{"id":9987,"date":"2013-02-14T20:18:10","date_gmt":"2013-02-15T01:18:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aforgrave.ca\/detritus\/?p=9987"},"modified":"2013-02-18T13:11:09","modified_gmt":"2013-02-18T18:11:09","slug":"photoblitzin-some-awesome","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aforgrave.ca\/detritus\/2013\/02\/14\/photoblitzin-some-awesome\/","title":{"rendered":"Photoblitzin&#8217; Some Awesome"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Thursday evening I undertook my first <em>official, as-defined-by-ds106<\/em> <strong>photoblitz<\/strong>. With a time constraint of twenty minutes, only the immediately available surroundings as subject, and a randomly generated set of seven prompts for focus, I took 38 photos, and from those, selected seven to share (plus the two bracketing start\/stop time photos).<\/p>\n<p>The images were photographed at the ice rink during a 17 minute interval. I used the list generated using <strong>John Johnston<\/strong>&#8216;s <a href=\"http:\/\/johnjohnston.info\/tests\/photoblitzer\/\" rel=\"nofollow\">Photoblitzer<\/a> web app. John&#8217;s web app uses a randomly generated list derived from <a href=\"http:\/\/cogdogblog.com\/2012\/09\/26\/ds106-photoblitz\/\" rel=\"nofollow\">Alan&#8217;s list<\/a>, the ds106 <a href=\"http:\/\/tdc.ds106.us\/\" rel=\"nofollow\">The Daily Create<\/a>, and the discontinued DailyShoot website.<\/p>\n[AFG_gallery id=&#8217;1&#8242;]\n<p>While I have, on occasion gone out and shot a couple hundred photos over the course of an afternoon (and in a few instances taken dozens and dozens of images of the same subject over a similar period of time) I&#8217;ve not incorporated the photoblitz technique per se as a time-limited practice. The closest might be when I took my camera and a list of overdue dailyshoot topics out for a Sunday afternoon drive.<\/p>\n<h4>Some reflections:<\/h4>\n<ul>\n<li>I felt a rushed, and took the &#8220;end&#8221; photo when I thought I&#8217;d gone over the twenty minutes. In fact, I was only at the seventeen minute mark, but stopped as I had found something for each of the prompts.\n<ul>\n<li><em>In the future, I think I&#8217;ll cut myself a <\/em><em>bit<\/em> of time-slack, and use an alarm to alert the end point.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>I used my 50mm lens, as it has a nice large aperture and works well in lower light conditions. I&#8217;m still learning my way around it, and find it takes longer to get the settings just right. In looking back at the images I&#8217;ve chosen, the depth of field and focus aren&#8217;t quite what I&#8217;d normally settle for.\n<ul>\n<li><em>Working with different lenses is part of photography &#8212; I think I&#8217;ll try the 18\/55 kit lens next time.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>I&#8217;ll look more and take fewer photos &#8212; working to make each one a good photo.<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Working from a randomly generated on-the-spot list opens the eyes (just like the DailyShoot did) and helps for a creative solution to the prompt problem, influenced by the given location. I like that.\n<ul>\n<li><em>This will be a good strategy to use on a regular basis. It makes sense to contrive to have a 20-30 minutes available for a photoblitz every now and then.<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h4>Hanging out and Plugging In<\/h4>\n<p>After the visit to the ice rink, I had a chance to Hangout with Alan (<a title=\"Alan Levine, on Twitter\" href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/cogdog\/\" target=\"_blank\">@cogdog<\/a>) and Nancy (<a title=\"Nancy B., on Twitter\" href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/bellekid\" target=\"_blank\">@bellekid<\/a>) in the ds106 online lab and\u00a0say hi, learn a bit about ducks (and some other things), and have a chat.\u00a0\u00a0During the conversation, I heard a brief mention of an <em>awesome Flickr plug-in<\/em>, which Alan had helped Nancy get set up on her blog, but I missed the details.<\/p>\n<p>Having decided that the plain vanilla Flickr slideshow wasn&#8217;t giving the control I was looking for (slide order, specifically), I searched for &#8220;awesome Flickr&#8221; in the WordPress plug-ins directory, and installed the <a title=\"Awesome Flickr Gallery plugin, on WordPress.org\" href=\"http:\/\/wordpress.org\/extend\/plugins\/awesome-flickr-gallery-plugin\/\" target=\"_blank\">Awesome Flicker Gallery plug-in<\/a> (easy to find, right? I gather it was listed on the ds106 site somewhere, but such is my process).<\/p>\n<p>I had already organized and numbered my selected images by the sequence provided by the Photoblitzer web app, posting them to a set entitled Photoblitz, and tagged with Photoblizt130214. (My intent is to post other Photoblitz pics to the same set, but tag them with the new dates.) After a bit of experimentation (documentation? we don&#8217;t need no documentation) I determined that the best way to manage the display sequence is to control that by the <em>posting sequence<\/em> to Flickr (either forward, or backwards &#8212; still not sure which I prefer) and then select the option to display the given show by order as posted to Flickr. \u00a0This method preserves the date\/time stamp information (something which I had been prepared to adjust, in a last ditch effort to force the sequence) but allows for a sequencing to match a chronology or story. Depending on the application, that could be <em>quite<\/em> important.<\/p>\n<p>The font aesthetic for the descriptions seems a bit small for my liking, but the plug-in has an option to let you tweak the output via CSS. If it bothers me too much as time moves forward, I&#8217;ll look into that. \u00a0I&#8217;d also like to sort out a way to display just one image (rather than a page) and have the plug-in gallery slideshow provide access to the other photos without the pagination that currently results. Again, likely doable, should the need arise. Having the plug-in installed and configured adds just another option to the methods available for sharing images. \u00a0Nice.<\/p>\n<h4>And so<\/h4>\n<p>More photoblitzen to follow, more use of the gallery plug-in to come, and continued ds106ing &#8230; #4life.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Thursday evening I undertook my first official, as-defined-by-ds106 photoblitz. With a time constraint of twenty minutes, only the immediately&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[15,46],"tags":[419,420,131,132,134,1078,321,417,418],"class_list":["post-9987","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ds106","category-imaginages","tag-awesome-flickr-gallery","tag-bellekid","tag-cogdog","tag-alan-levine","tag-dailyshoot","tag-ds106","tag-john-johnston","tag-photoblitz","tag-photoblitzer"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2UvWF-2B5","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aforgrave.ca\/detritus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aforgrave.ca\/detritus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aforgrave.ca\/detritus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aforgrave.ca\/detritus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aforgrave.ca\/detritus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9987"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/aforgrave.ca\/detritus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9987\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10005,"href":"https:\/\/aforgrave.ca\/detritus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9987\/revisions\/10005"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aforgrave.ca\/detritus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aforgrave.ca\/detritus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aforgrave.ca\/detritus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}