With the web we get to present our work right away and enjoy the satisfaction of presenting and seeing a “finished” project, the benefits of helping commentaries, and the fun of sharing with our family and friends.
We make these proof sheets so you will learn right away what those in our small group see and don’t see, and so you will get a “reality check” on what you have done. That is, we want to train ourselves to make things for others, learn our common vocabularies, and be able to anticipate what others will respond to and how.
Feedback is vital to learning, and we get a lot of it by sharing our b/w proof sheets in class, sharing our images over dinner, watching each other photograph … each occasion has its own strengths.
We’ll also use some online technologies, beginning with Picasa Web Albums. When you store your images using Picasa online, we’ll be able to project and discuss your work in class and find and add our comments during the rest of the week, too.
1. Upload your photo albums to your Picasa Web Album.
Picasa Web Albums offers a cost-free and very easy way to put your photo albums online and share them with me, your classmates, and your friends. To see how they work, click the illustration above to view my Picasa Web Album, choose among the available albums, browse the thumbnails, and click “slideshow” to see the images enlarged and presented one after another.
a) Setup. To set up your own Picasa Web Album, so visit https://www.google.com/accounts/ and follow the instructions to sign up! That’s easy.
b) Upload Photos. Once you have set up your Google Account click “Picasa Web Albums” or “Photos”, depending where you are in your Google Account, and then click “Upload” and follow the directions to drag the photos on your hard drive to the uploader and then click “upload” and you will be done.To see how it works.
- Navigate to “My Photos” and view the album you have just uploaded.
- Click “Slideshow” and be amazed at your own work.
- Click “Share” and learn how to send the link to your mom.
- Click “Download” to see how others can save your images.
- Click “Edit” to see how you can move or delete or rename images.
- Select and copy the url to share.
e) You can also install Picasa on your own machine and take advantage of its many, many photo editing, sharing, managing tools, as you will find described in these great videos.
TIP: Picasa will catalogue your entire hard drive, but you probably want it to catalogue only one photo folder and its sub-folders, as I have done here by selecting the red “X” for each of the other, non-wanted folders. And from there you can simply click these folders to upload them and keep them synchronized.
2. Share your album with the rest of us.
We need ways to find and connect to each other, and for that I’ve created a group bookmarking site on delicious called “bt2009″ where you can add the link to your albums and blogs everyone may find everyone else easily.
To add the url of your new Album to our bookmarking site, navigate to http://delicious.com/bt2009, login with bt2009 and the password I’ve already sent you by email, click “Save a new bookmark”, and paste in the url you just saved.
Before saving it, you will need to add at “tags” that we will all use to sort, such as:
- yourname
- our-albums
- our-blogs
- ears
- street
- comparisons
By clicking these “tags”, Delicious will sort through all the bookmarks and serve only those that you have tagged: this works if we follow common conventions, and as long as two or more of you agree to a new tag name, you are free to add your own!
To understand what makes this application “social bookmarking”, plug your ipod headphones into your computer and watch Social Bookmarking in Plain English, and while you are at it, watch Blogs in Plain English, too.
3. Set up your Google Reader.
To make it really easy to see what everyone has done, set up a reader that will collect all of our posts on your own Google Account, using the Google Reader that came with it. Here’s a one-minute video that explains how it works.
4. Set up your personal blog.
You fourth task is to set up a blogger for posting comments on your images and your final projectyour final projects Our third web activity will be the posting of our photos with commentaries using the free blogger that comes with your Google Account. It is so unbelieveably easy to use that all I have to give you is the url, http://www.blogger.com and invite you to follow the directions!
There are a couple of tips I’d add, as we will here be working with photos and text.
Use the Simpla II template, because it is the widest and simplest, and you probably don’t want to have a narrow column with fragmented text a million miles long, but something closer to a magazine format so that you can concentrate on the interplay of photos and text.
Add posts from the bottom. I chose blogger.com because it gets the basic job done simply, but it is quirky, and it adds images to the top of a post, not at the bottom as we normally type and think, so you’ll probably want to build your posts from the bottom-up (you can drag things around, but it is not elegant.
In the example from my new post, Normally, I don’t follow … illustrated below, I added first the bottom three images as “small”, then the text, then the “large” image at the top.
(If you use WordPress or have your own blog editor, you can and must specify file sizes, but in the interests of time we are choosing a simpler solution.)
Alternate image sizes. Learn how to vary image sizes to give your posts some depth. Positioning a “large” image at the top of the page is always a good idea for the post and the post aggregators (the rss feed or linking arrangement to be discussed below), and including “small” images lower down can help you discuss context, as I’ve done here. Use just these two sizes to keep your blog formats simple, consistent, and easy-to-build.
5. Print proof sheets to share during the break and in class! Finally, print out your collections of ears and street photos like we did on Monday, with nine images on a page, so we can all sign the ones we like best and choose 4-6 of your favorites from anything you have photographed, on any topic, and send them off to the color printer on A4 size to be picked up in room “Bora” when we come back from the break, on our way back to class, so we will have some color images to share!
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