X Per Day” groups are not unique, but I still find it remarkable (note to self, some people feel “amazing” is used too often) that this group, completely organic, self organizing has grown now to 263 members, with almost 25000 photos shared since the first year for the group (2008). There’s a lot to say about this phenomenon I spouted in a Feb 2009 presentation at Northern Voice.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

These are people doing incredible amounts of informal learning, networking, based on their interests, or desire to be better at something, or just a part of something. In this year, our flickr group saw a giant increase in the sharing/discussing in the flickr group discussions, and for a year, people picked up an ran with posting a monthly topic, as a help to drive people’s photo subjects. This was simple, I made the first topic in January, and the rule is the person who makes the current monthly topic can pick.tag someone else in the group to do it for the next month. This self-perpetuated for all 12 months last year, with no one in charge, or grading.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Heck, sometimes a gentle jab of a toy photo leads to a series of more unexpected connection….

So, I’ll be rewinding my flickr set for today, starting a new one, and setting out to do another year of daily photography. If you want any sense of what it means, and there are lots of stories out there like this, I hope it is okay Michael C if I share your message you sent today- it’s very powerful.

I first met Michael back in 2000 when I got my first Australia tour, and have had the pleasure of seeing him again on return trips to Adelaide or when he comes to the states. So while we’ve had this connection through other electronic and lesser in person opportunities, I find a real special way of knowing someone through their photographs- its some of what they see, where they live, but also says, “this is what is important or interesting to me.”

And with that, Micheal’s testimony–

I initially refused to accept the invitation to join the 2009/365 photos pool. I thought there would be no way I could keep up with posting a photo a day. After a few days mulling it over I decided what the hell and launched into it. I can now say categorically that it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made!

I had no idea what good would come from it. Over the course of this year, and because of my involvement in this project I have:

• Become a better photographer
• Opened my eyes to the world around me in a way I imagine children do naturally all the time, and in a way I can’t remember doing for a long long time
• Have enjoyed hundreds of photos from fellow group members
• Made many ‘Flickr friends’, as a result of sharing the minutiae of our daily lives
• Experienced the cycle of the seasons as I watched the photos change from summer to winter and back again over the course of the year
• really appreciated the support and tips from other group members
• used Flickr has a visual Twitter and more readily turned to Flickr rather than Twitter to know what was going on in my network
• eagerly looked forward to my daily walk with my camera to not only get needed exercise, but to take that daily photo
• learned so much about other places I have never seen
• Learned to look forward to every day as an opportunity to catch that special or unusual sight or moment
• Learned that images can connect people with very few words
• Learned that if I took the time to comment on others’ photos then people would reciprocate
• Eagerly Looked at Flickr every day for responses to my photos
• Become more assiduous with tagging and naming all photos

In short, I now appreciate the world around me more than I used to!

I will stay on as a more passive member of 2010/365, and free myself from the commitment to post a photo a day. As much as I have loved it, it has been a significant time commitment that I would now like to allocate to other tasks. But I will be there peeking around at your pix :)

Thank you everyone so much. It has been an absolute privilege to be part of this project and part of your lives.

All the very best for 2010, and keep on Flickring. I will.

Thanks Mike! I will see you there….

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

This post bookended by first and last photos for 2009!

Not that anyone would care,, this is a blog post for me as an audience. With some fiddling in flickr I was able to find the number of photos I took for cameras that are matched when you upload photos(find the camera, do a search on that model, than change the search results to search your own photos, check the number at the bottom of the search results).

I start with the genesis of my interest in photography, when in my last semester at University of Delaware (1986), needing an art elective, i chose a photography (a darkroom course). I cannot even remember why I chose it, but it was almost the best class I had in college, and had I made the accident a few years early, I might have had a different major.

