geek.teacher

After a year of taking pictures, I’ve done it. Slightly over a year ago I received my first digital SLR camera as a super-generous Christmas gift from my parents. I knew from the start that I wanted to really get in a lot of practice with my camera, so I committed to participating in Project 365, in which you attempt to take at least one photo a day for an entire year.

Here’s the first picture I took of my brother right after I pulled my camera out of the box and had fiddled with the settings to ensure the one thing I knew I wanted to do, shoot in RAW:

While I was totally blown away by the quality of the photos from this camera, I still had a long way to go in learning how to use it…this was shot in P mode, which is fully automatic. I knew that I loved the “blurry background,” but had no idea how to do that. I was really flying blind. Fortunately, I brought my network with me. I got a lot of starter advice from Craig Nansen, who helped me understand a lot of the basics to using a DSLR. As time went on, I also got several pieces of advice from my good friend Brian Taylor.

Speaking of the network, here are the most important pieces of advice I can give to somebody who wants to do a 365. Join Flickr. Then be sure to join at least one group that’s dedicated to doing a 365. Submit your photos to the group every day. For me, I topped it off by following the RSS feed for one of those groups in Google Reader. If, like me, you check your RSS feeds every day, following your group’s feed will constantly remind you to take your picture every day. I would have forgotten many times if not for my group posting their pictures, and I thank them immensely for that. When I started to realize that I would sometimes get comments on my photographs, I also started to follow my activity feed. Feedback from other users will make you look forward to posting your better shots. While I got plenty of great comments from people over the course of the year, I especially have to call out Kathy Onarheim for her consistent efforts at commenting on my pictures, and, I’m sure, the pictures of many other people. I also got a lot of nice comments from Damian Bariexca.  When I paid for my Flickr pro membership, I did it specifically because of the community.

Over the course of the year, I actually ended up taking over 7000 exposures on my dSLR. That’s more photographs than I had taken in the previous 7 years of owning a digital camera combined. It’s overwhelming to me how many pictures I took this year, and, more obviously, how much I disliked so many of them afterwards. Looking at my “favorites” smart folder in iPhoto, I seem to be really happy without about 6% of the photos I take.

I first knew that I was understanding how to actually use my camera about 3 weeks after I got it. We went to dinner at a hibachi place, and I got this shot:

It took some serious playing around on my part to get the shots just right, so i felt pretty proud of myself after seeing how this one came out. I’m still learning, but it surprises me that now, when somebody recently asked for advice on how to take pictures of fireworks, I was able to point him to some of my shots from Independence Day at the Art Museum and rattle off the settings I used.

One of my favorite parts about having completed the project is the ability to look back at a year of pictures, and see some of the themes I returned to over and over again. So, to conclude this post, some of the more common themes and subjects I used in my 365:

Pictures of animals, most frequently my cats: 64

Pictures related to food in some way: 50

Pictures of buildings: 41

Pictures of complete strangers: 34

Pictures with a nature theme: 30

Pictures featuring my wife, Beth: 19

Self-portraits: 12

Pictures of my godchild, Nora: 8

Pictures of my nephew, Julian: 3

Pictures of Abe Lincoln:2

I created a disclosure policy page after reading this post by Wes Fryer, who is clearly both more on top of these things than I am and more knowledgeable about the quickest place to go to create your own policy in two minutes. Long story short, new FCC mandates want bloggers to explain what kinds of money they might accept and why. Figured I’d do it now before it languishes on my to-do list.

I’ll keep this one short and sweet. If you’re at all interested to find out how Apple can take a flat phone with a touch screen and one button and turn it into an amazingly accessible device for people with vision/reading disabilities, watch this video.

Tonight the new Wolfram|Alpha computational knowledge engine launched.  Thanks to an overload of paperwork, I’d successfully avoided the hype until a few hours before the launch, when I decided to sit down and watch the introductory screencast.  I had an immediate reaction that I needed to share with my friend Brian:

Once I saw that it launched, I decided to test out a few different things.  I discovered the weather on my birthday (cloudy, average temperature 8 degrees).  To the surprise of everybody, I discovered that I am apparently the ideal male:

Sorry, ladies, I’m already taken.  Honestly, though, my favorite part of the data provided is “normal” in quotation marks.

Finally, I had to know the most important answer of all:

Yes, it’s fun to play around with, but this kind of tool could be incredibly useful for our students and is definitely something to keep an eye on.  As opposed to links, it’s pure data and information.  It’s a search engine that will solve math problems for you and provide definitions for words.  I really do recommend you check out the gallery of examples to see the huge scope that this engine provides already.