Scott Kelby, photography and a 50mm f1.8 lens

book_coverI have just bought Scott Kelby’s recent book Digital Photography volume 2 and love it. I read the first book and learned that Scott’s style is down to earth and practical. He uses a lot of humour to ease you in to the subject for each chapter, but there are some seriously good tips and hints in each section.

Since I consider myself a learner still (and probably aways), particularly when it comes to photography, I really find this kind of book extremely useful. Yes, there are bits that are probably common sense and need not be said, but then again there will be folk will appreciate the information nonetheless. After all, having your common sense ‘confirmed’by an authority such as Scott can only be a good thing!

One immediate action as a result of reading the book was to buy a Nikkor 50mm f1.8 lens. I love it… so fast compared to even my f2.8 Sigma and the results are tack sharp. Thanks Scott! It didn’t cost a fortune, and I am sure it will be a firm favourite of mine very soon (probably by Friday afternoon, since it will be used for a wedding shoot then).

Reading Scott’s book also prompted me to  go through all of my kit and check out some of the features I know I don’t use so often. One such is the ability to use my SB800 flash gun ‘off camera’ using the wireless connection from my Nikon D200. I love the depth you can get when you move the light around to a different angle instead of blasting right off the top of the camera. Another tip was to shoot ‘tethered’ – i.e. using a USB lead from my camera straight in to my Mac. This needs a piece of software from Nikon (30 day trial) and you’re away. I liked the ability to see the image right on my laptop screen instead of in the viewer window on the back of the camera, but the software leaves a lot to be desired… more on that in another post, I think.

All in all, the two books I now own from Scott are proving to be a goldmine of useful information and I can thoroughly recommend them. The information in the second one about the use of flash is brilliant (no pun intended), and just what I needed to give me the confidence to go off and try stuff out. Buy the book – you won’t be disappointed.

Sweeney Todd Review, Cloverfield Review, No Country for Old Men Review

This has to be a first for me… going to the cinema is frequent enough, but going for a whole day? Shameful! Yet that’s what I did on Saturday 2nd February. Heading over to Braintree Freeport cinema, it seemed the sort of day that was best spent indoors. It was cold, for a start… and with England playing Wales in the opening game of the RBS Six Nations I knew I wouldn’t be sitting restfully at home! So first up, at 11.30am was Sweeney Todd.

I know this story – it was something I had read at secondary school way back in the late seventies/early eighties, so I was not surprised to see so many throat cutting scenes and pie making. What made this film stand out was the acting (although the story is pretty good, too). For a start, the cast was excellent – Johnny Depp in the lead role, Helena Bonham Carter as Mrs Lovett, Alan Rickman as eminently corrupt Judge Turpin and Timothy Spall as his sidekick Beadle Bamford. Fantastic stuff from the start then. The whole film is a grisly portrayal of vengeance as Todd arrives in London to find Turpin and kill him for destroying his life (he has him deported and steals his beautiful wife and daughter). Setting up as a barber, Todd works above Mrs Lovett’s Pie Shop, where the pies are actually pretty grim as meat is scarce and what you can get is too expensive. So begins a partnership between Todd and Lovett – Todd supplies the ‘meat’, courtesy of his cut-throat antics and Lovett cooks the pies which she sells to unsuspecting Londoners. The tale slowly unfolds as Todd works ever closer to Turpin, but things are complicated by a young sailor Todd met on is voyage home. Anthony Hope falls in love with Judge Turpin’s ‘ward’ Johanna, who is in fact Todd’s daughter. Turpin plans to marry his ward, Hope plans to get there first, and Todd plans to kill Turpin anyway! Needless to say Todd achieves his aim, but not without dire consequences to those who he holds dear (and there’s precious few of those). It is a first rate film with excellent acting from Depp, some less excellent singing all round which doesn’t matter one jot and a hugely enjoyable experience overall.

Cloverfield couldn’t be more different. Leaving the previous film with enough time to get some light refreshments it was out of one and into the next.