One of the earliest images I developed that I like was this one of a run down chicken coop:

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

I did not have a manual 35mm camera at the time, but a room-mate did, and he said he never used it, so he loaned it to me for the semester. I am fairly sure it was a Pentax K1000- fully manual

public domain Wikipedia photo shared by SlugBug

Because I had shown this interest in photography, as a graduation present, my parents gave me an Olympus X-700, my own SLR

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

It was a basic kit with a stock 50mm lens, case, cheap flash. I think when I was working the following year in a Ritz Camera Store (Westview Mall in Baltimore) I bought a used zoom lens, but I cannot remember any details on it.

It was at this store that I picked up perhaps my favorite film cameras, a Nikon Nikkormat- I sold someone a new camera to replace this one, and the guy asked if I might know who might be interested in his old camera… I said, “me!” and I think I bought it for $100. It had a Nikkor f/1.4 lens.

The reason why was on my last Geology class as an undergrad, actually it was the field camp where we went to Sound Dakota, a guy on the trip told one story about this metal Nikon he carried- he had gone on raft trip, and took a spill, He thought the camera was ruined, but after taking it apart and letting it dry, it worked fine… I kept that in mind as it seemed like the most sturdy piece of equipment for taking photos.

I used that camera exclusively for my 6 years in graduate school, taking it all over the west. The original case got worn, cracked, and eventually it was just a case made of duct tape on the outside.

Sometime in the late 1980s I picked up a small pocket 35mm camera, an Olympus Stylus, but I was so pleased with how sharp the little camera was for people photos.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by the other Martin Taylor

Although it was mostly plastic, it was durable and its curvy shape was comfortable in the hand. On a Grand Canyon river trip I took in (?) 1988, I took the Nikkormat for black and white photos and the little Olympus for color.

The very first digital camera I got to use was one we got at Maricopa- the very first Apple QuickTake 100. It was huge, and I don’t remember being too impressed with the photos. Other people at the time were using that Sony Mavica one that wrote images to a floppy disk inserted into the camera– those just seemed so clunky looking.

My own self purchased digital Camera was an Olympus D-450, with a whopping 1.3 Megapixel resolution (I think the top quality images were 1280×960)– I got sometime around 1999. I went for this brand because of my experience with my small Olympus film camera

Its 32 Mb SmartMedia card could hold 72 images. I used this extensively on my 2000 sabbatical to New Zealand and Australia but all of the photos were uploaded to my own custom hand spun web site.

When I got back to my job at Maricopa, I picked up first and Olympus 3030 (3.3 MegaPixel) and then a C4040-Z (4 MegaPixel) for the photos I took on the job.

I liked the 4040 so much I bought one for myself and got many years of good use out of it, this was most likely the camera I was using when I started using this little site called “flickr” in March 2004 (the early pictures do not give camera data). Of the flickr data which includes camera data, I had 650 posted photos with this camera. The first photo that flickr gives camera information on is dated August 20 2004, so assuming all older photos in flickr were taken with this camera (63 of them), the total is 713.

In July 2005, I took the step up when I got mt first digital SLR, the Canon Digital Rebel XT, or as I later called it, the “Big Gun”

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

The photo quality was several steps above what I had been using for sure, and I had thought going back to an SLR might get me back to full manual mode shooting (cause at one time you did not even have a choice), but I usually found the Aperture priority or even full automatic was giving me great photo quality. I did not get any extra lenses, etc for it til later.

But I did take 2355 photos on flickr using this camera.

After a few years of using the “Big Gun” I had been noticing at conferences the fun my colleagues seemed to be having with the little pocket Canon Digital Elph cameras- and how lovely large that screen on the back was. So I picked up a Canon SD 800 IS:

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

I was able to find I took 4495 photos with this camera.

And I loved what this little camera could do, especially for something you can slip into a shirt pocket. It became my main camera for years, and it went so many places, did so many things. One of them was using it to shoot GigaPan scenes, the rig that moves a camera on a robot controlled tripod head to take multiple images that are stitched together to create a hugely detailed image. The goal of getting to a GigaPixel image is helped by several factors, including a longer optical zoom (mine was about 3.5x) and image resolution (mine was 7 MP).

