Change your perspective
Tired of the same old, same old, perspective of life. Here’s some alternative ways of seeing things that help snap you out of that automaton existence, that is the day to day.
Sub orbital flight around earth
When catching a plane at altitude turn you head to be horizontal and pretend you are in a context of looking at earth from space. It feels like you are looking at our planet not out of a plane. Photo:marclehmann
Losing your self importance – we are all just ants
Looking down from tall building, planes and mountains is a chance to change your perspective from the day to day macro perspective up to micro. The god like view of things. Photo:kelpenhagen
I’m a fish!
Get you underwater goggles and hop in a pool. Lay on the bottom of the pool. Look up and see the plane of water and sky above. Works best on sunny day and if you can hold you breath reasonably well. Photo:wili_hybrid
Very little visual information
This creates intrigue, assumption and a bunch of other feelings caused by your brain filling in the missing gaps. This shot is taken of my daughter and her friend through the slats of a chair. Photo:marclehmann
Bugs eye view
Get yourself (or your camera) on the ground looking up through the layers of jungle toward the canopy and sky above. Photo:marclehmann
The Blade Runner cityscape
I like this type of photo of Tokyo super city. It gives a feeling of future, excitement, life. Photo:masochismtango
Aura’s
HDR Photography techniques give back an auro to scenes which often the brain or the eye sees but which the camera just can’t capture. The colour intensity gives the world an aura. Photo:_neona_
Why Teens Don’t Twitter
Why no baby tweeps?
- Teens don’t want mum and dad to see their chat. Tracking = bad idea. No, very, very bad idea.
- Their personal brand is already promoted on Myspace and Facebook through status updates (also with photo content). Why risk leaving this party for one with less people who are also a lot older. Platform loyalty is strong.
- It’s not an SMS killer when it comes to communicating with their friends…yet. They tend to SMS in less than 50 characters in chatspeak (textese) and it is more efficient arguably.
- Voice is important to teens, more so than adults. In gaming, calls and self expressed conversation.
- Teens want certain people (or groups) to know certain bits of info, but not everyone. “Careful or Joe will find out about the party and turn up”.
- Immediacy is really important to teens. Arguably Twitter is immediate, but to send it is. Is everyone listening. Generally a mobile SMS gets attention instantly from another teen on the receiving end of a message
- Like news sites, forums and social networks in general. A demographic can get in there and through the content they generate it will cause a disinterest barrier to the other demographics. The barrier being “I’m different to these guys and that’s bad”.
What will change their minds…eventually
- It ain’t cool yet. Teens are cool hunters.
- One to many communication. Update lots of friends at once.
- Bragging – very easy on twitter, you just need to be subtle.
- The social tools they love are causing a convergence between “status updates” and “posting Tweets”
- Visual identity of avatars and photo’s are important to teens so the richness of Twitter over SMS gives it an advantage.
- Teens solve for easy. Laziness is well catered for when you can update all your friends on an event through twitter and get 2nd and 3rd degree promotion.
- As Teens grow up their older work/social contacts will influence them onto it.
- They don’t mind forums so Twitter could be an easy move once they understand it.
- Brands they love are moving into spaces like twitter and draw cards will pull more and more teen consumers across.
- When Twitter is cool (in their demographic) it will take off with them. Teens being cool hunters are now more likely to adopt Twitter because twitter now hangs out at the Facebook party.
Quick Tilt-Shift Hack
Tilt-shift is a very appealing technique to me. I love photography and when I first learned of the technique from Adrian Lynch on his Flickr.com account I had to learn more.
I used a de-focus feature to blur the top and bottom of this photo I took in Tokyo. You can see the miniaturization effect. Even though it’s not great quality you can get the idea that defocusing the fore and back ground areas around your subject makes it feel miniature. In many cases the top and bottom thirds of the shot is all that you need to de-focus in a gradient manner.
Essentially your brain thinks it’s a macro/miniature photo because there isn’t any depth of field in the photo. Brain Trickery at it’s best.
The Wikipedia page on tilt-shift has a good detailed explanation.
Getting into nature, gets you into nature.
The easiest way to become environmentally sensitive is to get amongst nature. I always come back from a bushwalk feeling more enthusiastic than ever about saving what I have just seen. This weekend we took the kids and did a walk from Cowan down to Jerusalem bay in the Hawkesbury river (Ku-ring-gai Chase). The valley is steap, dark and has a phrehistoric feeling.
Here’s some Umbrella Ferns (Sticherus flabellatus) we saw on the section where the creek is not quite at sea level. We have this fern growing naturally in our backyard thus my interest in this one.
If you live in Sydney and want to know what plants are called that you see on bushwalks then get Les Robinson’s Field Guide to the Native Plants of Sydney. It just makes the experience richer when you learn a little about what you are looking at.
