I do want to go through some of the actual assignments for Unit 2, but this writeup is just about noticing things and taking photos of them. It’s also about learning what the little buttons on the Flickr app do.

It got real cold in Ohio again. That’s frost on the inside of the Olin Library door.  (Also, we may have some humidity issues.) I was struck by the way the screws stand out in this closeup.

Two days later. The anterooms going into the library are frequent spots for student cell phone conversations. I suppose there’s an illusion of privacy in a room other people are supposed to walk through without stopping. Sometimes those conversations get emotional, and I imagine that’s what happened this time. You might need to look at the photo full-size, but scrawled in the frosting condensate are the words “love is dumb”.

Getting those angsty letters to stand out was a neat trick of post-production. None of the Flickr app filters helped at all, but increasing saturation, contrast, and decreasing exposure helped bring up the color in the background, reduce the light in the foreground, and help the finger-writing appear.

Same day, different door. Increased the saturation to get the orange lights at the Church of the Holy Spirit to pop a little.

Same exact shot, in fact, but instead of messing with color, I maxed out “sharpening”. The condensate turns pebbly, almost like a rained-on window in a movie.

So I haven’t made much progress on taking better photos in the first place, but I have started to learn about the things I can do to help existing photos tell different stories. I even graduated past flipping through the presets. I’d love your comments and suggestions.

Cross-posted from my Storytelling blog, because I thought this was about making art and it turns out to be also about instructional technology. Kind of.

Man, I’ve got to figure out “write once, publish everywhere”.

I bought myself an Intuos tablet some time ago at work, on the grounds that I would use it for Big Serious Stuff like annotating screenshots or making screencapture videos. In theory, drawing with a mouse is hard and a pen interface should be easier. In practice, a tablet input is neither like a mouse or a pen (or a touchscreen) and it can be frustrating to get started.

And there it sat, gathering dust, taunting me to read the manual, pick software, practice, prove myself worthy.

Now might be a good time to point out that I describe my drawing talents as “maxed out at stick men.” So when it said I wasn’t worthy, I assumed it was right.

I brought it home a while back, thinking big thoughts about how I’d use it to think about the shape of stories, especially as they relate to the stories we tell when we do technology trainings. Sitting on the dining room table, it caught my son’s eye.

“Daddy, what’s that?”

“Oh, it’s for drawing on the computer.”

“Can I try?”

“I guess so… but I have to plug it in and find the software and all that.”

“OK. Well, can we do that?”

“Um… yeah. Yeah OK. Let me see.”

It’s hard to enter the Kingdom of Technology like a little child, after I’ve debugged and disinfected and documented professionally for so long. It’s a challenge to ask “why not?” But I got the drivers installed, and after dorking around looking for the “right” software, I figured out that Microsoft Paint would work as well as anything for letting my kid play.

And it wasn’t simple, his learning to match up the pen to the screen. After a bit, he got it and started exploring Paint. An arrow became a house. Green squiggles became grass. A line was the horizon; the fill tool gave him purple grass and a yellow sky.

And he said it was my turn.

How about a bunny? I think I can draw a bunny. (It’s like a dog with no neck and bunny ears, right?) Hey, maybe the spraypaint brush will make the fur look more furry. A bunny should be on grass. OK, painting that grass was kind of annoying, what if we do the sky with a fill tool?

Draw your stuffed hamster? Sure, why not. I can draw Hamster.

Oh, the hamster’s name is Rhino? Of course it is. I’ll draw Rhino.

Objectively, I know it’s … primitive. But the fact is, I made it, and making it was fun. And I pretty much killed the excuse that learning how to use the tablet would be too hard.

I’ve tried to get multiple faculty members to try out these tablets, and few of them are willing to put in the work. I wonder if the problem is that I haven’t asked them to just draw a happy little tree.

I love to be in the kitchen. The kitchen is my playhouse. It’s a place where I can focus, where learning and doing emulsify, where this singular moment connects to long tradition. I expect I could find the path from the stove to the fridge to the sink with my eyes closed.

OW! Well, I can if the cat’s not in the way.

So it was easy to drop what I was doing and answer the question “where’s the you in your kitchen?”  I had a quick look around – knives on a magnetic strip on the wall, utensils on hooks, fridge, cluttered counters, the sink…

the Lodge cast iron skillet. The stove is my place in the kitchen, and what I want on that stove is either that heavy black pot frying chicken, or the large brewing kettle full of wort.

Yes, the cabinets really are that cattywampus. It’s an old house.

This was a pretty quick shoot – though I did have to get the stock pot down and declutter the counter a bit. No flash, though it took one overexposed shot to learn that.  I’ve loved playing with the presets in the Flickr app, but this shot didn’t need them.

I’m a relative latecomer to the smartphone world, and I’m still getting used to this idea that I am always carrying a camera. I tried to become a shutterbug for a while in my early teens, but it never really took. If playing with the You Show and DS106 only made me better at taking photos (and more conscious/confident of the option to take photos), that would be a big step in the right direction.

I was watching YouShow Episode Zero this morning, and about 3 minutes in, my wife called out “What is that, Bob and Doug McKenzie teach the web?”

Hmm… getting Photoshopped by their students is exactly the kind of thing my faculty are afraid of. I might be doing this wrong. Good thing it’s not graded.

I could probably riff on the parallel between the plucky DIY attitude of SCTV’s fictional TV station and the open web concepts of the Reclaim movement, but that’s a lot of intellectual weight to hang on a cheap joke.

I’m joining up with the You Show because I would like to have a more reflective practice in my job, and I’d like to do that publicly. I’ve come to realize that I envy my colleagues who have more explicit agendas for research and speaking and engagement with their professional communities. My practice has been very reactive – what’s happening, what’s interesting, how can I help. It’s got me this far and I have no (OK, few) complaints, but I think valuing my own process enough to narrate it might be the first step in developing an agenda of my own.

I often quip that my job is to buy faculty members lunch and get them talking. So when I think about a visual metaphor for my own interests, a sandwich is what comes to mind. I combine different ingredients, sometimes asking them to blend, sometimes hoping they will retain their essential flavor or texture while affecting and being affected by the others. I create an environment where (I hope) people can relax, reflect, and open up… literally with a sandwich or a beer, figuratively in the way I try to approach the tasks at hand.