Children are not childish - Education needs to give them credit

Yesterday Anvitha, a young schoolgirl and an avid birdwatcher reached out for help to rescue a black kite from what could have been a slow and painful death. I'll let you take a look at the two messages - one with her call for help and one with how she actually managed to gather people and eventually rescue the bird.

First message

Hi, just now while coming from school I saw a black Kite that was caught by a thread in a tree. What can be done to help it? The tree is quite high to climb and to cut the thread. Is there something I can do as my house is quite close to my school?

Second message

I went to that area where I saw the bird. The bird was still struggling. I asked help from my aunt who was near by and one of my teacher. We thought of climbing the tree and cutting the thread but the tree was too thin and long to climb. We took a stick to remove the string but the stick was short. Seeing us trying to help the bird many neighbors came and one of them brought a long stick and thread. We joined the 2 sticks. One of the bike riders seeing us stopped by and helped us. He was tall and so he stood on a long chair and tried removing the thread. We were holding a blanket to catch the bird if it falls down. The thread was cut and the bird fell on the ground. It hopped a few times and then flew away. At first it flew in the ground level and then was able to fly high. It was a memorable movement for me. I was happy to see the over whelming response from the neighbors. Many actually saw it but thought it was dead. After carefully seeing those innocent eyes blinking they came helping :). One of the things what I saw was - at first when i saw the kite while coming home, many black kites were trying to push the bird. Did they do that to help the bird?

Children are capable of wonderful things. Uncorrupted by our desire to compete, win, think way too far into the future - children are capable of demonstrating maturity, given half a chance. Anvitha herself is a passionate nature lover. Her knowledge of birds can put an adult like me to shame. Did this happen as a consequence of her school curriculum? I doubt it. Did it happen due to the right context and her own passion - I suspect so. Education needs to give children credit for the fact that they can choose their own paths. So should schools be more about creating context than imparting knowledge? Is knowledge really scarce in this world? If so, then how does Anvitha know so much about birds? Can you really bind down a kid's human ability to create, think, dream, be sensitive to curriculum alone? What role do parents play? These are important questions.

Kids don't surprise us - we just haven't given them a chance

"Learning between grown ups and kids should be reciprocal. The reality, unfortunately, is a little different, and it has a lot to do with trust, or a lack of it." - Adora Svitak

We often term kids as doing something 'beyond their years'. I believe that to be a truly discriminatory way of thinking. Yes, kids do need guidance. Yes they do need exposure and context setting. From that point on though, it's really about letting passion and the human desire to learn and create to set in. I love the fact that young Tom Suarez (above) got the opportunity to set up an App club in his school. That even if programming iOS apps wasn't part of curriculum his parents and school gave him the opportunity to pursue his passion. At 12 years old, he's a developer that's looking to expand his skills to program on both the iOS and Android platform. We have adults here who'd die for that opportunity. I'd really love for schools to give children this ability to try, fail, learn, succeed than to confine them to the realms of curriculum. For what it's worth, we adults have perhaps more to learn from them than we give them credit for.

Photography for Elearning Developers - Working with a Histogram

If you've owned a prosumer camera or a DSLR/ SLT,  you may have seen the histogram display on your camera. It may have even left you confused. One of the more ignored tools in your arsenal, the histogram is a great diagnostic for your image. Taken step further, it's also a pretty awesome guide to post process your image.

In today's post I'll explain this really useful graph to you. Don't worry - you don't need to be a scientist to understand this. It's quite simple.

So what's a histogram really?

In simple terms the histogram displays the distribution of blacks, whites and middle greys in your picture. The key mnemonic to read a histogram is this 'dark to light, from left to right'. The left half of the histogram shows the distribution of shadows and the right half displays the distribution of highlights. The x axis of this graph starts from a pure black and goes on until  a pure white. Everything in between is a shade of grey.

Not all histograms look like a bell curve as you see in the above picture, but what you should try and ensure is that  you don't have too much of pure whites or pure blacks in your image. Why is that? That's because the textures and play of light in real life ensures that situations in which you see a pure black or pure white are unusual. The situation when you have a lot of whites (also called 'highlights clipping') indicates that you may have over exposed your image. As a corollary, if you have too many blacks (shadow clipping) that may mean you've underexposed your image. Makes sense?

There are situations when you'll have both shadow and highlight clipping. These are very tricky. Usually this happens in awful lighting situations where you perhaps need to underexpose to overcome the highlight clipping and use artificial lighting to bring out the detail in shadows. Unfortunately these situations are difficult to post process as well. This is one of the reasons it is a good idea to get the right exposure out of camera. Here's a video explaining the concept visually.

Post processing - Creating a high key or low key photo

One of the great things about a histogram is that it tells you exactly what you need to do to give your image a professional pop. The easiest thing you can do is move the middle grey slide in Photoshop (any other tool will give you a similar interface) to either darken the shadows or lighten the highlights further. If you move your slider too far to the right, you'll get a low key image (eg: here) and of you move it far left, you get a high key image (eg: here).

Post processing - Improving tonal range using Levels

One of the most useful images you'll see on Photoshop is the Levels tool. Before you understand how to use it you need to understand histograms - which you already do to a great extent. The key to a good image is that it should ideally have a range of greys in the shadows and highlights with no pure whites or blacks but almost every other shade. So, the wider your histogram, the more contrast in your picture. Now you will also have a lot of contrast if you had a lot of highlights and shadow clipping, but this will mean that you'll get a very black and white image! So you need to avoid that one.

In a lot of photographs you may be able to go with some amount of shadow clipping because extremely dark places usually will show up as pure blacks. In rare circumstances - and remember they are rare - you might be able to live with some highlights clipping too. But for the most part, the levels tool should be able to help you modify your histogram and shift the white point and black point inwards. By doing this, you're effectively spreading your original histogram over the entire tonal range from white to black, thereby increasing the contrast. Take a look at this video to see how you can create a nice, pleasing, contrasty image with the levels tool. It really helps add a professional pop to your image. And by the way, you should be able to use similar tools on any other post processing package.

