My 3 digital image sharing hats (with respect to Joanne deGroot's 500 hats)

Personal:

-share family event photos

-share personal event photos with absent family

-share photos of paintings with the world

-join Flickr watercolour artist groups 
-reference photos for paintings

Learning:

-building (PLN) learning networks with T-L Flickr groups

-studying the work of watercolour artists

-share comments with artists in my groups

Teaching:

-use to develop background knowledge with flickr visuals

-virtual shared experiences

-introduction to biomes, aboriginal peoples environment, country studies

-sharing school events

-virtual yearbook photo collection

-reference photos for electives watercolour students 

Note: I offer a watercolour painting course to grade 8 students in the library. As a result of my exploration of Flickr I created a gallery of pictures including a colour wheel, a palette of colours with paint tubes, and examples of watercolour paintings I found in the Flickr groups I follow. I was able to show slides of my own paintings and suggested we might create a gallery of student work. A collection of Flickr images of iris' and poppies helped students visualize the flowers for their floral paintings.

Grade 8 Watercolour Elective Flickr slide show

Foray further into flickr: Step Two

I have saved digital images of my paintings to Flickr, edited and saved my changes, created sets and made a gallery into a slide show. By making my photos public I can post a single photo, my gallery or a slide show from Flickr to my blog. Depending on the “look” you desire any of these easy to use Flickr tools work well.


My photostream includes a variety of my watercolour paintings as well as a photo of my studio.  I thought to add some Creative Commons watercolours to my photostream but they were mainly from State Libraries, the Smithsonian or the National Archives and were ancient and not in the style I am interested. I organized my paintings in three sets which allowed me to select specific photos to be added to my blog as a slide show.

I joined and requested to join Flickr watercolour groups where I have found many examples of landscapes, impressionism and other watercolour styles.

 I considered subscribing to one of the group feeds but the discussions I read were incomplete and irregularly used. I am able to upload three paintings (photos) each day to the group pool. The quality is something I will need to investigate because beside some of the other paintings mine look weak.  I read one discussion suggesting scanning rather than photographing your paintings.  I have added a small gallery of favourites from my flickr groups and upon closer inspection notice how some group members comment about the paintings by adding notes on the painting itself.


I explored a number of links to tools using Flickr images with some made available through Flickr. “The wealth of Flickr "toys" being developed is staggering. Many of these tools allow uploading of images or connection with a Flickr account.” (Troutner, 2008)  I played with Picnik editing and although some of the elements are extremely creative and fun I limited myself to cropping, colour adjustment, and framing my paintings. Flickr allows sharing through Voicethread, Facebook, Blogger, Tumblr, Twitter and email. A link to your photostream is available by grabbing, copying and pasting. 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/68282437@N04/


I especially enjoyed the Pop Art Poster “Warholizer” tool found on Big Huge Labs although I was unable to save the image through flickr and had to resort to an upload from my computer.

Gallery ONE Slideshow

Fumbling into Flickr: Step One

Online image storage was new to me. My first Flickr experience was one of frustration as registration for the free Web 2.0 tool requested none of my already existing email accounts but a new yahoo.com account. Not a real problem as I have adopted a small note book to keep track of my many Web 2.0 accounts, logins and passwords. Turn to F: there you will now find Flickr.
 That's me!

Next: To upload some photos (the free Flickr account allows 300 MB and  two videos each month –I am now at 5% of my 300 MB)...there were 60 plus photos taken with a cell phone camera. Once I had connected the camera to the computer...downloaded the software to connect camera to PC I was able to download the pictures to my computer and save them in a) my camera PMB program or b) in my Pictures Library. It seems that the cell phone program doesn’t talk to Flickr so I proceeded to move the pictures to the Picture Library to encourage better communication. Three hours later most of the pictures had been added to my new Flickr album.
The next time I considered photography for my Flickr album I investigated my camera and found a setting for “email” and used that setting (a smaller image size). I uploaded quickly and easily a set of photos of my art work.

When photos are uploaded to Flickr users are asked to tag them. These tags allow you to "connect your photos with other people's photos"(Richardson, 2009, p.101) and become part of the social Flickr network. I was able to organize the photos, add captions and tags and view my photos in an online format, deleting some which were not as clear as I would have liked and copying to a new set. I used the action menu of Flickr to edit the photos selecting edit photo in Picnik. Picnik is a program associated with Flickr that allows users to crop the photos, adjust colour, and add features such as text, stickers, seasonal effects and frames.
My first attempt using Flickr to share photos on my blog resulted in a collection of thumbnails and no slide show. Revisiting the Flickr site I found the share button allows ease of access to the embed code and by copying and pasting the code in Edit HTML I successfully created a slide show on my blog. One issue that needed to be dealt with was the notes added to the studio photo were no longer active in the slide show. So I added a single photo to the blog and explained in the text that notes were available by clicking on the photo.
See the Flickr gallery.