Kind Campaign

When I was 10 years old I moved schools. Nothing particularly unusual about that, but what makes it particularly memorable to me is that it marked the beginning for a period in my life where I was bullied. There wasn't anything particularly 'different' about me, except that I was new and someone felt intimidated and scared that I might upset the balance of friendships and clicks. The details aren't too important. I got over it eventually, changed schools and moved on. Although the scar has long since healed, I still carry my fragile 10 year old self around with me, nursed in cotton wool, fairytales and dreams. Every now and again she gets bumped and, being a little more sensitive than she perhaps should be, I find myself having to cajole her back into good spirits by whispering sweet nothings about how wonderful being 12 or 20 is going to be.

I'd like to say that this was a childhood thing. That girls get over it. That we grow up and become independent, loving and caring women who have enough self-confidence to be content with ourselves. But we all know that isn't true. I have a colleague at work who is mean. She's a mean girl. And she is mean in a way that makes me think that she has perhaps always been mean. She's crafty and manipulative. I am younger than her and better educated. While I spent my time in school, she worked. I hoped I could learn from her experience and instead I find myself trying to untangle myself from her tricks.

Why are girls so mean? I am not immune from meanness myself. I am not only a victim. I watched my year 8 class bully a girl and said nothing because it was easier to be silent than stick up for what was right. I've said horrible things about people - often behind their backs. Once, I slapped a girl. And the question is always, why?

For a little while now I've been following the Kind Campaign on Twitter. It's a movement to stop girl-on-girl violence. Not surprisingly, it’s something I feel quite strongly about. So strongly, in fact, that I've been working on a little "photo-blog installation thingy" to help promote the campaign. There's a great little area on the Kind Campaign website where you can apologise to girls for the mean things that you've done. I've taken a few of these and some of my photos and created a few "I'm Sorry" pieces. But now I need your help.

I want your photos and I want your apologies. 

And then I want to create an international "I'm sorry" installation for the Kind Campaign. If you're interested in joining in, then I invite you (yes you!) to send a photo or an apology my way.

Any photo, any language. 

If you're embarrassed about your apology, then you're welcome to use the 'Anonymous' comments, otherwise drop me an email with an apology and/or photo. I will try to use everything that I receive, editing and compiling to have them looking something like the two examples here. All photo contributions will receive a happy credit and all apologies will be kept anonymous.

The 'photo-blog installation thingy' will "go live" while I'm holidaying in Australia. So join me in saying Sorry.  I'll be accepting submissions until the end of the month.

Inspiration Studio

So, this is just a wee little post because I'm particularly excited... one of my photos is being featured by Jamie over at the Inspiration Studio today.  And she's talking about the song Hallelujah which is one of my all time favourite songs of, well, ever. For a while I occasionally listened to Jeff Buckley's version on repeat for far longer than I care to admit, but then I heard Leonard Cohen sing Hallelujah live . He is amazing. and his voice seems to only get better with age.  Anyway, head over to Inspiration Studio and have a look. Yippee!

No-style Style

Berlin isn't like any city I've lived in before. To start off, it's dirty.  Not dirty in a Bangkok or Delhi kind of way, but dirty with graffitti and a non-chalent, run-down, anything-goes feel that is aloof and friendly all at the same time. Matthias calls is the No-Style style and it is all pervasive.  The trick with this "look" is to pretend you haven't tried.  My favourite coffee shop looks like the owners drove around town picking up old couches and sofas off the street.  I went to a "very hip" bar recently where the only decoration was card tables and plastic chairs, it was lit with candles and the bar was made of a piece of wood between stacks of bricks.  Uber cool.  Personally I like my beer with a bit less attitude and a bit more grace.  But that's just me.  The up-side of all this, is that there are literally hundreds of cool op-shops and fleamarkets to source your No-Style style.  Oder Barfuss is one of my favourites - it just happens to be on my way home from work too!

