My Use of ICT - Part 2: Photos

I was given my first digital camera for my 21st birthday and I have been snappy happy ever since. I love taking photos to have memories of all the happy times and with a digital camera I see no reason to limit the number... until I see the annoyed looks from my friends. I have been influenced by my Mum, who has kept fantastically labelled photo albums right from when we were born; they are lined up in our study and often looked through when we have friends round or reminisce about certain happenings. My friend M, from university, introduced me to a more artistic way of taking photos. We were walking on the hills together and she was stopping to take photos of trees from all angles in various lights. I don't pretend to be anywhere close to her yet, but my iphoto albums now contain numerous photos of the same flowers, rivers, hills and trees.

I am still a big believer in printing out my digital photos. I don't find it satisfying enough just to have them on the computer. Probably 2-3 times a year I have a printing session. I spend several hours usually in front of the tv looking through the albums and putting the photos to print into a nice separate folder. I then take a memory stick down to boots and get them printed in 24 hours - usually a little over 150 photos. I haven't really investigated any online printing sources yet - think i would need a lot of personal recommendation before I took the plunge there.

If I take a fair few photos at an event with several friends, I tend to put the photos up on facebook. That was my main use of facebook for the first three years, though over the last few months I have been using it more to keep in touch with friends. I was wondering about doing a facebook post, but really, that's said it all!

The real purpose of this posting is to talk about flickr. We were introduced to this in our first IT session at uni. I had only really come across it once before when someone at a friend's party put her pictures from the event up on it. Although I had set up my account during the session, it wasn't until tonight that I attempted to get photos on. I think it is going to take me a while to get the hang of this and as often with ICT the more you use, the more you get out of it.

I am still very unsure about how others get to see my photos. I like the idea of my family being able to look at the photos I have taken - I have taken to posting (the snail mail way) memory sticks back and forth with my mum to share our photos. I thought there must be a better way to manage it and this might just be the answer! I am a little concerned currently that people will have to create a yahoo account to be able to view them and I don't believe my Mum or grandparents will be willing to do that. I wonder if that depends on my privacy settings. I know I have looked at friends photos on picassa online without having to have password. Something else I am interested in is whether I can publish photos on something web-based straight from iphoto. Hmmmm, more research and practice needed indeed!

Here are some things I have learnt tonight which will help me keep track of my flickr progress:

• Leave plenty of time while my photos are uploading.
• Choose which ones i want to upload beforehand - it can be hard to tell from the thumbnails.
• Descriptions can be easily added at any point from 'my photostream page'.
• The same tags can be added to all photos added, or can be individualised.
• Having read through Creative Commons I set up the copyright as 'Attribution-ShareAlike'.
• Privacy is set as only friends and family can see this photo.
• EDIT i changed the settings on 6 photos to 'anyone can see this photo' as a test.
  
• Photos can be edited quite a bit when on flickr using picnik though this is not something I tested tonight.
• Photostream seems to be the general home place of all photos i have uploaded.
  
• I have set up my photostream to show medium and sets.
• Sets seem to be like individual albums. I put all my QE2 photos into one set.
• Can map the location of the photos.
  

This blog really has been a record of my learning on flickr in action. I shall hope to write a follow up blog at some point stating my success at using flickr to share my photos. Hopefully then I shall have a better idea of how it can be a useful tool for the children in my class and to have our own flickr account of class photos. A current concern is still the privacy issues surrounding photos of children.

Note - an hour and a half for this post and that's before the spell checking and rereading - must become more efficient at blogging!

EDIT 20th November: I thought of one other photo related thing to write about. Earlier this year I used one true media to make a couple of photo collages as birthday gifts. I got to know about one true media through seeing it used on various blogs and decided to have a go myself, as i was, as there slogan says 'wowed'! I really enjoyed making them - though as always with such things, spent ages on them, tweaking timings, orders, transitions etc. A few years previously my sister and I used PowerPoint to make a presentation of photos for my Mum's birthday. We scanned in photos from throughout our lives. We spent weeks on it and I think the presentation lasted about 15 minutes!

Here's a new test for me. I am going to try post one of the one true media montages into this blog!

Make video montages at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Wow, I wasn't sure what was going to happen there, but I think it has worked. I just had to copy and paste a code into this writing and although it looks like some very complicated load of writing - when i click preview it appears to be there. So, fingers crossed! I think children in school would get a lot out of making montages like this from the photos from their school year. It's something that they can really personalise and be as creative as they can. A good project to tackle.