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So, try this tool as the basic post processing on your images and also as an in camera diagnostic for your exposure. You'll notice that being able to read the histogram is a really useful skill. Hope you enjoyed today's blogpost. More to come in the next one.

Photography for Elearning Developers - Why shooting in RAW makes sense

I've always thought of this blog as just a place to air my thoughts. Turns out it's a bit more than just that. I'm sure some of you've noticed my absolute laziness in posting to the blog in the last couple of months. While there are reasons for it, I also feel really grateful about the number of people that emailed or DM'd me on Twitter admonishing me for my laziness. I guess, this blog does mean a little more than a place for me to ramble. So let's see if I can turn over a new leaf and do a bit of a reboot on this site. For starters, let me get back on my weekly posting schedule - and if nothing I'll do my best to post a short update. Today is unlikely to be short though.

This past month I was on a 1000km door-to-door drive from Bangalore to Pune. On the way, I was able to photograph two beautiful raptors - a black shouldered kite and a white-eyed buzzard. Note this - I wasn't on a photography trip and most people won't be looking for photography opportunities on Indian highways. All said and done though, the opportunities did present themselves and I have some decent photos to show for. Photography is quite like that - readiness is a big strength. They say that luck is when preparation meets opportunity and this couldn't be truer for photography. If you want great photographs you need to have a camera with you. If your camera is always at home, you'll miss a lot of photo worthy moments. And mind you, it doesn't always need to be your entire camera kit. Even a phone camera is often a great tool to have for photo-journalism. Just remember to carry it with you; so when the momen presents itself, you're always ready. As an elearning developer or an instructional designer, you'll perhaps notice a lot of photo-worthy moments in the office that are worth preserving. I can't tell you how many candid photographs that I've randomly taken in the office came out to be useful in presentations, courses and in-person training sessions.

In today's otherwise short blogpost I want to discuss shooting in RAW vs shooting in JPEG. This is quite a subject of debate amongst photographers and I'd like to present my perspective on the issue. Of course, you can choose to disagree and that's the joy of talking about photography. So let's begin.

If you own a decent camera, you need to shoot in RAW

(Click for a larger image)Take a look at the before and after on this picture. Remember that not every photo opportunity will give you brilliant light in the right direction, with a very cooperative subject. This barn owl is my neighbour. I see the family every evening when I'm out for a run with my dog. The big problem though, is they're owls - they're nocturnal. In particular, I've never seen this family during the day or even in the twilight hours. I only see them at times when the light is poor. Now what should I do if I see this owl come and sit in the light of the street lamp, on a fairly good perch? Not take the shot? So well, I took the shot but as you can see, it wasn't much to write home about. Thankfully I was shooting in RAW. Before I tell you what I did, let me tell you what a RAW file is.

RAW formats are your digital negatives

Did any people you knew from the film generation have a deep interest in photography? You might remember the days of the 30mm, 36 shot film. If you remember, you'd get a film negative at the start of the development process. After that it was a lot of magic in the darkroom. People would then play with different chemicals and techniques to enhance the default negative image to produce masterpieces like the ones the great Henri Cartier Bresson created. Now granted, that Bresson himself wasn't great at cropping and processing film - he generally outsourced the activity to give himself more time to shoot. That being said, all his shots did actually go through a post process.

The problem with the digital era is the fact that you can produce pictures for sharing right out of your camera - the JPEG format. That's a problem because you aren't really giving your pictures the tender loving care that they need - the little extra zing before you actually share. So what's wrong with a JPEG - after all, you can use Photoshop to enhance your JPEGs and even tools like iPhoto and Picasa give you some tools out of the box. The problem is that the JPEG file is just a snapshot of a moment in time - nothing more, nothing less. It doesn't capture any information about the light available for you to be able to make changes to the exposure of the scene or the colours without actually deteriorating the quality of your image. So each change that you make from the time that you start editing your JPEG file results in some loss in quality.

On the other hand, the RAW file is an information heavy format. It's a proprietary format that changes from manufacturer to manufacturer. In addition to the snapshot that the JPEG also captures, the RAW file captures a lot of information about the light in the scene. While the camera does a little bit of work on your JPEG file by increasing the saturation and vibrance and adding a little bit of sharpness to your shot, the RAW file usually looks pretty drab out of the box. However, you get the opportunity to make a number of tweaks to the vibrance, saturation, sharpness and exposure of the scene without dramatically reducing the quality of the shot. Nice huh?

Do remember though that all this flexibility comes at a cost. RAW files are pretty huge and fill up your memory cards and hard-drives quite fast!

A few minutes of love

That's all your images need really. Take a look at the above video. It takes me less than four minutes to rescue what you could call a hopeless picture to start with. Most pictures aren't going to be such a hopeless job and all you're going to need is  few little tweaks that don't take away the detail in your image. RAW files help you do just that.

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Over the next few weeks I'm going to try and give you a bit of a build up to my talks at the Learning Solutions Conference 2012. I'm still undecided on the exact stuff I want to put up on the blog, so let me play it by ear for now. But let's see how this goes - keep reading and thanks for the encouragement.

Photography for Elearning Developers - Understanding Exposure

Between the last post and today, I had a great time at Thattekad - one of India's finest bird sanctuaries down south. I can't say it was the best photography tour - grey weather, rain and dark clouds never make for a good mix. I did have a fascinating birding trip, having spotted 110+ bird species during those three days. Along the way, I got some good photographs but not too many to be frank. I'm hinging my photography fortunes on the next few trips this winter - hopefully my luck will come good somewhere.

Coming to the topic of today's blogpost, you may remember that in my last blogpost I'd explained how to choose a new camera for yourself. In today's blogpost I'll follow that up with what I consider the most crucial part of photography - exposure. Simply put, exposure indicates the total amount of light that your camera receives during the time that you record a photograph. When your picture is optimally exposed, you get a great picture. In photography parlance, an underexposed image is usually dark and conversely an overexposed image is usually too bright and white. Well, not all the time - but we'll come to that later. Let's first look at the three different parameters that actually affect the exposure on your image.

