A digital camera, a little know-how and a lot of luck

I recently returned from a once-in-a-lifetime Mediterranean cruise with stops in Spain, France, Monaco and Italy. It was a photo-hobbyist’s dream, and I took all the obligatory vacation photos, including the one where my wife appears to be pushing the Leaning Tower of Pisa back up where it should be. Of course, the photos are great – especially the ones from the towering hills overlooking Monaco – but you probably wouldn’t expect any of them to win a photography award.

But then again maybe, just maybe, I am wrong about that. After all, if you were to combine location, opportunity, composition, timing and a very smart digital camera, you might get that exceptional photograph that actually stands a chance at winning an award. In fact, I believe that is exactly what happened to me.

I wanted to make sure I had a high-quality, reliable, easy-to-carry camera for our trip so before we left I did a little research and ended up buying a Sony Lumix DMC-ZS6. I consider myself a semi-professional photographer, having been the chief staff photographer by my organization for the last 20-plus years, although that admittedly entails only a part of my job and I have very little professional photography training. Anyway, I picked this camera because it got great reviews for travel photography.

On the third day of our cruise, we stopped at Naples and my wife and I signed up for an excursion that included the beautiful cliffside city of Sorrento overlooking the Mediterranean. My wife loves shopping, so we ended up in a tourist-oriented shopping district in the center of town. While she was examining the leather purses, wallets and belts, I wandered a little on my own. I quickly spotted a beautiful historic-looking church-like building, with inviting open doors and decided to explore.

I took about three steps into the Sedil Dominova, which houses the Societa Operaia du Mutuo Soccorso – the Worker’s Mutual Aid Society – and immediately held up my camera and snapped a picture. One shot. That’s all I took. Here I had a digital camera with hundreds of free shots available, and I took one single shot. Automatic settings. I was in the building for probably less than a minute. I liked what I saw and I knew this had the potential to be a special picture, but for some reason I only snapped one picture. I walked back onto the busy shopping promenade and went back to taking standard tourist shots.

Later than night, back on the ship, I downloaded the day’s photos to my Mac. When I got to the Sedil Dominova picture, I was taken aback. The photo I shot in this storied community building was like a piece of fine art. Seven middle-aged Italian men sitting around tables engaged in conversation and a card game. The room was piece of art in itself – slightly faded but stunning 18th century frescoes – wall paintings – of pillars, mantles and even babies with wings reflecting the character of this historic and artistically rich country. Set amid that backdrop – with perfectly even lighting – the men in the foreground almost appear to timelessly meld into history. A well-prepared professional photographer with the best equipment and lighting could have spent hours in this room trying to capture this moment and never have achieved it. All I had was a small – but very advanced – digital camera and a little luck.

Yes, I give myself some credit for looking beyond the surface for a better picture, for spotting the photograph in front of me, and quickly identifying a unique angle. But this is a picture that owes a lot to the incredible technology of digital photography. The camera made all the tough technical decisions for me, allowing me to act quickly and capture the moment.

The composition, the light, the background, the colors, and even the gestures and expressions on the men’s faces capture a moment that simply could not be planned or artificially created.

One moment in time. A real moment. A genuine reflection of a place and a group of people who represent a generation, a history and a culture.

I don’t know whether I will ever actually enter this photograph in a contest. But to me, it is an award-winner because – more than any of the 300-plus photos I took on this trip – it provides a genuine, deep insight into this fascinating country that I was so fortunate to visit.

How big is the Gulf oil spill?

Thanks to a very easy-to-use website by Andy Lintner, anyone can relate to the size of the horrible Gulf oil spill. Just go to http://www.ifitwasmyhome.com/ and you will see just how large the spill is as it is superimposed over your home town. I live near Madison, Wisconsin, and the spill – as you can see below – runs from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to north of Green Bay. And I can tell you it has increased significantly just in the last couple of days.

This is a great example of how web technology can be used to both inform and depress.