So on a September 2008 trip to Japan, I was mesmerized by this new Canon that was not yet available in the states, that had among other nifty features, a 14 MP capacity! I could not resist the fun of buying a Japanese camera in Japan, so I got the little black IXY 3000 IS (eventually released in the US as the SD990 IS)

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

I cant get an exact count on flickr photos posted by camera model, since it does not officially track this one, but by searching on the dates I used this camera the most, I come up with 3085 flickr photos posted using this camera.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

I was still thinking of the poor Digital Rebel which had not been out much since I got wrapped up in the little pocket cameras, so to stir my interest, in 2008, I invested in a fast Canon 50mm f/1.4 lens. I had thought I might find one cheaper in Hong Kong or Japan, but it was cheaper to get it from home ordering on Amazon…. but I ended up still not using the Digital Rebel after all.

Next I ought to include the iPhone (which I got in August 2008) as a camera.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

For a count of my iPhone photos, the camera model flickr search on catches just handful of photos- perhaps ones just sent by email; with the use of 3rd party phone apps, the camera must be reported differently, but since I always tag them iPhone, I get a count of 142 photos posted on flickr from the iPhone camera.

The camera landscape was reshaped again after a June 2009 workshop at the NMC Summer Conference — this was a day full of photography at Point Lobos with Bill Frakes (Sports Illustrated) and Don Henderson (Apple) and it totally reinvigorated my interest in going back to the DLSR. It was about 10 minutes before checking out of the hotel, I went online to Amazon to see what Canon had (since I had the one nice Canon Lens) and decided, impulsively, yes to order the EOS Rebel T1i

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

I just love this camera! I am definitely experimenting more, and finding what I can do with low light and depth of field; really pushed now by the assignments of The Daily Shoot. To date I have only 1231 photos posted to flickr (since July, 2009) but that increases daily. To add to the outfit, I got the Tamron 18-270 zoom lens and am considering another one soon.

The flickr photo counts show which of my cameras I have used the most to post to flickr:

Though looking at my photo count, I am missing about 1000 photos credit (hmmm, is there a camera I forgot about?)

To be continued… for as long as I breathe!

November was a month of taking on more of the “do something every day” type projects, and I think the madness needs to stop. I’ll stop every day.

This of course, is not a promise I intend to keep. I find these challenges very rewarding, especially the ones that you convince yourself that you can’t do before you try. How common is it we defeat our efforts from the start?

For a recap…

2009/365 Photos
I’m in the second year of the informal group that spring up over the idea of trying to take photographs every day, and posting our best to flickr, sharing in the 365 Photos pool.

This is one of many things I file under the strategy of Do What D’Arcy Does. In 2007, this idea was a solo project of D’Arcy Norman; I chimed in 2008, and we started the flickr group, which grew to about 120 people. In 2009, we have 238 active people, over 25,000 photos shared, and an active group discussion area (I’ve been away a while, but I see the monthly theme has made it all the way to December).

The most exciting thing about this group is that it is totally without leaders, it has no structure, and the rules are loose enough to drive Mars through it — a lot of this was covered in my February 2009 Northern Voice presentation Say/Blog It in Pictures.

I’ve heard a number of people say it is too hard, or they peter out after a month, 2 months, etc. I understand, and have no expectations or even snobbery that this is something that anyone can do. It’s really not hard; you just make sure you go out once a day and take some pictures. Frankly, after almost 2 years, it is just a part of the daily routine like brushing my teeth (which I may not do every day, oops! Sorry Dr. Fow!).

The dailyshoot
Again, I am DWDD, as well as following the lead of Barbara Ganley, this is yet another ting to post every day to flickr, and so far, it has not been the same one as my 2009/365 photo.