Aperture

Aperture on your camera lens indicates how wide your lens is open when receiving light. The wider open your lens, the more light it can take in - the narrower the opening, the lesser the light. Simple? Your camera indicates your aperture setting using what we call an f-stop. The confusing thing to remember though is that the larger the number, the narrower the aperture. This is because we express aperture as a fraction of the focal length. f/1.8 therefore is wider than f/5.6.

Now why would you like to control aperture? Firstly of course, a wider aperture gives you more light for your frame which is always a good thing. That aside, adjusting your aperture gives you the opportunity to play with the depth of field on your picture. Depth of field refers to the depth of the picture after which the camera blurs out the details. Remember seeing those pretty portraits where the background is a beautiful blur? This is a result of playing with the aperture. So here's the trick - a wide aperture will usually result in a shallow depth of field. A narrow aperture on the other hand will capture a large part of the image in a sharp fashion. So for portraits you can go with wide aperture. With landscapes and interiors you could go with a narrow aperture. Take a look at the above pictures for reference.

Shutter Speed

Shutter speed refers to the amount of time a camera's shutter is open when you capture an image. Think of a tap and a glass to fill. If you opened the tap fully your glass will fill in a jiffy. On the other hand if you just let the tap drip a drop at a time, it'll take you much longer to fill the glass. This is the relationship between aperture and shutter speed when it comes to aperture. If your tap of light is fully open you can go with a fast shutter speed. If your tap of light is down to just a drip you'll need a longer shutter speed to fill your glass of light. Simple?

Here's why you may want to control your shutter speed. When you shoot at a high shutter speed you freeze action in that split second. When you shoot at a lower shutter speed you get the opportunity to capture details in the poorly lit scene or capture motion using creative blurs - like the silky smooth waterfall in the above picture. The above pictures will help you see how shutter speed can help you capture different kinds of photographs.

ISO or Sensor Sensitivity

What if your tap was down to a drip and you still wanted to fill your glass quickly? You'd have to cut some corners right? You could potentially fill the glass with sand such that it takes only short amount of time to fill the glass! Yes, yes you make the water dirty - but you do fill the glass, don't you. This is how ISO works as balancing factor for exposure. ISO defines how sensitive your imaging sensor is to available light. So ISO 100 indicates low sensitivity while ISO 6400 indicates very high sensitivity.

Where could adjusting the ISO come in handy? Think about a situation where you're shooting a cityscape at night - handheld. If you shoot at low ISO, you'll need a very slow shutter speed. Here's the catch - slow shutter speeds introduce blur because very few people can keep their hands steady for more than 1/60th of a second! In such a situation, if you shoot at ISO 100 you just won't get a sharp picture. On the other hand you can go with a sensitivity of ISO 800 and you'll most likely get a sharp picture.

Now here's the other catch - remember the sand in the glass? The higher the ISO, the lower the quality of your image. In the film days you'd notice this in the form of what they called film grain and in the digital world you see it in the form of image noise. So the bottom line is this - a high ISO is the arrow in your photography quiver which you want to use only if absolutely necessary.

How do you control Aperture, Shutter Speed and ISO?

While most serious cameras have a manual mode where you control everything, it's usually not the best idea unless you're shooting in a very controlled, studio type setting. You're best off controlling either Aperture or Shutter speed and letting the camera control the other. If you're using a DSLR, then you'll perhaps know the modes to control these as Aperture priority (A on Nikon, Av on Canon) and Shutter priority (S on Nikon, Tv on Canon). All you need to do is pick the parameter you want to control, select the ISO you're willing to live with and let the camera help you along from that point.

What mode do I shoot on? Well as most photojournalists would say, "Aperture priority, f/9 and stay there!". Well not quite - I select modes based on the need of the photograph, but for the most part I shoot in Aperture priority since that allows me to control how much of the picture stays sharp and how much blur I need.

A Photo Case Study - Ceylon Frogmouths

For the last year or so, I've been waiting to see the Ceylon Frogmouths. These birds are some of most elusive species to spot in the wild. In fact, I was looking up Wikipedia and found that from the Batrachostomus genus only bird that they have photographs for, are the Ceylon Frogmouths.  These birds have excellent camouflage. They're hardly 23 cm in size and they choose their homes in dark, thickly forested, leafy areas. Since they look like dry leaves and branches they completely blend in. You could be a meter from them and still not be able to see them. The reason why we can actually find them in some spots of India is particularly because some birders know their roosting spots and end up guiding folks like me.

Now to this photograph - the tropical forest was very dark. We were struggling to see the frogmouths with naked eyes - through the camera it was even tougher. I proceeded to shoot at the widest aperture my camera offered. However at f/5.6, the shutter speed of 5 seconds was just unmanageable with a big lens, handheld. I kept upping the ISO until I reached a shutter speed of 1/30th of a second and then pressed the shutter. At an ISO of 6400, the picture isn't as sharp or as high quality as I'd like it to be, but I want to think it was the sharpest I could have got in that environment. I could have perhaps gone to ISO 12800, but that would have brought down the picture quality even further. In any case I hope this adventure of a photograph helps you see how ISO, shutter speed and aperture play together to help create the right image.

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I hope today's blogpost gives you a basic sense of exposure for your photographs. I am mindful that I'm not focussing on elearning-only situations with my examples and that's deliberately so. I'm guessing that if you can use your camera effectively in a life situation, the ability to do so for elearning will come automatically. In the next blogpost, I'll touch upon some simple tips related to colour and format choices in photography. Stay tuned until then - cheers! Is there other stuff you'd like me cover on this blog? Let me know by dropping your comments on this post.