Funnel clouds rip through old media

Where the old media failed residents of Sun Prairie Wisconsin on Saturday, the new media took over.

At about 2 p.m., funnel clouds started dipping down from the clouds above Sun Prairie. Everyone who wasn’t looking skyward was surprised when local authorities, responding to reports from citizens and law enforcement officials, sounded the tornado warning sirens. Yes, it was raining, but neither the National Weather Service nor any of our Super Storm Radar, Weather Tracking, Doppler fanatics at the local TV stations had predicted any severe storms. There were no warnings or watches whatsoever.

Not knowing why the tornado sirens were going off, I quickly clicked on the TV and shot through all the local channels looking for any sign of a weather update. Nothing.

Then, the text messages, photos and videos started coming into my wife’s cell phone. One of her friends was pumping gas when she looked up and saw a funnel cloud. She immediately snapped a picture, shot a little video and sent it out to her friends.

Yes, thanks to personal mobile technology, we knew about – and saw video of – the funnel clouds before TV ever acknowledged that they existed. That was quite surprising considering all the times our TV screen has been cluttered with storm maps and warnings of tornadoes that never materialize.

Fortunately, Saturday’s funnel clouds did no damage on the ground. But they did do a lot of damage to the reliability and reputation of the National Weather Service and the old media local TV weather stars who are constantly portraying themselves as our weather warning saviors.

Well, at least we saw some good coverage of the funnel clouds – but, again, not from the reporting professionals wielding their fancy equipment and expertise, but from our local citizen journalists wielding nothing but their smart phones.

Telling teachers how much they are appreciated

Before Dwayne’s daughter met Wisconsin Rapids teacher Stefanie Tryba, she was struggling.

She is deaf and has MD. She was in a wheelchair, and Dwayne says he feared she was heading down a path that would lead to “a lonely life devoid of friends, and peers.”

Then Wisconsin Rapids Lincoln High School teacher Stefanie Tryba came into her life. I could not tell the rest of the story any better than Dwayne did this week on MyTeacherIsGreat.org:

“Since her time with Stefanie, she has abandoned her wheelchair, and while difficult, walks everywhere she can. My daughter has also developed friendships with other students, and can now not only express her needs, but can communicate her thoughts. She has also, with Stefanie’s help, completed courses at Mid State tech, with the goal of obtaining her day care license. She recently won an academic award due to Stefanie’s care. We had once figured our daughter would be wheelchair bound by the age 21, due to her health issues. We figured she would lead a lonely life devoid of friends, and peers. Everything we had once thought, or ‘had figured out’ about her, was thrown out the window by Stefanie. We, and our daughter, are eternally grateful.”

When we make the observation, as we frequently do, that teachers make a difference in people’s lives, there is no exaggeration or hyperbole. Stefanie Tryba is a great example, and there are countless more out there. The people who have honored their favorite teachers on MyTeacherIsGreat.org prove that. This special website was set up to help celebrate Teacher Appreciation Week, May 2-8, and the response has been phenomenal!

Here are just a few other samples of comments:

• “Just because of my teachers at Marinette Middle School, I love to wake up in the morning and actually be excited to go to school.”
• “Mrs. Marx pushes us to new, higher levels only because she believes we can reach them.”
• “Mrs. Ebersold is kind and wonderful to the children and supportive of the parents. We are so fortunate to have an educator like her!”
• “Mrs. Mayer is the best teacher because she is loving, caring, and really takes the time to get to know her students and their parents.”
• “I am an OB/Gyn physician and am on clinical faculty at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health here in Madison. I still keep in touch with friends from my high school in Door County and we all agree that TONY KISZONAS is the best teacher ever! “
• “Mr. Jennerjohn speaks to his classes in a way that makes you wish his period was three hours long.”

There is still plenty of time to honor your favorite teacher during Teacher Appreciation Week by telling us about your favorite teacher or education support professional on myteacherisgreat.org. And we will keep the website up and running even after the week is done, because any week is a great week to say thank you to someone who has made a real difference in your life or the life of someone you love.

