ELT notes

I am back at it. I started a daily photo project for 2016/366. Checking out my albums in Flickr, I found that I have never been able to complete the daily yearly album. That is challenging. Can I succeed this year?

I take or blink photos very often. It is something that I started doing in 2010 with the stimulus of the dailyshoot (snif, I miss that) as well as the photographers who commented my photos and published their own, they still do, on their blogs.

I found that I needed to find a new internal challenge this time. I was never pleased with shooting with my Samsung phone, so I decided to explore that as a way of getting out of my comfort zone. That is one push for me. Another thing I had always refused to do is to touch my photos with post editing, except for cropping, which is part of composing for me. So now I am making it a point of altering my photos, at times, beyond recognition. I try to see the image as an inspiration to draw and my photo as a model in the making.

A good old photo is still my love, though. It took me quite a few days to obtain a decent shot at these White Petals. The photo is not postprocessed and although it is not perfect, it satisfies me.

So far, I have completed my first month of daily shooting. I know that once my holidays are over and I get back to the teaching and studying routines, it is going to be harder to keep it up. What keeps me going now is trying to learn to see things differently, very differently. So I guess that when photo subjects seem scarce or I cannot find myself in the zone for inspiration, it is not about the objects around me being too familiar, it is about shifting the way I see them.

That seems to be all the prompting I need, at least for now.

Labels: 365, dailyshoot, learning photography, photography

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Cubic-CC licensed shared by Claudia Ceraso @fceblog on Flickr

I kept looking for prompts. I found that Gwen came up with a project of her own creation. It is simple and powerful.

Her project is called a 100 Possibilities and it is basically to shoot a book in diverse creative contexts. Variations on a theme was also used by BZTraining , who solved every single dailyshoot assignment with his two dogs. It rendered great results in spite of (or with the help of) his self-imposed rule of the game. The most important thing is, as Gwen states it, to help yourself "push boundaries for a while".

Browsing the project, I came across a poetry quote that someone else provided in full in the comments. Funny that what had actually made me click on it was the image of the magnifying glass, which I thought I would use for one my own photos.

The interesting thing is that Gwen has found a way to prompt herself. She is to find new contexts for her favourite book for a 100 days. Talk about keeping it simple, with a constraint that enables creativity. Her take away from the Dailyshoot is not just about photography, but about autonomy.

Inspiring.

Why not? And why not combine it with bits of the poetry I love so much I thought of those long Song of Myself catalogues that could easily become postcards and then, perhaps a video. So in my fledgeling thoughts of mashing up interests that drive my passion, I stopped to think that it couldn't be me the first one to have come up with that idea. After all, Whitman is cosmic.

A quick search in Flick groups for Whalt Whitman led me to a group by students at a university with a link to the full project called Looking for Whitman. The site is full owesome bits of inspiration that can move a brain muscle or two. More about it later, for the project is worthy of a separate post.

I recently read somewhere that according to stats (so it must be true?), it would take three lifetimes to read all of the Internet content available today. Why do we stay on the same circles of friends then? Is it because they are the best curators we have found or because we are sometimes a bit lazy to push ourselves away from our comfort zone?

And yet.

Today, as I set my mind firmly into going away from the recommendations of my Twitter stream this morning, convincing myself that I am trying to pursue what I'd like to do with my creativity, I land on a project where Jim Groom, who is in my trusted network of curators and inspirers, has played a part.

Wait a second. I was on his website last night to create my first MacGuffin assignment! How come I've been going round in circles? My intention was to sail the vast open web, to go elsewhere, far out. This doesn't seem to follow the logic of serendipity. Six grades separation maybe?

I'd call it an online dream.

Over a month ago, I know Jim read and liked something I said to Alan about the mysterious nature of our connections, about the Internet being like a dream, only it's a real one.

Jim responded via Twitter:

1. 
   jimgroom @fceblog Dream a dream for me :) 05 Sep 2011 from web in reply to fceblog

-- this quote was brought to you by quoteurl

Come to think of it, it might have been a disguised assignment...

Done.

Labels: dailyshoot, ds106, jim groom, learning photography, photography, what whitman

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-Prompts make me take pictures I woudn't otherwise have taken.

-The photographer is more important than the camera. People do incredible things with an iPhone. I don't have an equipment with plenty of options. So I tend to get more carried away by composition than by technical aspects of aperture, focus and overall quality of the photo.

Re-reading what I just wrote, I find it sounds a bit like rules. I do not know if there are rules to learn informally. Certainly there are patterns shaping in what I do. Experimenting daily you find beliefs about learning emerging quickly. This post is about jotting down those ideas before they are challenged by future learning. This is what works for me now.

Labels: informal learning, learning photography, photography

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The world is small indeed and Flickr can make it seem a small village. Early this month, someone in Austria emailed me with a republishing permission request for this picture:

Thumbed
http://www.flickr.com/photos/79066620@N00/5558170700

The picture has recently been publised in a students' magazine called JAWS (journalists, artists, writers, students). You can see a taste of it here. Quite inspiring for any ESL or EFL writing class.

Mina, the magazine editor, was kind enough to send me a pdf with the article my picture illustrates. There I found a teacher's voice who could be someone working next to me.

That's about the length of my train journey to visit my family. That's how I got most of my reading done while commuting daily to study in Buenos Aires a long time ago.

It goes on...

"Sometimes the line between private and school reading was blurred by me realizing that a book I had ordered just for fun actually fit a course I was taking. This should have thrilled me, as it meant that what I enjoyed doing just for myself was also valuable academically. " (1)

Blurring the lines. That's it. Borges in his prologue to Borges Profesor argued that 'obligatory reading' was a nonsense phrase. How could you obligatorily enjoy reading? (Quote source in Spanish)

Lots of coincidences with Mina as a node in the connection. She had no idea the picture in Flickr had been taken by an English language teacher. Mina works for a magazine which belongs to the English and American Studies Department of the Karl Franzens-Universität at an Austrian university.

What Mina doesn't know yet is what the book in the picture is about:

If there were any more coincidences that linked us, I would not be surprised. Perhaps this post reaches Susanne? I sense this story may have a sequel. For now, I just enjoy to see what these connections through our published content can lead to. As I wrote in my Flickr profile, take me wherever you are.

(1)

My Semester of Reading by Susanne Kopf. JAWS Magazine, KF University Graz. Issue 21, pages 20-21. April 2011.

Labels: books, flickr, JAWS, literature, photography, reading

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Labels: collaboration, Jabiz Raisdana, learning, photography, storytelling, video

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Labels: flickr, learning, photography

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