Cloverfield as a film has been shrouded in mystery since it was first announced. The film with no name turned out to be pretty awful, I thought. A group of teens having a going away party are rudely interrupted when a monster decides the time is right to make an appearance in the middle of Manhatten. Ripping the head off the Statue of Liberty and hurling it into the middle of town seems to cause some disbelief amongst the party goers, but they slowly get the point when the huge creature is seen and the panic starts to set in. Most folk head out of town at that point, but not our intrepid group. After a series of mishaps (the loss of a brother on the Brooklyn Bridge for one) the group decide to head back towards danger to rescue another of their party goers who has managed to leave a message on a cell phone that she is trapped. She is, of course, the love interest of the lead in the film. So begins the sorry journey of rescue and ultimately disaster. One by one the group fall victim to various woes (the best of which is the girl bitten by a smaller creature ‘hived’ off the main dude, and who gradually deteriorates until she eventually dies). The trapped girl is finally rescued and the four remaining make it to the evac site. One gets into a helicopter that leves immediately (we presume she makes it outta there) and the other three board another helicopter which doesn’t make quite so good progress, lingering as they do to watch a stealth bomber drop munitions on the creature which reaches up and swats the helicopter. From there we know the end is thankfully near, as they survive the crash only to discover they are at the feet of the monster (who somehow managed to get from the midst of town to Central Park). The entire film is shown in a very ‘Blair Witch’ manner through the use of a hand held camera being used to document the party 9and subsequent events). At this juncture, however, the cameraman (called Hud), is eaten alive. To cut an already too long story short, the remaining two leave promptly (but not so fast as to forget the camera, of course) and hide under a bridge where they hear the four minute warning. Manhatten is about to be nuked in a bid to rid it of the menace (although there are probably plenty of other reasons to do this, some might say). Needless to say the film ends around about there. Phew… if you are around 15 you might enjoy this film. If you care much about camera work, storylines or acting, you probably won’t. Then again it’ll get rave reviews like Blair Witch – another film I really didn’t enjoy very much.

So from there it was time to eat – a quick trip to Pizza Express (I ought to write another review for pizzaexpressyourself.co.uk) and it was soon time to go back for film number three – No Country for Old Men.

Before I returned to the theatre I took a sneaky peak at the sports bar of the bowling alley opposite. All looked good – England were seven points ahead. I thought it would be close, but that looked promising. How things change!

This was an intriguing film, but one I found entirely unsatisfactory for various reasons. The plot synopsis is simple enough – Llewelyn Moss finds a group of dead Mexican drug dealers in the wilderness of Texas/Mexico border, tracks the ‘last man standing’ to find himdead under a tree with a case containing vast amounts of cash ($2 million, apparently). Fom then on it is a chase as he tries very hard to keep the cash, and a villain by the name of Anton Chigurh tries to find and kill him. To add to this, the Mexican connection keeps sending groups to do the same job. Finally, Tommy Lee Jones is the sheriff amongst this lot who is nearing retirement and wanting to wrap the case up whilst staying alive. The scene is set for a quite enjoyable romp where you would expect the good guys to win and the baddies to lose. Sadly, this is not to be. In an altogether too long film, evil prevails time and time again in the relentless closing in. Javier Bardem plays Chigurh and for me was the best actor on the screen – absolutely the best thing in the whole film, I’d say. However, he evades capture himself, kills relentlessly and narrowly avoids being killed in a car accident right at the end of the film. Oh – if you still care, the Mexicans get the man who after al this time you thought would have found a way to get out of the state and count the cash. The cash… we never see what becomes of it – the assumption is that Chigurh gets it, but once Moss has been killed we never see it again. The film ends with the Sheriff now retired talking about a dream in which he sees himself following his father into the dark. Clearly, it is a metaphor for death, but I’m afraid the film killed any desire I had to keep watching long before this point. I guess the reviewers wil say I am a philistine and what a brilliant piece of cinematography it is. It undoubtedly has merits, but if you like your stories to be complete (all ends tied up), satisfactory and ‘feel good’ then this is not going to be one you’ll enjoy. It is a masterful depiction of relentless evil in the character of Chigurh, but beyond that it left me feeling underimpressed. Sorry.

There was an option to go and see Aliens V Predator Requiem, but by now I had reached the limit. Three films (one good, one bad and one ugly) was enough and no amount of SFX would put that right. I have had a unique day, although I’ll probably try to repeat it with better films another time. Freeport Cineworld is a comfortable enough theatre and the films were such that there wasn’t a lot of youngsters larking about inside (outside is a different matter, as they congregate in the gap between the cinema and the bowling). Johnny Depp remains a top actor in my estimations, but I knew that before putting myself through the experience! All in all it was worth doing as a way of resting and not sitting at home, but I feel a little cheated regarding the last film. And then there was the final score in the rugby to contend with as well. Ah well.

Displaying SMS at Reading University

One of the tools I used yesterday in Reading was a rather nifty SMS tool, which allows me to receive SMS messages on a mobile phone and display them to the audience. All through the power of bluetooth and some technical wizardry!

