Let me start by saying that this was by far the most fun i've had with a school project while being at Lawrence. Besides providing a fun way to interact with classmates, the Flickr project was also a smooth introduction to an innovative, online technology. I had never heard of the website before yet found it relatively easy to use given the classroom readings and my own experience with photo-uploading sites like Facebook. Also, it didn't hurt that dragon-slayer He Zhang was also a computer wizard! He made the photoshop component of our stroy come to life and answered any questions i had while navigating Flickr.
Our group's story revolved around the mystery of student dissappearances on campus; the culprit being a massive, and unusually angry, dragon. The first picture is of four friends walking along the bridge to drop their friend He off at the grill. We were lucky enough to have a willing friend to take our group's picture. There was nothing too difficult about this picture as it was basically used to establish our stories' setting and characters. The tags were simply, "friends" and all of our names. The next photo was of a bike laying on the ground with it's owner mysteriously gone; creepy foreshadowing of the attack to come. We lucked out with this one because none of us in the group owned a bike. We found this blue one conveniently placed by the science hall and were quick to snap a photo. The tags were, appropriately, "bike" and "victim." The next picture in the story is of an ominous dragon flying through the clouded moon. This was a particularily difficult photo to take because the moon kept showing up poorly on our group's camera. We played around with different focuses and filters until we got a decent image. Then, He worked his photoshop magic to insert a dragon outline and enhance the moon's brightness. The tags were, "dragon" and "moon." The next picture is of three of us on the bridge; my crippled self being in the foreground of the shot suggests dragon abduction. We just tagged our names in this photo. The next shot is of me being pikced up by the dragon while the two others run away. This was my favorite shot because my cast provided a handy prop. I sat out of frame while holding the cast in the air as if the dragon had just grabbed me. He tilted the camera to catch my cast and scooter; this canted angle also gave the photo a sense of disorienting action. Again, we tagged our names while adding, "scooter" and "cast." The subsequent photo is a photoshop-heavy one of He shooting a spell at the dragon who is perched on main hall. We had to experiment with different angles and use of flash to achive a shot worthy of He's heroic stance. Once working on the photoshop stage, we decided the dragon had to be purple given our teacher's twitter account. We meticulously cropped the dragon and wand-beam until the photo looked convincing. We chose to tag, "Lawrence," "wand," "dragon," "hero," and "He." The last picture decribes the aftermath of the dragon attacks and praises He for his heroism. We took a picture of the "Lawrentian" and proceeded to insert text boxes via powerpoint. Our tags were, "dragon," "attack," "newspaper," and "Lawrentian."
Our group ran into a little speed-bump when we decided that our story should take place at night. We had already taken pictures throughout the day on various phones and cameras yet the night time setting seemed way more conducive to our photoshop needs. So we all went out together at night and in about an hour were able to retake the pictures we wanted.
I realized after the fact that the tags our group used could have been improved. We should have used tags like, "cast" and "scooter" and omitted ones with our names because those tags will lead to nothing else on flickr. A tag like "Lawrence," however, could lead to an amzing picture of our campus. This "tagging" option is what makes flickr an amazing tool to access and share user-generated content. As Jennifer Mazarado states in her article, "these tags allow you to see other people's take on something that's familiar to you, which can be surprising and fascinating" (Mazarado 1). One can simply click a "cast" tag and be comforted by countless photos of others with far worse injuries. Flickr can be considered an informal photography school in the way that people can easily critique others work while recieving feedback on their own photos (1). Many amateurs have made the difficult switch to proffessional due to the nature of the website and it is an inspiring thing to witness. The case of the purple dragon has definitely opened my eyes to an amazing new technology.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/68302494@N06/sets/72157627747755145/with/6239815340/
I think that most of us really got an eye opener to how awesome flickr can be when interesting photos are uploaded. I for one have become more interested in it, and I never would have thought about ever using it before. I think that alone might have made this project great, but getting to work with our group really made it an fun time! Our story rocked!!! One thing on the blog post though for next time is you should make sure you indent the paragraphs and check for grammatical errors.
ReplyDeleteGood idea on how tags can be improved. Certainly we could have had more thoughts on that. Tags may be some vague ones such as "fear" or can be specific (e.g. "sacrifice"). Photoshop was certainly a big part of our project and I hoped that Flickr had some photo editing tools to go with it.
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