Your Shot and National Geographic

I love taking photographs, experimenting with my camera and learning more about the different settings that can help to make-or-break your image. Sometimes I find that I battle to know what to take photos of. This is where National Geographic come in. They have this great platform that lets you share your pictures with others, it's called Your Shot. 

The reason I like this platform is that they post Assignments and Stories. The Assignments allow photographers and regular people like you and me, to submit their images to the assignment. They all have a theme or title and this helps to focus the type of picture that you submit. The editor for the assignment usually posts one introductory piece of writing, indicating what he or she is looking for and then throughout the course of the assignment they post a few updates, giving even more hints, tips and indications of what works for them and what is getting old. Once the assignment is closed, the editor takes some time to pick a few favourites and the final Story is then posted, along with the editors top pics picks. 

I find having an assignment in mind really helps me to have something specific in mind when I go out to take pictures. Sometimes having a reason, such as an assignment, to go and take pictures is just what I need to motivate me and push me out of my comfort zone. I also love going through the submissions of others and challenging myself to try something new.

They're currently running an assignment on Unexpected Discoveries and I submitted this pic - what do you think?

Here are a few of my other favourites from that same session:

Cape Weaver doing what weavers do best

A similar look of surprise to my National Geographic Unexpected Discoveries submission

Hiding from the camera? Or perhaps just in need of a good scratch? Who knows...

Have You Heard About HeForShe

You know, feminism hasn't been something that I've felt strongly about before. I've never needed to because that fight was fought for me and I have benefited from the results of past feminist movements. I've been privileged enough to be brought up in an environment where I was not limited because of my sex. I went to a school that encouraged women to be strong and independent and go-getters. I didn't have to fight to study an engineering degree. I worked in the maintenance department of a factory and I was lucky enough to never have been made to feel that my femaleness was a disadvantage, instead I became the in-house "expert" on some of our systems.

However, I recently watched Emma Watson give a talk on a campaign that UN Women have launched, called HeForShe. It struck a chord with me and has made me think. It has made me think so many thoughts that I can't even begin to pin them down in one post. Instead, like Emma, I am going to appeal to you - my readers, my friends, my family, male, female, young, old. To sign up for this campaign and start taking ALL gender inequality seriously. (In the mean time, I will carry on ordering my thoughts so that I can share them with you when I've figured them out!)

To find out more, watch Emma's speech below. 

Finally, now that you've watched Emma's speech, I am going to use the words of my friend Claire, who has summed this up much better than me:

"So if you haven't already, head along to the HeforShe website and sign up. Or don't. But do take a look at the awesome map. So far only 494* men from South Africa have signed up. Yes, many people don't have internet access, and yes, many men do not want to be spammed with emails, but this is not just for women. It's for equality. Something definitely worth being spammed for."

* This was up to 555 by the time I had signed up. Hopefully it's grown even more by the time you read this!

Global Collaboration

Remember that time I was lucky enough to go to Italy for work? Well, since then I've been working closely with an multi-disciplinary, multi-company team in order to specify and define the requirements for a project that is going to span different continents and use a combination of our system and a system designed by another company. 

This has required a lot of calls. At any one time, there will be people from at least 2 different continents (and usually more) sitting around our virtual table. English isn't always everyone's first language and while the conference calling facility we've used has been generally reliable, we have sometimes run into problems such as the ones illustrated in the two videos in this post.

There are a few things that I've learnt while being part of this project:

• You need to make sure that everyone is on the same page.
  
• Internet calls allow for some great collaboration (however, sometimes that isn't enough and face-to-face meetings are more productive).
  
• Dial in to your calls at least 5-10 minutes early so that, if you have problems connecting, you can address them before the meeting.
  
• The "mute" buttons are really useful, but don't forget that while you are talking with your colleagues "silently" the meeting is carrying on for everyone else so pay attention to what is being said over the connection.
  
• Keep your language as simple and clear as possible, especially when English is not the mother tongue of some of the attendees.
  
• Screen sharing is useful. But sometimes it's easier to just have everyone open up the document being talked about on their own computers.
  
• A single point to save all working documents is important.
  
• Keeping detailed meeting minutes is, quite probably, the most important activity during your calls.
  
• Using on-line collaboration tools is great and can help make work run smoothly.
  
• Have an idea of what needs to happen next (eg next planning stage, other meetings, important activities) and at the relevant time start confirming that these activities have started and time they will complete.

Meeting Minutes Tips

Manual Meeting Minutes

When you're trying to plan something that involves multiple parties and discussions and follow ups, keeping accurate meeting minutes is probably one of your most important activities. 

I know that most people know this. If you're anything like the me-6-months-ago, you would know and understand why meeting minutes are important, but not really have a good idea of what constitutes good meeting minutes and how to go about managing them. 