Photography for Elearning Developers - Choosing a New Camera

If you’ve followed this blog long enough, you’ll remember that I’m no big fan of stock images. No, I don’t hate them - in fact I use them quite often. That being said, I think there’s significant disadvantages to stock photos - my primary gripe with them being the fact that they’re so inauthentic. People just aren’t as pretty as they look in stock images, except of course you lot that’s reading this post. And then again, they don’t strike cheesy poses. Most importantly, stock image models are so far removed from the real world that the credibility a real colleague’s photo brings just doesn’t come through with a stock photo. In my presentations and learning programs I’m using more and more of my own photography and I can imagine this could be a really useful thing for other elearning designers too.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to do a few posts on basic photography that’ll help you take high quality photographs for your learning materials. Of course, I don’t proclaim to be an expert and well it’s going to take far more than my posts to be a really good photographer. I’m sure though that learning about the art and science of photography will help you develop the craft in case you have an interest for it. In today’s blogpost, I’ll show you how to select a new camera - after all, that’s a prerequisite to awesome photographs!

The best camera is the one you already have

Photography geeks can keep going on and on about the best equipment. Is the A77 the best DSLR ever? Or is it the monstrous 46 megapixel Sigma SD1? Well no one cares. I for one don’t have the budget to buy the best gear on the planet. And then again the deal with photography is this - your existing equipment is good until you run up a limit. So if you have a point and shoot and you need more creative control on your images then you perhaps should get a prosumer camera. On the other hand if you’re looking for lightning fast response then you may have to choose a DSLR. Often you may be already shooting with a DSLR and you need to capture a small object with all its details. You may then need to upgrade to a macro lens. All this said, if you have to always remember - if you don’t see a problem with the results you’re getting, your existing equipment is just good enough. I am however going to tell about the different types of cameras in the market so if you did have to purchase a new one you can make an informed decision.

Equipment Geekery

I like to look at cameras in three different categories. Let’s take a look at each of these:

1. Point and shoot cameras: Compact and pocketable in size, these are the cameras that a lot of us have. I have one too. They take decent pictures and are meant for exactly what the category is called - point and shoot. Your cellphone cameras also fall under this category. Most people will say that these cameras aren’t meant for serious photography, but hey - look at these photographs from the iPhone 4! For a lot of photography, a little pocket device is adequate. The downside of these cameras of course is that they aren’t really versatile for various purposes and because of their small imaging sensors, the image quality often isn’t as good as you’d like it to be.

2. Prosumer cameras: Prosumer cameras are a little more advanced than compacts. They essentially have similar or slightly larger sensors and theoretically are capable of producing better images. More importantly, some of these cameras allow you to shoot in the camera’s native format a.k.a RAW which gives you a lot more control to tweak your images after the fact. This apart they’re equipped with more versatile glass that can zoom into far away objects or often shoot really wide landscapes.

3. Digital Single Lens Reflex cameras (SLRs): SLR cameras start to go into the realm of serious photography. The ability to shoot at rapid pace, to choose from a wide range of lenses and accessories and to be able to come up with high quality, tack sharp images is something a lot of photography enthusiasts prefer. Amongst DSLRs there are full frame cameras that are fitted with image sensors of the same size as good old 35 mm film. This means that if you were to put any lens on top of these cameras, your picture would be similar and true to the 35 mm film format. These large sensors help you reproduce vivid colour and detail and well that makes these cameras quite costly - anywhere between $2000 and $8000. There are also what we call crop or APS-C format cameras which have smaller sensors than the full frames and produce a cropped image in comparision to those big guns. They’re still pretty good and I own two of those. You can get your hands on one of these for as little as $450. There are also newer variants such as the mirrorless micro-four-thirds cameras and the single lens translucent (SLT) cameras. I’ll leave it to you to find out about those.

If you’re looking to buy a camera for your elearning photography, I suggest you go for a DSLR. I’m a Canonista and I strongly recommend the EOS 600D as your first camera. I’m pretty sure Nikon produces good cameras too - I just don’t know about them. The advantages of the DSLR are aplently. The fact that there’s only one moving mirror which projects to an optical viewfinder, you have a WYSIWYG experience with photography. Plus you can keep adding equipment to the base system as you want to expand your photography repertoire.

Beware of the myths

If you’re buying a prosumer camera or a point and shoot, do remember that there’s a scam in the market. I call it the megapixel and optical zoom scam. You can guess what I’m referring to. Manufacturers, regardless of whether they’re well meaning or not, need to have some way to keep selling you new models of their devices which don’t necessarily add much value beyond what you already have. Don’t believe me? Check out the story of stuff. Now with cameras, technology doesn’t really change by much each month. Yet there are new models in the market every month. The one way that camera manufacturers can lure you into buying something new is by providing you a quantitative metric to evaluate your purchase. The easiest one is the megapixel count.

Now remember I told you that point and shoot cameras and prosumers have very small sensors in comparison to DSLRs? Think about it. Pixels are finally dots on your final image. To reproduce these dots as they appeared in real life, you need to lay out several mini-sensors on your sensor area. Therefore as you’ll notice from the diagram above, while a DSLR sensor area has these mini sensors laid out quite comfortably, the point and shoot has them fighting for space. The more megapixels you pack into a point and shoot, the more mini sensors you need. The more mini sensors you pack in, the more squished they will be. The more squished they are, the more they’ll interfere with each other and produce poor images. So if you’re picking up a new point and shoot camera or for that matter any other camera, be mindful that more megapixels doesn’t always translate to better pictures. For all you care, you’re likely to get better pictures from a camera with a lower megapixel count!

The other scam that camera companies run is that of optical zoom. Remember those numbers you saw at the store - 4x, 10x, 15x? Does a 15x camera lens have a better zoom reach than a 4x camera lens? Not really. X here signifies the ratio between the highest focal length of the camera lens, to its lowest focal length. So a camera that goes from 20mm to 300mm is a 15x lens. Now let me tell you that several wildlife photographers use the following professional lenses for super long reach:

• 100mm-400mm; just 4x
• 200mm-400mm; just 2x
• 400mm, 600mm, 800mm primes which are just 1x!