As a tool when presenting it offers the audience a chance to interact directly – asking questions, making comments and so on. You need to be careful who you use it with though – there is no moderation, and although the sender’s phone number is captured, the messages appear without any names or identifying features… so all pretty anonymous.

The screen capture here shows what happened when it was used in Reading. As you can see from some of the comments… my mac fell over during the presentation!

If you are looking to do the same thing, drop me a line and we can talk about how we might work on it for you.

smswall

Reading University

I had the great privilege of talking to this year’s PGCE graduates at Reading University today, sharing my thoughts on education and ICT. I was invited to talk by the head of Education, Leslie Honour, who had read my CV and thought that I had something to offer.

I talked for just over an hour as a keynote speaker, covering a number of different aspects to education and ICT. Central points I touched on included my background as a teacher, and experience with computers (remember that first time with a mouse…?) plus a brief tour of what I am doing these days with Cleveratom. From there I went through the Digital Creativity work where I showed some of the stellar pieces we have had from children over the years, the use of online spaces for learning (lingering over Notschool, somewhat, as well as the power of virtual learning environments), the technology we could use as well as a brief thought about where the future might go.

As ever the focus is on the students and what we are doing/could be doing to provide better opportunities for learning. A common cry from any audience is “That’s all very well, Hal, but how do I do this as well as fit in everything else?” Of course, the answer isn’t to try to cram ever more things into the school day, but to use the technology wisely to replace things you normally do, working smarter with it all. How does this fit with the national initiatives? I think I could reasonably easily show how this kind of clever use of technology incorporates  the key skills demanded, and I’m pretty confident that I can offer greater opportunities to students through the use of ICT than without it.

One comment from today went along the lines of the extensive reliance on ICT to provide communities and social groups for learning would inevitably lead to the destruction of social groups as more and more people receed to an online existence. This is a pretty bleak picture, of course, but perfectly valid as a point, and achallenge to all of us to ensure there is an appropriate blend of activities, not all based on ICT.

In fact, it is important to remember that from time to time ICT should NOT be used – particularly when there is no real benefit.

And all of this needs to be in the context of the changes in society, the different needs of the learners coming through the system and the expectations of what they will do when they leave school and take their place in work. Additionally, the global context increasingly shows the shift in emphasis from the UK being the centre of the universe, to a far bigger distribution elsewhere on the planet. Did you know, for example, that China has well over 1 million schools (England and Wales has 24,000), and that by any measure the number of gifted and talented pupils in China exceeds the number of children we have got in schools in total? What are the implications of this for the future, do you think?

And if the average teenager spends around 6.5 hours out of school in media based activities (YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Television) what are we doing to capture the learning that is happening and how would we begin to assess it if we could? Should assessment criteria begin to expect a child to run a group in Facebook, or upload content into YouTube and have it critiqued by an audience?

Or do we do what we have always done, and accept that we will end up with what we have always had… which quite frankly is not going to move us up the world rankings given the shifts happening!

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them” – Albert Einstein

Heath Ledger

ledger1It was with great sadness that I learned of the death of Heath Ledger today. I have no remarkable stories to tell of knowing the chap, nor can I say that I was a massive fan of his work. Despite having only ever seen him in a handful of titles I have to say I had utmost respect for his talent. Moreover, my children still watch ‘A Knight’s Tale’ repeatedly, loving the story, the music and the characters, of which Heath Ledger is the lead.

What also saddens me is that such a young man (28, I believe) with such a promising future and respected back catalogue of work has been taken from us in such a way. Already the whisperings of drug abuse are filtering around the internet, amongst strong claims of a reaction to prescription drugs, or an accidental overdose. Whatever the cause, we are in a world where celebrities are elevated to unsustainable status and for some the way to deal with the immense pressure seems to be to find an outlet in drug use. Is this reasonable?

I feel a real sense of loss today, which is puzzling given my distinct lack of involvement with all things ‘Heath’ (apart from A Knight’s Tale each week almost), but nonetheless I am sad. My thoughts are with his family, particularly his daughter (Matilda) and those closest to him.

I only heard of his death when driving in to work and listening to the morning radio ‘crew’. Most had heard of Heath Ledger, but the ‘frontman’ of the show claimed not to have done, and was, in my opinion, less than generous in his comments about it all. It may well be that you have not heard of the fellow, Martin. It might be that you do not watch anything but blockbuster mainstream films (except, clearly, Brokeback Mountain), but regardless of your perceptions, the world has lost a talented actor through a drug related incident and is a duller place for all that. I would cut the family some slack right now, look at what Heath Ledger managed to achieve in his very short stay and celebrate some of that as a mark of respect, personally.