WAA Trailer 2 – 16×9 from NSC Creative on Vimeo.

We are astronomers

On a recent visit with my kids to the Leicester Space Museum, we all watched, and were very impressed by an animated film they made and show there called “We are Astronomers“. I can heartily recommend seeing it because it is a truly remarkable film, dealing with us, space, the vastness of the universe and the people who work all this stuff out and explain it to us. It’s shown in a 360° domed theatre, so your seat tilts back like a dentists chair. Not surprisingly  the trailer doesn’t do justice to the experience of seeing it live.

The state of the internet

Another film of a different kind, but still pretty remarkable for the size of the data that generated it is, The state of the Internet by Jesse Thomas. I had the same kind of feeling watching this because we are all, through the use of the internet, generating astronomical numbers of pages, sites, emails and tweets.

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo.

Chemistry stencil free vector download

Gone but not forgotten

Many years ago at school I had a cool stencil which enabled me to create and illustrate elaborate chemistry experiments. I remembered this when I needed chemical shapes for a job recently. A search of the internet produced no usable results, so I spent the morning recreating the stencil in Illustrator and decided to offer the file as a download for anyone else to use.

It’s free to use but if you feel like linking to this site that would be appreciated.

Free Download

• EPS File can be downloaded from Mediafire (430k)

Links:

• Kiel Johnson
• www.theojemison.com
• Pinhole photos taken with the camera

Northampton University Website screenshot

Images on websites

Northampton University are using some of my pictures on the front page of their website. In this instance, to promote the clearing process for next year’s cohort of students. The images being used were part of a commission to provide good quality pictures of the Library and its users.

Flickr images can get you noticed

My Flickr account has been contacted on several occasions with people asking to use images. Some I have allowed and some I haven’t. Most of the requests don’t involve any money being offered. Because someone may recognise your genius,  does not mean that they are willing to pay for it, especially as there are another thousand genii (that’s the plural I looked it up) on the next Flickr page. Having said that, my friend got a couple of quid from Pizza Hut for the use of this image, which was taken on a little point and shoot, so there is some money to be made.

Babble.com liked the cut of my jib

website screenshot

It was via this serendipitous Flickr path that Babble.com were sourcing images for their website. Lauren, an intern, contacted me to ask, very politely, if they could use this image. Now I like this image – it’s my son doing Kung Fu, leaping off the sofa. I have good memories of taking it, as we were playing a game which involved me being stationary while he rained down the pain and I just managed to sneak in a little camera gear testing at the same time. So the picture has sentimental value to me. But what’s the market value?  Well, It was already on show to the public on Flickr for free so, after reading the proposed article, I agreed to let them use it for nothing. It was a win-win situation as far as I was concerned. They illustrated their article, my son thought he was known as a famous Kung Fu expert in America and told everyone at his school, and I got a little kick from seeing it in “print”, a blog entry, and good Karma out of it.

You can still see the article on the babble website.

Creative Commons

There is a alternative solution for image rights called Creative Commons (CC) that you can use to distribute your work into the public domain. It’s an alternative to “all rights reserved” copyright, sometimes referred to as “some rights reserved” or “copyleft“. Flickr organises this for you and CC comes in a few flavours on their site. You can specify commercial, non commercial, attribution, derivative or distribute restricted licenses to users. If you have images that you might want to distribute in this way you too may find yourself in “print” on the web.

Links

• Flickr creative commons information
• creativecommons.org

Design for Book Week poster - Read, Write and Blue

Engaging children in reading, before JK Rowling came along, was always a bit hit and miss. Over the last few years I have worked on a variety of reading promotions including themed Book Weeks. Here I offer some of the material I’ve produced in conjunction with these events.

The promotional material here was designed to appeal to school children aged 11-18.  Some years we specifically targeted sub groups such as boys with the ‘Get Booked’ campaign which featured football hardmen Vinnie Jones and Roy Keane discussing their favourite literature.

One theme, entitled, ‘Would like to Meet”,  engaged and challenged the viewer to work out which literary character was placing lonely heart adverts in the local paper. These themes proved very popular and helped in planning and guiding the course of other events such as  quizzes and competitions held during the week.

“Our best themes were slightly risque and had an air of ambiguity about them, which would cause quite a stir among the students (and the staff) We did not want the tame and sometimes slightly corny slogans which seem to pervade the national psyche when it comes to young people and reading.”
(Librarian Charlotte Smith)

Poster Gallery:

[Show as slideshow]

All material was backed up with Book Week Websites which have been archived online.

This current picture is from early high ISO tests I did with the Canon 5DMkII. Actual image is called “Leaves and Lights” can be seen on Flickr.

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