As you can see the x value is nothing but a hoax to make you buy a new camera and doesn’t really mean anything without knowing the focal length of the lens on the camera. Also remember that it takes great engineering to build lenses that operate at various focal lengths. This is the reason that most professional lenses are either primes or 2x or 4x. A camera lens that operates at a focal length multipliers of 15x, 18x and 30x is surely cutting corners with image quality.

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There’s perhaps heaps more technicalities to know about with photography. In my next post, I’ll try to clarify some of the technical jargon you’ll hear thrown around in the space. After that we’ll start getting our hands dirty with some neat stuff. Deal? See you next week then.

Camera image credits: Individual manufacturers. Title photo credit: FOTOCROMO

Share your images freely - you have no excuses

This week is Diwali in India. An extremely colourful festival of the country - one that celebrates the victory of good over evil; I believe it represents some of the greatest inequalities of our nation. Don't get me wrong - Diwali is like Christmas for many Indians. It's a time for family and a time to be happy. At the same time it shows what a great divide exists in our society. While one part of the society showcases its opulence by lighting fireworks worth thousands of rupees, another part of society still sleeps hungry and earns less than two dollars a day. While some children spend all evening in new clothes and launch fireworks into the sky, several Indian children have been slogging away in the same factories that produce these fireworks. While society brandishes its wealth by causing noise and air pollution this year, we lose several plants, birds and insects to this rampage by human kind. As you can tell, I have a very different perspective to Diwali from most Indians.

Anyways, let me get to the point of this blogpost. Last week I reached out to a very respectable wildlife photographer and made him a request. I noticed that his pictures had really huge watermarks which he'd placed to protect his work from copyright infringement. I asked him if he could consider opening up his work a little more and he revealed to me what he was apprehensive of. His concerns were quite valid and as an amateur photographer I'd like to share them with you. In addition I'd like to share some other concerns I've heard from photographers who've been reluctant to open up their work. But before that, let me explain some basics about intellectual property.

Copyrights and Licensing

A copyright as the word indicates is the exclusive right to make copies of a piece of work, to distribute it, to modify it and to create derivative works. When you take a photograph, you automatically gain the copyright for it and it's upto you to share those rights with others. No one can use your photograph until the time you either grant them the right to do so. You can grant people all or some rights by using a license. There are three traditional ways around this :

• Now quite often you'll give people the entire picture which means that you've shared all your rights.
• You could give them the picture with an informal agreement, in which case if there is an infringement you'll have trouble explaining your agreement, especially if you have no legal skill.
• You could use a custom license, and while this has it's advantages, it increases complexity, because you need to understand the legalese behind it.

The simplest way out however is to use a Creative Commons license. You can retain whichever rights you want to retain and give out the remaining rights. I won't get into the details of the creative commons scheme - you can choose a license that suits you by using the Creative Commons license chooser. At the heart of the system though, is the one thing that most artists care for - credit and attribution. Every creative commons license requires the licensee to give you credit for your work. With that basic information in mind, let's look at some of the arguments people have against openness.

Argument 1: People have copied my work and given me no credit

I've heard this complaint often and here's what I'll say. Jerks will always be jerks. Regardless of how much you watermark and protect your pictures, it's very easy for theives to steal your work if they want to. Take a look at this one minute video to see how easily I removed the watermark from the above picture. Also be mindful of the principle of fair use. Anyone who is using your picture for the purpose of research, criticism, teaching, commentary, news reporting or other such purposes are fully entitled to use your picture without seeking your permission as long as they attribute back to you. By placing a watermark on your pictures, you make it difficult for the rest of human kind from using your work for such purposes. Given that people will steal if they need to no matter what you do, does it make sense to make fair use difficult?

Argument 2: I'm not required to use a Creative Commons license

Absolutely - you could just keep all rights reserved and let people ask for permission each time that they need your pictures. Do remember though that this only creates friction. The more the barriers to use, the less your pictures will be used. Now you could argue this is good, but again remember that only if your pictures can go far and wide will people actually know you.  Most geeks know Linus Torvalds - there's a good reason for that. It's because Linux and Git are open source and they take his name far. But even with photography, you don't need to go far - Trey Ratcliffe, Jonathan Worth and Kalyan Varma are great examples of people who are popular because of their openness.

The advantage of choosing a creative commons license is that this makes your approach towards sharing explicit. You can be very explicit about what people can do with your photos and what they need your permission for.  For example, people can use, share, modify and redistribute my photos as long as they attribute back to me and they don't use my work for commercial purposes. I wouldn't mind earning some money, so if there's an opportunity for something like that I'd love to have a share.

Argument 3: But what if I want to use my work for a commercial purpose?

This is the beauty of the creative commons scheme. You can reserve the rights that you consider important to yourself. If  you'd like to preserve your work as is, you can reserve the right to make derivative works. You can reserve the right to commercialise your work. You can share a low resolution version of a photo liberally and reserve the high resolution version for commercial printing. It's a very flexible system.

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As you can see, thieves shouldn't deter you from sharing your work with the world. The Internet can be a much better place if photographers in particular share their creative representations with the world without fear. If you are a photographer or create digital media of some kind, please read the power of open for inspiration. If you haven't been sharing openly, you'll surely find some stories that strike a chord from that book. And by the way, don't be scared to visit the link - it's a free book.

Do you have other fears about sharing your work? Please post them in the comments section of this post and I'll do my best to answer them for you. Thanks for reading!

Three antipatterns to protect your learning community from

I'm back from China and it feels great to be back home finally. China's a great place that I recommend everyone tries to visit at least once in their lifetime. That said, if you are hooked to the internet then you've got to be prepared to sacrifice some of that during your visit. So with about 30 days of no access to my blog, several of Google's apps and Twitter or Facebook, socialising on the web was a bit of nightmare.