Install software on your computer? Soooo 90s!

Remember the days when you used to load software on your computer? Pretty much everything you wanted to do on the computer required you to purchase software, either online or at a store, and then install it: email, photo editing, writing, designing, page layout, spreadsheets, creating forms or website development? Boy, have things changed!

I thought about this last week as I created a form for our website. It never even occurred to me to purchase software. I simply went to an online provider of forms (this is not an ad or necessarily a recommendation but the one I used is called formsite.com) and whipped the form together. It was actually very cool and very easy. I could simply drag and drop text fields onto a page and then write whatever question or statements I wanted. I embedded the code on my website, and now the application gathers all the information and creates reports that can be organized and reported in many different ways, even displayed back on my website using an embed code. No software, no installation, no registration key, no worry about using up disk space, no long-term investment or obligation.

Of course, this is just one example of a change that has been revolutionizing computing – what is often referred to as cloud computing. Instead of loading software onto your computer, you use software and servers accessed across the internet. Often, the provider will allow you to use a limited version of its application for free, with embedded advertising. You can pay to get rid of the ads and to access a higher level of service.

Instead of installing Outlook on their computer, people just use gmail or yahoo mail or any of dozens of other email services. Instead of installing Photoshop, they can use online photo editing software provided by many companies, including Walgreen’s and Kodak. Instead of installing Dreamweaver, they can use Wix or WordPress or Blogger to create websites or blogs.

Lately I have been using Ning and Groupsite to create social networking sites without loading any software. For my personal computing, I used to use Quicken to manage my checking account; now I just use my bank’s online services. Even TurboTax is now available online with no need for software.

A fully functional high-end computer without software? I’m not quite there yet, but I am very close. Premiere, InDesign, Outlook, Word, PowerPoint and Photoshop may be my last big hold-outs, but I really believe their forecast – at least as software products individually installed on personal computers – is cloudy with a good chance of extinction.

Blending art, activism and social media

We all know that activism and social media produce a powerful combination, whether it involves politics, the environment or any of a thousand other issues. And we know we can find many forms of art throughout the social media sphere, from photography to videos to poetry. But it is when art, activism and social media are all skillfully molded into a single force that social media reaches its pinnacle, not only educating and motivating an audience, but inspiring it as well.

Milwaukee poet and educator Ryan Hurley proves this point with a moving new YouTube video that not only displays his varied artistic talents – including poetry, photography and video production – but serves as a rallying call on behalf of the arts themselves.

Using art to promote art is the power behind this video. Moved by the dedication of Milwaukee students who are weary of seeing art fade from their schools’ curriculum, he and colleague Eric Mire document how these students take to the streets – both as artists and as activists – to fight to keep the arts alive.

Enjoy:

(In the interest of disclosure, Ryan Hurley is my very talented son.)

Where are the flying cars?

For all the incredibly fast changes in technology in our lives, some things just don’t change at all.

Take the toilet, for example. Still pretty much exactly as it was 50 years ago.

Cars are starting to change, with hybrids and such, and the engines are more efficient and reliable but the basic gas-reliant technology is pretty much the same as it has always been for the vast majority of car owners. I think about that every time I pull up to the gas pump. And what ever happened to the Jetsons’ flying car?

The TV has changed a lot, with color in the 50s and 60s and now HD and DVRs and cable channels and flat screens, etc., but AM radio hasn’t changed a bit. You can still get faraway stations at night if the climate conditions are just right, and if you drive under power lines you still lose your signal. And our local public radio station, which broadcasts only 15 miles from my house, gets all crackly as soon as the sun goes down. Can’t they fix that?

Anyway, with all the focus we always put on our changing technology, I thought it might be fun to think about the technology in our lives that doesn’t seem to change much at all. What else can you think of?

So much technology, so little time

On the day that Apple released its iPad, I was not standing in line to get it.