For this, every day the twitter account for The Daily Shoot tweets an assignment- a specific thing we need to capture in a photo, then post it to flickr and twitter. For example, today was

In a way, this is almost easier, because we are given a goal. But it also provides an opportunity to stretch, and work hour to meet a specified topic. I’m finding myself trying to get around 3 or more variations so have something to choose from- today I got water drops as a pattern:

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

This too has been somewhat of an organic group, conceived just this month by Portland based photographer James Duncan Davidson
.

Ironically, in early November, I was stuck in the Portland airport because a United Flight was canceled. After I tweeted about it, D’Arcy Norman messaged my to look for this pro photographer named James Duncan Davidson who seemed to have been on the same canceled flight. I looked up his twitter profile pic, and was fairly sure I knew which one was him, but then felt a little fan-boy stalkerish walking up to someone and said, “My friend on twitter said I should say ‘hi’”. Now I regret being reluctant! Especially after leafing through his photos on flickr.

I’m only a few days in on doing the dailyshoot but it feels like a fun fresh challenge; ny dailyshoot set is at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/sets/72157622779450205/

NaNoWriMo
I’d heard in the past about National Novel Writing Month, where the challenge is to write a 50000 word piece of fiction in 30 days. Writing a novel is one of those fuzzy goals that floats around in your head, like doing a parachute jump or running a marathon, and then just never get around to actually following through.

I decided this year to just say ***** It and give it a try.

I just finished tonight; my work stands now at 50239 words, and this was a super hard and effective challenge. I fell behind, some with travel, more with procrastination, but poured it on in the last week with a row of 5k and 4k writing nights.

Now I agree it is not about writing to some goal, but I agree with the project’s assertion; without some arbitrary goal, a lot of people like me would never try.

The other reason we do NaNoWriMo is because the glow from making big, messy art, and watching others make big, messy art, lasts for a long, long time. The act of sustained creation does bizarre, wonderful things to you. It changes the way you read. And changes, a little bit, your sense of self. We like that.

(enphasis added by me).

Sure, 50,000 is an arbitrary number, but the rationale is:

Our experiences over the past nine years show that 50,000 is a difficult but doable goal, even for people with full-time jobs and children. The length makes it a short novel. We don’t use the word “novella” because it doesn’t seem to impress people the way “novel” does.

We define a novel as “a lengthy work of fiction.” Beyond that, we let you decide whether what you’re writing falls under the heading of “novel.” In short: If you believe you’re writing a novel, we believe you’re writing a novel too.

The last thing I wrote of any length was in 1989, at 157 pages, when I finished my Masters thesis in Geology. 5 people have read it (my committee). It sits on my shelf gathering dust.

So of course, your question is, “Okay hot shot, where is your 50239 word novel?”

Right now it is sitting on my laptop (and in a backup location) as a really messy draft. I need a break from it before thinking about cleaning it up.

But you may counter, “Fair enough, but what is it about?”

It is called (for now) Four Way Intersection, and was really a germ of an idea I had 10 or more years ago when I was bicycle commuting to my job at Maricopa. I use a real intersection, McDowell Rd and 64th St/Galvin Parkway at the Scottsdale/Phoenix border as the location, and use a lot of settings I knew from living and biking in the area.

Let’s say it is a 4 act study of an encounter between two strangers. Each telling involves two people, one is Pat and the other is RJ, and until the end of the act, you actually don’t know their gender, but one is male and one is female. One works as an architect and the other is trying to fit in as a military vet. One drives a car and one is on a bicycle. Each story fades in with each character’s dream sequence, that sets in motion a series of events that has these two people meet at the intersection and fades out with a closing dream sequence. Then I shuffle up the characters and tell it differently.

The encounters work through 4 human themes- Anger, Love, Humor, and Ambivalence.

And just for fun, I insert myself into a cameo role in each act.