Anyways, I got back last week and went on an amazing birding trip to Ganeshgudi. In birdwatching parlance, a bird you see for the first time in your life is a called a 'lifer'. My friends Raji, Kannan, Sandeep and I lost count of the number of times we saw a bird and shouted the word 'lifer' to each other. An amazing biodiversity hotspot in the Western Ghats, Ganeshgudi afforded sightings of about a 110 different species of birds. If you're interested, you should look up my photographs. I wasn't looking at photography as a goal on this trip. I wanted to use my camera as a bit of a documentation tool for this trip. I'll be back there soon and then I'll perhaps move around with a monopod and try to get better shots.

Three pillars of successful communities

Speaking of the birding trip, all three of my friends that came with me were folks I know from a naturalists' community that I participate in. It's been an enriching experience being a part of that group. I believe that successful learning communities are founded on three important pillars:

• Sharing and Altruism: The most successful communities are where people participate because they believe that sharing what they know helps others and they believe that they'll be better off if others share what they know as well.
• Feedback: In his Last Lecture, Randy Pausch said, "Your critics are the ones telling you they still love you and care." Communities that have a healthy culture of sharing feedback are likely to learn and grow better.
  
• Respect: As a fundamental value in most meaningful human relationships, respect has to be out there as one of the fundamental building blocks of successful communities. Communities that respect experience and the lack of it alike and can create safety for people to participate are likely to see a lot of meaningful traffic.
  

As I was thinking about these three pillars, I've been thinking of three very common antipatterns I've observed on online communities that I'd like to share with you. If I'm running a community, I'll probably avoid these like the plague and I really hope that you do too.

Hero worship

Every community has it's heroes and top contributors, but to elevate these individuals to god-like status is an absolute no-no. I remember that a few days back on a birding community on Facebook an experienced wildlife photographer posted a beautiful photograph of a bird. He'd also posted a write up on the bird. Everyone had great stuff to say about the image and the write up. That being said, there was  problem. The photographer had copy pasted the write up from Thomas Jerdon and had done nothing to attribute to the great naturalist. I was surprised that no one had called him out on this. I have very little tolerance for plagiarism and un-deserved praise gathering, so I had to call him out. This however led me to notice how several of the established photographers and naturalists on the group received nothing but fulsome praise. There was hardly any useful feedback for these folks. Now this is a problem. How does someone with expertise grow and learn if they receive no feedback?

At ThoughtWorks, we have our heroes in people like Ola Bini, Martin Fowler and Jim Highsmith. That doesn't stop us however from sharing our views openly with them, even if we're at odds with how they think. That's what makes the ThoughtWorks community so awesome. Think about where your community suffers from hero worship. If so, you need to fix that soon.

Boorish behaviour

Some months back, I wrote an article about behaviour on social media. A respectful community handles disagreement and feedback respectfully. Often people will say or do things that may or may not be correct in our opinion. It's crucial though that we convey our opinions in a manner that doesn't undermine someone's intelligence and doesn't humiliate them on a public forum. Let me explain.

A few days back one of the members on a naturalists' forum mentioned how he'd attracted a crested bunting by throwing food grains and then lying in wait to snag a photograph. One of the more experienced members of the forum was furious with this. Baiting is generally a frowned upon practice amongst naturalists and for good reason too. The experienced member laid into the photographer and gave him a public dressing down on the forum.

I felt a bit odd about that angry response. I wrote back to this person explaining that while the actions were wrong, the photographer perhaps didn't mean any harm. I explained that by berating someone in public he'd not only insulted that individual, but made the community environment unsafe for genuine, well intentioned mistakes. After all, mistakes are a great way to learn!

Thankfully the experienced member understood my point and immediately wrote back on the group apologising for his outburst and explaining why he felt strongly about the concept of baiting for photography. I'm pretty sure this made the original poster feel a lot better. This was a story that had a happy ending, but a lot of such stories end with just bad behaviour that goes unnoticed. If you're running a community, this is something to be aware of. Remember - good, respectful behaviour creates a safe environment for people to contribute and learn from their mistakes. It also creates a healthy environment to share feedback.

Hoarding over sharing

If you're a member on any wildlife forums, you'll see a lot of people sharing photographs with copyright notices that look like this:

"Copyrighted by _____________ and may not be used in any form,website or print media without written permission of the Photographer.For any enquiry for the photographs please contact _______________."

You know my views about this. Communites are about sharing and restrictive copyrights are about hoarding in the hope of maximising value for an individual. They have no place in learning communities. I'm amazed why people even bother posting restrictively copyrighted work on online forums. Is it just to tease people with a 'see, don't touch' approach from museum culture? Are these contributors so full of their own work that they believe they're better than all of the awesome, successful people who make money despite sharing freely?

This is a simple problem to solve, and yet something that's not easy. It takes talking to people individually, and high standards for sharing in the community. It's quite easy to ignore, but in my opinion this is a stink to watch out for in just about any community.

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Over the next few weeks I want to try a few different articles on this blog. In particular I want to focus on photography for elearning media. I've been experimenting with photography over the last few years or so and I wouldn't mind helping elearning professionals select gear, understand the technology behind phototgraphy and play around with the composition and post processing. While I've almost made up my mind to do a series on this, I'd like to know if you think this could be a valuable thing to cover on this blog. I look forward to hearing from you - either on this post or on any other channels you're connected to me on. Until next week, happy learning!

Setting up a learning community? Consider this.

You've perhaps noticed that I haven't posted in a while and frankly I have no excuse. I'm just slacking off - it's a bad thing to do as a blogger, but I must confess that my participation in the real world is affecting my contribution to the virtual world. For those interested in news about me - I'm back China now and I'm unsure how that'll again affect my Internet usage. In the mean time though there's really no reason for me to not share what I've learnt about learning over the last month or so. In today's blogpost I want to share some epiphanies I've had as a consequence of my experiences over the last month or so. These are only theories and I'd love to know what you think about the validity of these thoughts.