Zinnowitz Beach

I think the wind permanetly blows at Usedom.  It was cold, the thermometer read 8 degrees celcius at 11am and I'm not sure if it got much above 12 the whole day.  But I still took my shoes off and let my toes sink into the sand and felt the waves wash over my feet.  I love beaches in winter, perhaps more than summer.  I love the smell and the feeling of the cold wind against warm, woolen clothes.  I love the soft cry of the seagulls and the constant, rhythm of the waves crashing again the sand.  The quietness of the "noise" is calming.  Sometimes, if you're lucky, you have the beach to yourself.  We didn't, but it was still nice to be out of Berlin and in the open for a little while. 

Usedom

Thank you everyone for your lovely comments and well-wishes last Friday.  Taking a break away, even if it was only for 24 hours was wonderful.  It made the weekend feel just that little bit longer and even though it was cold, the weather was sunny and perfect for walking along the beach and taking my fill of the sea air.  Autumn colours were definitely in full-swing up in the north - lots of photos to share, but for now just a few.

It's the light beautiful?  This little glen was hidden just to the right of the path up a small embankment.  It was just like this, with the light streaming through the trees and a misty, magical kind of atmosphere to the place. I could have spent hours here, but we had more important things to do, like drink coffee and admire old DDR relics like this funny old train and wish we'd bought a kite to fly in the wind.

As a complete aside to all of this, I was again impressed by the efficiently of Germany's rail service.  We needed four connections to get from Zinnowitz to our house on Saturday night.  All the connections were on time, trains often "met" at the train station making it easy to move between one service and another.  All you had to do was disembark from one train, walk across the platform and get on your waiting train on the opposite side.  The longest we waited was 5 minutes for our tram to take us the last 1km from the train station to our apartment. It was by far the least stressful way to get to Usedom on a Friday night and meant we had an enforced 3 hours of sleeping and relaxing time on the train. I really do love German efficiency sometimes.

Shutter Speed

There are three basic elements of photography - shutter speed, ISO and aperture.  Over the next few weeks we'll be talking about all of these.  Some aspects are difficult to manipulate using a point-and-shoot (P&S) camera, but it is amazing how much you can do if you read the manual (yes, really). What I am going to term 'bridge-cameras' straddle the gap between DSLR and in-your-handbag P&S and will let you alter the aperture, shutter speed and ISO if you want. 

Let's first start with some pretty basic definitions.

Full automatic mode - this is when the camera chooses everything - aperture, ISO, shutterspeed, flash and white balance.  Most cameras will provide you with some flexibility and you'll be able to switch from landscape, portrait, sport (kids/pets) and night-time view. 

Some cameras also have something called program mode.  Here the camera chooses the aperture and the shutter speed, but you have control over the flash and white balance.

Semi-automatic - here you can choose between shutter priority or aperture priority.  In shutter priority, you choose the shutter speed and the camera sets the ISO and the aperture.  In aperture priority, you choose the aperture and the camera sets the ISO and shutter speed. 

Manual mode - you are the master of your machine - the photographer  (you) set the ISO, shutter speed and aperture, white balance and flash.

Okay, definitions aside let's talk about shutter speed.  I reckon this is the most intuitive of the three. Basically this is how much time your camera needs to take a correctly exposed picture.  Imagine for a second your eyes are a camera.  Close your eyes and think of a hot summer day at the beach. Got it?  Now, ask yourself, how much time would you need to keep your eyes open (reverse blink) to get an impression of the scene?  a fraction of a second, half a second at most? 

ISO 100, f/5.0, 1/3200

What does the stuff at the bottom of the photos mean?  Simply, it's the settings that were used to take the photo and helps you understand how the photo was taken.

Now, close your eyes again and think of an open campfire, with the only light source being the fire and the stars.  How long would your eyes need to be open now for you to be able to fully capture the details of the scene?  It's possible you might need as long as 10-20 seconds to fully appreciate what is going on. 

ISO 1600, f/4.0, 1/6

That, in a nut shell, is shutter speed.  As it turns out, a camera's light sensor "reads" light pretty well and on a bright day it might only need a 1000th of a second to capture a photo at the correct exposure.  Because of this, cameras tend to work in fractions of a second eg. 1/60, 1/125, 1/400, 1/1000.