On the day that Apple released its iPad, our family was celebrating my daughter’s 22nd birthday. We were sitting around the living room as she opened up her present: a new Motorola Droid, an incredible phone that rivals if not surpasses the iPhone in the Wow Factor. When we bought it for her we knew it had some amazing features, but we didn’t know it has a voice recognition browser. Tell the phone what you want, it automatically Googles it for you. It has a built-in GPS and, of course, an MP3 player that syncs with Windows Media, which syncs with iTunes.

We sat around the living room. I had my MacBook Pro and was looking up directions for tethering her new phone to her PC. My 26-year-old son was working on a YouTube video he is creating on his MacBook. My wife had her Mac and, just for fun, was Googling my 90-year-old mother’s name as my mother sat next to her to see what would come up. My sister had her iTouch out and was hooking it up to the Wi-Fi in the house. We all had cell phones with us, including my mother.

So, here we were, six of us of all ages sitting in our living room. Among the six of us, three of us were on our computers, all of us had cell or smart phones (including one iPhone, one Blackberry and one Droid), and we had one iTouch and an iPod in the room, although our background music was coming from the cable box hooked into the stereo system.

It was the day before Easter, and we had rented a movie to play on our Blu-Ray player but we never got around to playing it. We have two HD TVs but never got around to watching them. And the Wii we got a month or so ago was not even turned on, despite the fact we had a cool new Resort game we wanted to play.

On this day that the iPad was released, we clearly already had far more technology to use – and play with – than we had time for. And that’s not to mention the time we spent just talking among ourselves over Easter brunch and playing a highly non-tech bean bag toss game in the backyard.

Sure, the iPad is very cool, and I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point I will purchase one, mainly for newspaper and magazine subscriptions, and maybe even some books. But on the day the iPad was released, my only thought was – how on Google Earth will I find time to work another tech toy into my life?

Newspaper Nostalgia vs. Social Media Mania

In his book, Late Edition: A Love Story, famed Chicago journalist Bob Greene laments the decline of newspapers and the outright death of so many of them. As a longtime reporter and editor for several newspapers, including the now defunct Milwaukee Sentinel, I directly relate to his tales of quirky newsroom characters at the old Columbus Citizen-Journal, and how he developed a deep affection for the days of “extra, extra” and newsprint-stained hands.

Greene has a touching way of reliving the days when reporters would yell “copyboy” to him as a newspaper intern when they needed him to take their hard copy (typed on paper) to the linotype operators or walk a couple blocks to get them coffee and a sandwich. When he mentioned that the guys who operated the presses would fold newspapers into hats, I couldn’t help thinking, “Really? They did that at the Citizen-Journal too!?”

And he – like me – was in absolute awe at the mere idea that he would walk into a newsroom for a day’s work knowing that the next edition of the paper was a clean slate and that the work he and colleagues did that day in the newsroom would become the next morning’s newspaper that would start the day for thousands of people in his city. As you read his book, you can just feel his genuine love of newspapers; Greene has newsprint coursing through his blood.

To Greene, the guys at the Citizen-Journal, where he began his newspaper career, like mid-size newspaper reporters and editors throughout the country, were just regular people doing a days’ work and loving it. And he deeply respected them for their expertise, hard work and dedication.

One of my favorite parts of the book is when he projects what these grizzled journalists would have thought if someone told them that someday any old Joe could write a story, or a column of rambling thoughts, and send it out directly and immediately to potentially millions of people using something called a blog. “I think reporters, hearing that, would have deemed the proposition so loony, they would have done pirouettes – they would have placed their fingertips on the tops of their heads and twirled around on their toes like ballerinas. It just would have struck them as deranged – to think that a reporter (not to mention anyone else who owned a computer) would have the ability to reach the world, and without having to wait for an editor’s approval, or for the presses to roll.”

There absolutely is a sadness to watching this bedrock of American democracy and society – the newspaper industry – wither away like a crumbling sheet of newsprint that’s been exposed to the searing sun for days on end. And the thought that we have fewer and fewer highly trained, experienced reporters and editors covering, and uncovering, the news and sorting fact from fiction and putting news in proper perspective is disturbing and worrisome.

