Last month I wrote about some of the photos I have taken of friends, colleagues who honor me by using them as social media avatars.
The crowning prize has been the one I took of Audrey Watters in 2013 at a small meeting of ed-tech folks at the University of Mary Washington.
flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license
Audrey uses it all over the place, and told me she would not change it.
Never say never. Sounds quotable?
https://twitter.com/audreywatters/status/711668356521152512
And a change-up is more than okay (I do kind of wish twitter kept an avatar history). She double honors me with a use of the photo I took of her just on Saturday.
The story of one photo….
It just happened that Erin Richey’s group formation technique for our work at the meeting was based on birthday months, and Audrey ended up in the same group as me. At one break I asked if I could take a photo of her characteristic binary tattoos in her forearms (after the photo, she explained the passage to the interested English students in our group, and I plum forgot the passages again, doh).
I was already shooting at high ISO and open aperture from earlier, so the camera was set for ISO 2000 and f/2.2. I was almost going to do a closeup on her arm, when she laughed and said, “How about the Wonder Woman bracelet pose?”
It was not only appropriate idea, her suggestion was better than the first way I was composing the photo.
I locked the focus on her near arm, and snapped just one photo. I thought it might turn out good.
It was pretty darned good, if I say so myself (I did). What I like is the softer focus on her face, but still enough to see that intent signature expression of both seriousness and whimsey in her eyes. And there is a little bit of a purple glow in the background left, reflected in her hand (I think it’s from the screen behind?)
I lucked out again! (I still have fondness for the shark jaw one).
Another Audrey avatar photo taken at a small ed-tech meetup at a college on the east coast. Not that I would ever count on the same kind of luck again.
Thanks again, Audrey!
Top / Featured Photo: My photo of Audrey Watters taken recently at the Indie Ed-Tech meeting at Davidson College, another flickr photo https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/25826877221 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
