Someone asked on Facebook how you find statistics about clip, and more specifically, how to see where the viewers were from. I thought I would give it a go and see if I could find out how. My very first hit was on a site that gave “statistics”. They had a, now old, list of most viewed video and this one was first. Haven’t seen it in a long time:
Of course I started following links…
then...
And it went on...
Somehow it led to kittens...
It was time to leave the table.
Sometimes it is not about knowing how to take a decent photograph, but about having your camera ready at the right time and pressing that button just when you do. Sure, some planning will increase your chance of actually getting the shot, but it will always be just that, a chance.
Chance is something many people don’t get about the kind of photos I take. By no means do I qualify myself as a great photographer, but I do have some shots that show I am competent. That competence is something many other people have though and when they don’t, they can usually get it.
The tree photos in this post are from a sports day we had at school a few weeks back. I managed to take 1100 odd photos. I was able to discard 500 right off the bat and managed to get that down to about 160 that I thought was worth cropping, editing and sharing with the people at school.
Of those 160, there are maybe five that I really like and maybe five more that I think are a bit better than the rest. That is 10 photos out of 1000. 1000 photos where I got in to position and I pressed the button, hoping to get what I needed or wanted. I did not take my camera, point it at something just willy nilly and then expect every one of my 50 total photos to be usable.
Ansel Adams, one of the most recognised names in photography said:
“Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.”
You can add to that what Henri Cartier-Bresson said:
“Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.”
This first photo was taken at the rope jumping competition. They had three or four rounds, I don’t remember. These two were the last remaining students in their grade. I got myself a position so that I had both of them in the frame and waited for one to make a mistake. Every now and then I would press the button just in case it looked nice, and then it happened. The one boy made a mistake. He did not immediately realize what had happened, but as soon as I saw the mistake I had my finger on the shutter release and burst mode was firing. This was the exact moment where he realised that after all his hard work he was not the winner.
For the next two photos I got myself in position to look down the final straight. I was day-dreaming and didn’t get the moment it started, but I reacted quickly enough to get some of the complete scene.
The boy in white was on the final straight, way ahead of the rest. Finishing off the win for his team was just a formality. Something happened and he stumbled, falling with everyone looking. The student avoiding him did not seem to fully grasp what was happening until the second photo, when he was breaking the finishing line.
.
We were having a late lunch in a little restaurant in a traditional type market. Spice food for both of us. I’m not completely sure why I have this photo or what I was doing with the camera, because I don’t normally sit and take photos of the people at my table. The only time I do take photo of people at my table is when there is some sort of an occasion involved. Whatever the reason might be, when I went through my photos I had this one waiting for me. It is not perfect, but I really like it. Good job Jo was pretty much ignoring me and my camera.
Close to Gecko’s at Haeundae Beach in Busan is what looks like a new bar. The place is all space and light and very glamorous looking. At one of the outside tables was a huge teddy that looked like it would make a nice photo. As I was trying to line up a shot one of the employees noticed and decided to help me out. He had obviously done this before and had Teddy set up in a laid back, life is great pose.
Autumn is in strange. You can go around for a month and take photos and you will get a few great ones, but there is this short window where everything just seems perfect.
I was going home from work a couple few weeks back and it suddenly struck me that the colour of the setting sun and the changing trees at Seoulbong Lake would be great for photos. I went by the lake instead of going straight home and indeed, the view was not bad.
I should have started monitoring the trees there about two weeks earlier, but every year I forget to do it. What I got was not amazing, but I feel that it is at east pleasing to look at.
The mission to find relaxing places for food, caffeine and ethanol led us to Rock and Roll Club, or house, I’m not sure. It is a bar on the 14th floor of a building right on the Haeundae beach front.
These are steps leading up to the aquarium at the 2012 Yeosu World Expo. I loved the colour of the wall. A group of 5 people dressed in white, grey and black would have looked great on this.
00:36 Christmas Island is only around one hundred thirty five square kilometres and was named after the day of its discovery, December 25 1643, by captain William Mynors of the Royal Mary.