There's no pace better than your own pace

I'm the kind of guy that tour guides hate. I meet them with a "No" almost each time. There's a part of me that likes exploring places at my own pace. I must say though, that I've developed this tendency through my prior experience with tour guides. Tour guides have the tendency to give their standard spiel regardless of who they're with. Often this is a mouthful about the history of the place full of facts, dates and information that I struggle to remember. In the end I remember only the highlights, which are usually signposted by tourism authorities near the monuments themselves. When in China, I just got myself several pages of information on each of the sites I was planning to visit and carried them along with me on my iPad. When I thought I needed more information, I pulled out my iPad and found what I needed. From the perspective of learning and recollection, I found this to be a more effective, tailored approach than following a tour guide's pace and narration. I wonder if there's something in their about learning in general. Do we really need teachers and trainers for most learning? If most knowledge is in the public domain and people have the motivation to learn, do we really need the trainers as middlemen? I don't think the role of a trainer or teacher is dead but I do think these roles need some redefinition.

Empathy is a big connector in group work

There was a point in China, where I was really depressed. Despite all the great sights and colourful culture, I think the language barrier had just gotten to me. Plus my iPad had gotten stolen, so my easiest way of communicating with the rest of the world was lost too. I think I'd hit a brick wall with how much I was willing to do all by myself. By my last weekend in China I think I was well and truly at that brick wall. When I look back at the few really memorable days in China, it was perhaps the nights that my Chinese colleagues took me out for dinners; hanging out with Dave Worthington, Anita and Adam who were foreign ThoughtWorkers like me in China and hiking the Great Wall with Emily Ghan, a fellow tourist who I befriended. I think in several of the situations the feeling of empathy was the glue that made the activity hold together. My Chinese colleagues displayed a sense of empathy towards my situation as a first time China traveler and took me put for some of the most fantastic meals of my life. Emily and I had a sense of empathy towards each other as we chatted away about China, India and our hike on the Great Wall. Even when I cramped up and fell, Emily was nice enough to give me a helping hand. And I had the best times with Adam, Anita and Dave because well, we had so much in common as foreigners working in China. Going through bucket loads of chicken wings with them was such a great experience! Now that I'm back in the country with a team of my own, I can't tell you how enjoyable the experience is. We have two Mandarin speakers in the team and four of us are of non-Chinese origin. That's a great mix to connect to the culture and learn about it while having a group that can be empathetic to each other's situations. As we look at technology to connect people, I wonder how we bring together the empathy glue that truly helps people engage with each other. There is a point where just being self driven isn't enough, is it?

Strong ties are crucial for the success of a social network

I'm running a few little communities on Facebook. Two of these communities are quite interesting. One of them is a photographers group and another a group of naturalists. If you go to the Naturalist's group, it's buzzing with activity. On the other hand, the photographers group is a bit quiet. I don't believe that the photographers are any less inclined to sharing than the naturalists, but here's the deal. The core of the naturalists' group is a set of us that share a great friendship and have extremely strong ties. While there's part of the article I disagree with,  Malcolm Gladwell wrote sometime back as to how at the centre of revolutions and high risk activism you need people with strong ties. I suspect there's something similar with online communities too. It's tough, though not unprecedented to build communities on the basis of weak ties and acquaintances alone. On the other hand, communities with a core of people with strong ties is a lot more likely to attract and support weak acquaintances. Something for us to investigate further and think about as we spawn newer communities.

There's still nothing that beats the real world

One of the reasons the naturalists group has a lot to talk about, is because we a lot of us meet very regularly for nature trails and birdwatching expeditions. Every trip has a trip report that follows and requests for identifying birds, butterflies, insects, plants and fungi that we couldn't recognise. This heartbeat ritual ensures a regular channel for communication in addition to the adhoc collaboration on the group.  Had it not been for the real world activity, we would have had nothing to discuss in that forum. This is where the photography group suffers - we have little in common in terms of shared experience and while photo critique is an interesting activity every now and then, the lack of common context makes a big difference. There's something to be said about the value of real world meetings and activities, don't you think?

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So, I've tried to give you my view on these theories of mine. Now it's your turn. What do you think about these theories? If you agree how do you think they influence the way you design communities and learning experiences? If you disagree, what's your view?

A tale of two photographs

I know I haven't posted this week. That's because I wanted to spend some time on my photography. So here's what I've decided - why don't I post something about my experience this week? I took a couple of photographs this week and I thought I learnt something from each of them. Neither of them are awesome snaps since I kinda took them in trying situations and of course, I'm always learning about the craft. I think though that some of my introspection may be of interest to the at least those of you interested in photography. Let me tell you a bit about each photo.

The new urban raptor

Photo here.
The Shikra or Little Banded Goshawk is a primarily a forest and farmland raptor. It's quite uncommon to see them in urban environs, especially residential areas. However, in recent months Shikras are becoming quite a regular if not common sighting in the city. My theory is that we may be seeing a rise in the number of rodents and the Shikras potentially are attracted to the food source. I'm no biologist though, so I can well be wrong. Now to this photograph. This is a juvenile, who came and sat right next to my balcony when I was sipping on some late evening tea - ready to head out for a run with my dog. I took this photo at f/5.6, 1/50 and ISO 1600. Here are some lessons I learnt:

• You never know when your next photo opportunity will arrive. A state of readiness is quite important. When I saw the bird, I was able to jump into the house, pick up my camera and get out to shoot in 30 seconds. If your camera is not at arms length, you're most likely to rue lost opportunities.
• Your camera is a great feedback tool. I was initially set to shoot at ISO 400. In fading light, that led to a really impossible shutter speed for hand-holding my 100-400mm lens. I kept looking through the viewfinder to adjust the ISO to a point where I was able to finally get a manageable shutter speed.
• Your subject deserves proper attention. While you could say this is a satisfactory shot, I actually missed a really good shot. I saw the bird fidgeting and I thought I should change the camera orientation to get a frame filling portrait. In the split second that I was trying to compose a length shot, the Shikra exposed it's beautiful belly markings, spread it's wings and took off. Had I not bothered about the new orientation, and tried to read the bird's body language, I would have had a much better shot to show you. Sometimes composition can be secondary to understanding your subject. Post processing can often help with composition, especially in nature photography.
• Calmness is a great virtue. I think I got too excited to see a Shikra at such close range in my colony. As a result I wasn't breathing right, I wasn't thinking clearly and I didn't balance myself well. If you blow up the image, you'll notice that there's a bit of blur and it's not really the nicest picture. Photography is like a sport - you need to have the right stance, you need to breathe normally and balance your posture. The clearer your thought process, the better you capture your subject (or so I guess).