The second consideration when thinking about shutter speed is how fast your subject is moving.  If you want to take a crisp, focused picture of a car driving at top speed on a freeway you need your camera's shutter speed to be at least as fast as the speed of the car.  If your shutter speed is slower than the car, the car will have moved while the camera was taking the photo and you'll have a blurred image. 

ISO800, f/4.5, 1/800,  

Picture (and how-to) at The Bonnie 5

You can use this concept to acheive 'special effects' in photos, the most commonly seen one is manipulating the shutter speed when taking pictures of liquid.  If you want to take a picture of water droplets then you'll need to use a shutter speed that is at least as fast as the droplets are moving.  Likewise, if you want to blur water (for instance, in a waterfall) you'll need to slow the shutter speed down so that the water "moves" while you're taking the picture.

The picture above was taken by Karli over at The Bonnie 5.  The photo was taken at a shutter speed of 1/800, which was quick enough to take a snap-shot of the milk flying through the air.  Karli's tutorial for how to achieve this is here.

The last "essential" to know about shutter speed is what is termed 'camera shake' or 'camera wobble'.  To a greater or lesser degree our hands shake.  If the camera has a slow shutter speed, you'll be able to see your hands shaking  in photos.  This will show up as a generally unfocused photo.  At what speed camera shake becomes a problem is an individual thing. 

ISO800, f/2.8, 1/30

 ISO800, f/2.8, 1/60

In the first photo you can see that the image isn't 'crisp'.   I was really pushing the limits of my handheld ability to try to correctly expose the shot and the result was camera shake showing up in the picture.  In the second photo, I increased the shutter speed with the result being a much "crisper" photo. I corrected for it being underexposed in the post-processing (editing) phase. 

As a general rule, camera shake shows up at around about the focal length of your lens. This means that for most people if you are using a 50mm lens you shouldn't really use shutter speeds slower than 1/50 without a tripod or flash.  I don't have very sturdy hands and tend to need faster shutter speeds to get crisp images.  1/60 is about as low as I can go with my 50mm lens and I tend to prefer 1/125 for my 90mm macro.

The other issue is that people cannot stand completely still (even if you ask nicely).  As a loose rule of thumb, your shutter speed should not be slower than approximately twice your lens length if you're taking pictures of people - with toddles and babies you might have to go even higher.

Now, a lot of what I just said will only be useful if you are using a bridge or DSLR camera.  But, if you use a P&S, you can also manipulate the shutter speed to a certain extent by changing between full-auto, portrait and sport settings.  Your sport setting is designed to capture movement and therefore it will prioritise fast shutter speeds over aperture or ISO when choosing what settings to take pictures at. 

Next week: White Balance

Scavenger Hunt

Scavenger Hunt Sunday, and for the record it is a particularly awesome day today, if your a numbers kind of person, 10-10-10.  And because I'm slightly geeky and secretly like that kind of thing, I'm also posting at 10.10.

1. Pink - Pale pink flowers, the last of the summer blooms here.

2. Books - A snap-shot of our bookshelves.  For Valentine's Day Matthias and I get each other a book.  This year he bought be Doeblin's Berlin, Alexanderplatz and I bought him the A.A.Milne's Winnie the Pooh series.  This says as much about our differences as anything else - and in case you're wondering Soviet Politics 1917-1991 and Phrasal Verbs is his, Tales of Ginger and Pickles and Cecily Parsley's Nursery Rhymes are mine.

3. Fall Colours - I'm still messing about with capturing sun flare - I'm getting better and it's a lot of fun when it works out, kind of.  And the other picture I've quickly put in from Usedom.

4. Leaf - I know I already posted this here, but I love this photo.  I think it's one of my favourites at the moment and went so well with the theme.

5. Orange - I was aiming at the truck in the background and this little kid came barrelling down the path so quickly that I didn't even realise he was on me until, well, we nearly crashed.  The trike is "a little bit orange" so it kind of passes for this theme, right?

For more, head here.