Luckily, in the last 6 months, I have been able to observe and learn from a pro meeting-minute taker and project manager (let's call him Minute-Man for the purposes of this post). 

Here are things that I've learnt from Minute-Man:

• Not only are meeting minutes important, but so is communicating the minutes to all relevant parties who couldn't make the meeting (either via a separate call and/or including them on the mail of the meeting minutes).
• Use your minutes to track who is responsible for what - then FOLLOW UP a few days later with a mail.
• When you're not sure where the conversation is going, use phrases like "Sorry guys, I'm battling to follow where we are going with this point." or
  "I'm a bit confused as to what needs to be done here. Are there any specific actions that we need to note down or possible follow up discussions that need to take place?"
• Keeping time is important.
• If you see you are starting to go over the allotted time, check with everyone to see if they can carry on for an extra half hour or so, or if another meeting needs to be scheduled for a later stage.
• Refer to previous minutes to check up on previous actions.
• Before the meeting, have a basic agenda and discussion topics listed down and add notes to them as the meeting progresses.
• Use coloured highlights to note attendance and actions.
• Sometimes you need to have the same meeting with a second group of parties if you need their input on certain aspects of the project.
• Label you minutes in a logical way. For example if you have a weekly update meeting label them something like 01 - Update Meeting 18 Sept. Create a special folder where you keep the Update Meeting minutes.
• Lastly, be cheerful and upbeat (and mean it!) - you can hear it in the persons voice, and when the voice is the only thing you can interact with for a person, it makes a huge difference!
• Use words like DONE and OPEN to note the status of actions as you go through them.

If you are needing a place to start - you can check out an example of meeting minutes below. You can also download my meeting minutes template and use that as a starting point for your own meeting minutes. Happy minuting!

Example Meeting minutes: 02 - Planning Meeting
Meeting Minutes template*: Meeting Minutes Template

* If the page tells you it can't display this document, don't worry, it's because it's saved as a Microsoft Office Template file. Download it, when you open it, it will open as a document that you can then save in doc format and not template format.

Conference Call Reality

Part of my job involves conference calls. And when I say conference calls I don't mean a half hour catch up with my boss who is working from home. I mean 2-4 hour long discussions with people on multiple continents discussing 
requirements and brainstorming useful functionality for clients. 

If you take part in conference calls as a normal part of your working life, I'm sure you'll appreciate this as much as my whole office did when we were shown this clip a few weeks ago!

And, just for fun, another clip on what happens when you're trying to specify something using concepts that people don't fully understand...
The caption reads "Funny business meeting illustrating how hard it is for an engineer to fit into the corporate world!" which is pretty accurate as well.

How To Take Pictures Of The Moon

This weekend was a good one. I finally found time to go shopping for a tripod and found one that I really liked (yay!). Then I had to wait until night time so that I could test out my tripod and finally figure out how to take pictures of the moon! 

I spent some time playing around with different settings and totally by accident finally found a combination that worked! You can take a look at the pictures below, I've included the settings that I used to take each shot so that you can test out the same thing with your own camera.

To take these pictures I used my Nikon D3100 DSLR and my 55-200mm lens. In some of the below pictures, I cropped the images to give you a closer view of the moon - which still gives a good quality picture.

Aperture: F5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/3
ISO: 450
White Balance: Incandescent B4, G4

Aperture: F5.6
Shutter Speed: 4
ISO: 100
White Balance: Incandescent B4, G4

Aperture: F32
Shutter Speed: 1/6
ISO: 200
White Balance: Cloudy B2,M2

Aperture: F32
Shutter Speed: 1/6
ISO: 200
White Balance: Cloudy A3,M2

Aperture: F29
Shutter Speed: 1/6
ISO: 200
White Balance: Cloudy B6,M6

Aperture: F32
Shutter Speed: 1/6
ISO: 200
White Balance: Cloudy B6,M6

Aperture: F32
Shutter Speed: 1/6
ISO: 200
White Balance: Cloudy A6,M6

Aperture: F32
Shutter Speed: 1/6
ISO: 200
White Balance: Cloudy A6,G6

Aperture: F32
Shutter Speed: 1/6
ISO: 200
White Balance: Cloudy B6,G6

Aperture: F32
Shutter Speed: 1
ISO: 100
White Balance: Cloudy 0,0

Aperture: F32
Shutter Speed: 1/10
ISO: 200
White Balance: Cloudy 0,0

Aperture: F32
Shutter Speed: 1/50
ISO: 200
White Balance: Cloudy 0,0

 So, in summary. If you would like to take a cool moon photo with your DSLR and you're not sure how to start, try these initial settings and then take it from there:

• Aperture: The F-stop number should be as large as possible. My largest F-stop is 32. (In other words the hole should be as small as possible).
• Your shutter speed should be around 1/6th - 1/50th of a second. 1 second gives you an overexposed image and anything shorter than 1/50th of a second and your moon will start looking like a ghost.
• ISO: should be a smaller number, rather than a larger number. Your ISO is the sensitivity of your sensor to the light, the lower the ISO, the less sensitive it is to light. 
• White Balance: in this case, a white balance of 0,0 is fine. I was playing around with the white balance settings and that is what let me take "coloured" pictures of the moon.