The lovable neighbourhood owl

Photo here.
The Barn Owl is probably one of the most common species of owls across the world. Extremely social birds, these are mostly nocturnal and I can't ever remember seeing them in the day. They have little fear of humans and often make their homes in apartment complexes, roofs of mansions, tree hollows and of course, barns. I have a family of five owls staying on top of the last house in my lane. I see them every night, but they tend to stay in the shadows and my attempts at photographing them have generally been quite bad. This time however, I saw this guy when running with my dog. He was sitting on the tree opposite the house and the street light was illuminating the scene partially. I ran back home, picked up my camera and kept praying all this while that he'd still be sitting in the same place when I got back. Here are a few of things I learnt from this photo:

• The onboard flash isn't a bad tool at some times. Now this isn't a great photo, but it's good enough for me to help people recognise the bird. The light was poor, I don't own any other lighting - shining a flashlight would have just made the bird fly away. I had to make a compromise and use the flash. At the end of the day, it's what saved the picture and at least I have something to tell a story around.
• Manual focus is not scary. Autofocussing in that light was a nightmare. When there's no contrast with visible light in the scene, cameras struggle to autofocus on the right subject. I turned that off and manually locked onto this guy. The advantage was that I not only could get my focus spot on, I could also lock it in and shoot in a burst. Other situations where I've found this useful is where I'm really treading the line of minimum focussing distance - auto focus can sometimes go right through the subject. Manual focus comes in real handy in those spots as well.
• Knowing the photo you want helps in a big way. I knew I had no photos of the barn owl to show anyone, so I've been looking out for opportunities everyday. My gear is always in the living room, so I can always get it quickly and shoot. Every day when I get back home, when I leave for work, when I run my dog, I look for these guys. Whenever the opportunity presents itself I know I'll be out there shooting. I still don't have quite the picture I want, but I know that if I stay focussed I can get there at some point.

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I usually don't post much about photography since I'm so much a learner at this - but these photos are such great learning moments for me that I just couldn't help sharing my thoughts. Hope they made sense - do let me know what you think.

I'm sorry, education is a scam

My friend's daughter got accused of being ADHD a few weeks back. My colleague Dinesh is keen to take his son Aravind out of school. My friend Sandeep is trying to build software that recognises every child to be a unique individual with their own little achievements. I see a growing sentiment in my friends circle about the current state of education and it's impact on young minds. I don't have a kid, but I can only dread being a kid in this climate. It's a hostile environment that teaches kids to master a curriculum but not to learn. It makes kids competitive but teaches them very little about collaborating, about being better citizens, better people. I have a few thoughts about education and I want to share them with you - it's a real scam.

What is this model based on?

"If Isaac Newton had done YouTube videos on calculus, I wouldn't have to. " - Salman Khan

We've predicated our model of education on a system that presupposes that kids need to go to school to gain knowledge. It is based on the assumption that knowledge is scarce and you need an expert to dole it out. Except the person who your kid learns from is not really an expert. That person is a middleman. Knowledge is not scarce anymore. You could learn the guitar from a really successful, best selling artist. Using your computer. Not in school. Actually, you couldn't learn from the best selling artist in school. School is really a bit of a deterrent when it comes to learning from an expert. Yet, school is still all about that old model which isn't true anymore. Kids can learn sitting at home, using a service like Khan Academy. School doesn't teach people what our ancestors learnt - applying knowledge to the real world. School instead is preparing people only to clear the next exam.

Life skills? Not a chance?

Success is in the doing. And failures are celebrated and analyzed. Problems become puzzles and obstacles disappear. - Gever Tulley

My nephew is 12 years old. He ranks first in class each year. Awesome eh? More information - he is overweight, he plays no sports, he can't have a real world conversation beyond his textbooks and couldn't survive if his parents were away for even a couple of days. Is that what education is supposed to mean? What about experiencing life and learning real life skills? Where are the tinkering schools of the world? Why isn't every school helping children learn like Diana Laufenberg does?

We learn to succeed despite education

Children quickly learn to navigate and go in and find things which interest them. And when you've got interest, then you have education. - Arthur C. Clarke

I work in a job that I never received any formal education for. I'm quite happy about that frankly. Let me give you an example so you understand why. In school I was deeply interested in plants, animals and birds. But to tell you the truth, the biological names and academic knowledge behind them was of little interest to me. I could spend hours at Alipore zoo admiring the animals in my backyard but to remember a tiger as Panthera Tigris was beyond me. Unfortunately to have an education in nature, I needed to cut up frogs, fish and cockroaches in the lab which I avoided like the plague. I quit biology studies in 11th grade because I just couldn't take it anymore. Why couldn't I just learn about natural history as I do today? I've learnt more about birds and animals as an adult than I did with formal education in school. To me, my self-supervised hours in the field mean a lot more than the supervised hours I had in school. I got educated out of my interests in school and it's no wonder that I'm my current job is miles from what I actually studied to be. Children are wonderful - they have the natural ability to learn if left to their own interests, the internet and the resources they'll need to support their passion. Sugata Mitra's hole in the wall project proves it.

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Current schools depress me. There's great thinking in various circles about the future of education, but we're not there yet. And it troubles me that my nephews and nieces, my friends' children and kids I care for may have to go through a generation of poor education. I wonder how this'll change - I'm very cynical about this whole scam we call education. I wonder what you think. Especially if you're in India, I'd love to hear your thoughts.