At this point, I am not sure if it is too contrived/gimmicky or just not sensible, but the point was not to write a best selling novel, but just to do the writing, and reach the goal. I likely will post it here soon, but just need to put the damned thing down.

I’m glad to be done this one.

And that leaves me with 2 daily photo chores (not to mention keeping up in running)

]]> http://cogdogblog.com/2009/11/30/x-a-day/feed/ 3 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/ http://cogdogblog.com/2009/05/19/gigapan-embed/ http://cogdogblog.com/2009/05/19/gigapan-embed/#comments Tue, 19 May 2009 19:46:22 +0000 Alan Levine aka CogDog http://cogdogblog.com/?p=3665 It’s been a while since I shot or even explored Gigapan, the amazing photo exploration tool that lets you see a wide range of zoom detail in a scene. I have not even captured a scene in a while (see my old ‘pans).

But by sheer accidental link clicking from my RSS Reader (am I the last person on earth reading feeds while everyone else tweets their lunch?) I found on a neat site (see below) that you can now embed a gigagpan image.. So here goes one I took in November at the foot of the volcano Hekla:

If you are interested in some applications of the gigapan I can think of few finer that the Geology ones by Ron Schott lots of structures and outcrops to study at many different scales.

The thing that got me (linktribution to David Weinberger) here was a blog on Nano Gigapans, where rather than looking at large open scenes, they have gone the opposite way and have set up detailed scenes of very tiny things, like an SEM image of Blood and Hair — this is brilliant, and has me nostalgic for a part time job I had as an undergrad running an SEM (Scanning Electron Microscopy) at a DuPont lab.

Hmmm, I am again inspired to take the rig out…

]]> http://cogdogblog.com/2009/05/19/gigapan-embed/feed/ 2 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/ http://cogdogblog.com/2008/12/13/diy-camera/ http://cogdogblog.com/2008/12/13/diy-camera/#comments Sat, 13 Dec 2008 22:22:41 +0000 Alan Levine aka CogDog http://cogdogblog.com/?p=3116 Lifehacker’s Top 10 DIY Photography Tools is a mine of nifty gems for photographers to up their own photo mojo. Besides what I learned (see below), I am finding myself thinking more about the rise of the DIY (Do It Yourself) culture on the net- there surely is a future blog post relating that to education. Or maybe some crazy dude will write it for me.

But back to cameras. I am going to ASAP try 9. Make a remote camera trigger by modding a $3 cell phone hands set (looks like a matter of disabling the microphone). There is a very clear instructables bit to walk you through it. What I am looking for is the ability to take long exposures

Make a remote shutter release for your canon digital camera (and some other brands such as Pentax, sony, and some nikons) for about 3 bucks in under 5 minutes, even a 1st grader can do this.

Remote shutter trigger for Digital Cameras – More DIY How To Projects

Does anyone sense a value in the approach of the way content is done in instructables?? Does not smell like a CMS at all.

5. Take wider-angle shots by creating mini-panoramas. I’ve already been doing a lot of this- my pocket Canons (SD800 and the new IXY 3000is) have a great shooting mode for getting your overlap on panoramas. I rave about Autostitch (free, but Windows only), and actually use the shareware Mac OS X version that is done up as Calico.

4. Get started with time-lapse photography. This is one I want to do, am going to check out the LifeHacker recommended Photojojo guide. Check out this example of a year’s worth form one spot in New York City:

Photojojo’s Time Lapse Video of Bryant Park from Photojojo on Vimeo.

3. Super-charge your Canon camera’s firmware. I played with this a bit on my old SD800 — it had the benefit of adding a needed battery meter and enhancing the shooting capabilities, e.g. shooting in RAW… My new IXY seems to have these covered, but the whole process (easy_ of hacking your camera’s firmware is fun. Check out CHDK.

1. Make your own macro kit. Another one I plan to try, as soon as I can finish a can of pringles and find some cardboard to use as the macro studio.

More to come as I tinker with these.

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