Other then cropping some of my images, I didn't do any other post image processing on them, so all the colours and effects are from playing with the different settings! 

The 7 Deadly Sins of Falling in Like: Epilogue

So, we've reached the end of our first guest post series. I hope that you've enjoyed this series as much as I have! If you missed all of the previous posts, scroll to the bottom of this post and follow the links before you read the epilogue. Finally, don't forget to like my facebook page if you would like to see more of Practical Cookie! Now, your epilogue...

Epilogue

And so those are the seven deadly sins. Read it, read it again and think about them. Think about them in others and yourself. Think about when it has all gone wrong and try to look back within the context of what I have just wrote about. I really hope it helps some of you out there. 

In the end the sins are nothing more than a tool to letting you be yourself. There really are no such things as reachers and settlers. There are just people who are in the right place and people who are in the wrong place, and, within and around that, people who are right for you and people who are wrong for you. It is sad how much the two get lost within each other. We all long to meet the right person in the right place, but maybe the right person in the wrong place really is worth fighting for.

I think over years I've lost a certain respect of the intelligence and insight of others. I had become so lost in how to get someone to like me, preparing for the worse and scrambling at avoiding that eventuality that the cycle became self-fulfilling. I failed first by never really taking the time to think through their own mind space and needs, and putting them before my own. Secondly I failed by never really given anyone the chance to just like me. 

Maybe I am too hard on myself. I have courage for days and an unquenchable ability to hope. At this time of life we should be allowed to like who we want to like, and spurn those who we want to spurn, but equally as much we should be allowed to fight for who we want to fight for. We need only be ruthless in questioning why we like someone, why we’ve spurned someone, and why we want to fight and how. 
In the end it is always in our own hands. There is always a path that would have worked out with a right person. We are responsible for the outcome, and, to quote Emerson, we should not weakly try to reconcile ourselves with the world. We are the captains of our fate. We are the masters of our souls.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

For those who managed to miss the entire series, here's a round-up of all of the Guest Posts for this series.

Intro
Sympathy
Relationship Perks
Grand Gestures
The Word Love
Guilty Cornering
Private Parts
Non-Verbal Leakage

* I have not been able to find the sources of all images used in this series to credit them properly, so if you see an image and it has not been properly credited, please let me know so I can give credit where credit is due.

The 7 Deadly Sins of Falling in Like: Non-Verbal Leakage

Last but not least, the 7th Deadly Sin of Falling In Like. Perhaps not something to be avoided at all times, but definitely something to be used with care!
If you missed the other posts in this series, click on the links below:
Intro, Sympathy, Relationship Perks, Grand Gestures, The Word Love, Guilty Cornering and Private Parts

Non-Verbal Leakage

I wanted to leave this sin to the last because I am really not entirely sold on it being completely bad. It is a tool, like any other, but a dangerous one that needs to be handled with care.

When the worse comes to worst, when the lines of communication break down and no matter how hard we try, no matter how pure the intention is or the message trying to be sent is, the point comes when there is just no way to get through. A lot of us get to this point and things get desperate. The two best options are to either give up, or dig deep. In and among these two paths are non-verbal leaks.

Instinctively, we will try to reach out in any way we can. Some try to going for sad song lyrics or melancholic reminiscing, some try to show how awesome they are. Plans are made, circumstances are tweaked, and friends are harassed. Drastic measures can be taken. A grand gesture is basically a massive non-verbal leak. Leaks can beg for sympathy, make someone feel guilty, or delve too deep into the idea of love, etc. 

The Great Gatsby

It is especially easy in the modern world of social media. Not often do we do anything online really without hoping there is one person in particular that will see it, even sub-consciously. The option is always tantalisingly close and sometimes it isn’t always wrong. I’m not even prepared to say it doesn’t work. And not saying anything can sometimes be just as much of a leak. 

The point I am trying to make is to be careful. There are a million ways a leak can be taken (that came out wrong), and it is important to remember that. There are better ways of doing things, maybe involving a partial non-verbal approach, but one done the right way. Mostly sit down, think step by step where things went wrong and why, think especially hard on whether this person is actually right for us. Pen down a revolutionary list of world saving guidelines, figure out the best time, place and way to communicate again normally, knowing that it might not work out again no matter how brilliant we are. This might be the best way to a second shot, but in the end unless we have shown appreciable effort into figuring out where things went wrong the first time and showing why and how we want to change, the shot won’t be worth the taking.