But, frankly, it’s not all doom and gloom. It’s a new era. It’s a new world. The newspaper industry has had a great run. But today we have so much more. As fascinating as the concept of a daily newspaper once was, it pales in comparison to the depth, the speed and the reach of the Internet. We have millions of Web sites and blogs and social networking sites. News – from a war breaking out to grandma getting her hair done – has never spread faster, and we have far more choices than anyone could ever have imagined. As someone who – like Bob Greene – has always been in awe of newspapers, I am a thousand times more fascinated by new media. It’s more convenient, more extensive, more useful, more interesting, and more exciting.

Yes, we have to be more careful about what we believe and don’t believe when we get our news from sometimes dubious online “reporters.” We have to take the source of our news into account. But having to be on our guard is a small price to pay for what we get in return.

When I started at the Milwaukee Sentinel in the late 1970s, I remember when bells would ring on the AP wire machine as important news came streaming into the newsroom. I would always walk over to see what the big, breaking news was. I loved knowing I was one of the very few people in the country at that moment to know about this news. Most people would have to wait for the next morning when the paper would arrive on their doorstep.

Now, I get an automatic text alert when breaking news occurs. I’m no longer one of just a few who get the news first. I am one of millions, but that’s OK. Even though I no longer work in a newspaper newsroom, I have never had more access to the news than I do today. And I love it.

Tsunami generates huge wave of social media activity

Thankfully, Saturday’s great Hawaiian tsunami scare turned out to be little more than a splash of excitement. But the online wave of activity leading up to the 11 a.m. (Hawaiian time) anti-climax left news hounds and social media aficionados awash with options for staying informed. You could monitor the tsunami build-up through the eyes of experts (the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center) or through the 140-word thought-spurts of sometimes-insightful, sometimes-lame keyboard observers (Twitter hashtags #tsunami, #hitsunami or #hawaiitsunami), or through streaming video of media outlets in affected areas.

On real TV, I was toggling between CNN and MSNBC (no Fox for me) and had a tab open to two online Hawaiian media outlets. Hawaiinewsnow.com, apparently a joint venture of the local CBS and NBC affiliate (anyone know how that works?), had, by far, the best coverage of what was happening in Hawaii, including a live shot of Hilo Bay, with expert analysis, as the waters receded and filled back in several times over. CNN had the best analysis of how the waves were spreading from Chile across the Pacific (although the CNN host bordered on obnoxious).

Overall, the extensive media and social media build-up almost led me to expect I would see a huge wave form and wipe out buildings along Waikiki Beach. Although the small wave action was a letdown from a strictly news-hound point of view, I was certainly glad to see the event resolve itself without any damage or injuries.

Two of the best social media comments I read online were from the same person (who I do not know), Erick Straghalis, on Mashable:

• “There have been these events for centuries… we’re so connected that we hear about everything instantly. It feels like things are getting worse, but really, it’s the constant availability and instant technology that gives us so much information! 20 years ago, we would have heard about this briefly on the evening news — a side note to the Olympics.”
• “Have family and friends in Hawaii, Chile and Central America — it’s been great to get information straight from the source, streaming, twitter, facebook, etc… instead of waiting for CNN to pick up feeds or general information. I can hone in on the information that’s important to me, not just what CNN picks and chooses.”

A few other quick thoughts about the role of social media on Saturday:

• Mashable came through again, putting together a great package of streaming video, Twitter feeds and other live online coverage of the tsunami scare.
• As the event unfolded, I discovered through Facebook that two of my friends were vacationing in Hawaii. One was keeping us informed of what she could see from the 15th floor of a hotel on Waikiki. I was very happy to hear that she, like everyone in Hawaii, was safe.
• It’s now time to turn our attention to Saturday’s real tragedy, and organize to help the victims of the tragic Chilean earthquake. Mashable already has come through again with a comprehensive page on How to Donate to Chile Earthquake Relief Online, including options for texting donations.