00:52 Christmas Island was formed by a series of geological uplifts.
00:58 The structure of the island is comparable to a wedding cake with the central plateau at two hundred meter above sea level and a number of cliffs and terraces descending to a rugged shoreline with few beaches.
01:13 Sixty three percent of the island is a protected Australian national park.
01:19 The park offers the perfect forest eco system for the Christmas Island red crab which is endemic to the Cocos Islands and Christmas Island, both in the Indian Ocean.
01:34 They try to keep a low profile under the forest canopy most of the year.
01:42 The annual Christmas Island crab migration is legendary. Each rainy season these crustaceans leave their inland burrows and head to the sea to spawn.
01:54 What makes this migration legendary is that the red crab is the most abundant of the fourteen species of land crabs on the island with an estimated one hundred twenty million inhabitants.
02:08 They will have to cross treacherous terrain, traffic, the risk of dehydration and the rocky battered shores.
02:21 The males lead the way and are joined by the females, but they won't mate until they reach their breeding terraces by the shore line.
** Created for Mrs 최현숙 at SongJong Middle School
“And of course, three weeks before the final exam, we are again disrupting classes by separating them into lower and higher level classes. It did not work last year, or the year before, or, yes, earlier this year, so maybe if we do it now, at some random point, just maybe it will work now.”
That was my reaction to what was going on at school, again.
Earlier this year the school tried this little mess of an idea. To be fair to the school, I’m fairly sure this is an Education Department decision. What you do is you separate the lower and higher level students, allowing teachers to teach a more uniform level of student. It is not a bad idea, given the right circumstances. We do not have the right circumstances.
The first problem is that they take two wildly different subjects, Mathematics and English, and divide students according to the average of the two. The first year the school did this I had a girl in the lower level class who lived in the US for a year and spoke near perfect English. When I asked her about it she said that she sucked at mathematics so was forced to go to lower level English. Hopefully Mathematics is easier to teach with 40 low levelled students, but I doubt it. This poor girl got screwed for both subjects.
The second problem is class size. Forty higher level students who put their heads down and do the work are great. What more could you want from a class. However, 40 little arseholes who are too lazy or too cool to study are impossible. Half of them never progressed past 3rd grade elementary school level and the rest, even if they do understand, are just not interested in working. You help one student and ask them to go on and the moment you turn your back they start talking and playing, and just in case you missed it the first time, there are forty of these monsters in the same class.
I don’t want this and more importantly none of the other teachers want this. I’m pretty sure many parents don’t want this either. The first time they tried this, it was started in the middle of a semester and they went back to normal in the middle of the next semester. I am saying middle, not beginning or end, but middle. Last year the same things happened. Earlier this year, when I heard we were doing this again I started laughing, explaining what would happen. My one co-teacher assured me that they would keep the separation. The order to change back to usual came a few weeks later.
Somehow, despite the recent failure, “we” are giving it a second try within the same year. It only took 20 minutes before I felt like seeing if my fist would draw blood from a face.
Students are forever drawing things on their desks. More often than not they are just drawing rubbish, but every now and then there is a student who either uses the desk as a reusable canvas for their art, or just comes up with a great idea.
The first three images are of a drawing which uses the table’s bolts as elements. The skill of the drawings are not on the high side, but what is there is well done and oh so girly.
The next image is from a student who seemed to be working on a new character. I really love this style of art and just had to capture it before he erased it.
The last image was one that must have takes quite a bit of practice and time to create. Initially it was just cute, but after playing with Instagram I found this photo visually stunning.
A friend took me to a sport that I have never seen before. At first I thought it was just field hockey in an arena, Action Hockey if you will, but it turns out it was ice hockey with no ice, no protective gear and a orange ball. I was there for a very short time and would like to go back to get more photos, but I have no idea when I will get another chance.
The guys playing here are all from the US and Canadia. Teams are sponsored by various pubs in Seoul and more information about this league at Canada Ball Hockey Korea
