Today Nick and I spent some of the day at the Wired Sussex Media Jobs & Skills fair manning the Madgex stand.  This is a new event for me, having missed previous years, and I have to say I rather enjoyed it.  There was a good presence of local companies, and some good representation of support for freelancers (such as the Farm, the Werks and the Skiff), and of course Wired Sussex were out in force.

Madgex are currently only recruiting for a Global Sales Director and so we weren't really present from a recruitment perspective, more from the position of reminding the local community that we are still around and active, and to share our experiences of working in the media sector, and what the various job roles we have actually involve on a day-to-day basis.  Weekly, internally to Madgex (although hopefully coming soon to the lab site), I produce a newsletter listing all of the community events I've tracked down from around Brighton, Sussex and London which seem to be relevant to the team.  Today we produced a special list of these for the next 7 days to distribute to anyone interested, which allowed us to introduce people to some of the more active, and frequent local events like Flash Brighton, UX Brighton etc

I spoke to a wide variety of different people today, from sixth form college students, to people finishing their MAs in Digital Media, to java developers, to freelance designers, to Adam from Garage Studios (who taught my flash course), to one of the ladies from City College who oversees the NVQ I'm doing, to a business coach, to creative writers and film-makers.  I enjoyed talking to them all, suggesting events, or people that they could or should talk to, and I even managed to get a few plugs in for my Brighton Bloggers site, so am hopeful I'll see a flurry of new add requests soon.

All in all it felt like a good event, enabling me to practice my networking skills with a more diverse group of people than I usually meet.  Of particular benefit to me was the opportunity to talk to Sixth Form students, and BA/MA students and get feedback from them on how they see the world of media evolving and understand more about what their various courses actually involve.  Thanks Wired Sussex, I hope to be back next year.

I've been refactoring one of our projects today, and one of the areas I've been working on has been reducing 5 or 6 similar stored procedures into 1 more generic version.  In doing this, I've had to add a couple of nullable parameters, one of which is a GUID.  

If it is specified, then I need to set an AssignedToUser column to be the GUID, and I also need to record the date of the assignment.  I can do this all within the UPDATE statement, but I needed to only affect the assignment date when the GUID is specified.  Enter the ISNULL function, but what do I set my default value to when it is null? I really wanted to create a known GUID without hardcoding a fixed GUID - a SQL equivalent of Guid.Empty.  A quick bit of googling and I came up with

SELECT CAST(CAST(0 as BINARY) AS UNIQUEIDENTIFIER)

which evaluates to 

00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000

Job done, and recorded here so I can find it next time I need it

Another meeting with Dawn, my NVQ assessor today.  I'd completely forgotten about it until 15 minutes before she was due to arrive so spent a frantic 10 minutes formatting and printing out the reflective accounts and descriptions I'd written - thankfully I'd spent a couple of hours the other week doing some preparation so I didn't have to write things on the fly.  She greeted me with some great news - the first 2 of my modules D1 and D6 have been approved and are officially completed.  Hurrah!

My evidence for module A2 is amassing, and apart from the fact that I forgot to print out one of my descriptions, and didn't finish another I'm well on the way to getting that completed.  With a bit of luck, and another few hours work I should be able to send another one if for assessing.  The most useful aspect of this module was sitting down and doing a SWOT analysis.  I've never been very good at setting myself goals, and haven't prioritised it so being forced/encouraged to do one was really good.  No big surprises in it really, but good to see all of it down on paper to help me to improve myself to get over my weaknesses and play to my strengths.  As Dawn said it comes in really handy in an interview situation to have a really well thought out answer to the inevitable "what are your biggest strengths and weaknesses" question.  It'll stop me having to fall back on my age old, answer of "biggest weakness is interviews".

All in all, a really positive meeting.

At Madgex I have the opportunity to talk to people about photography, even though it isn't related to my day job.  I occasionally run training sessions or workshops to share my passion with others.  I enjoy doing this as it makes me think in a different way - I often find explaining needs a deeper understanding than just doing.  I'm not the most talented photographer in the company, but I want to learn more, and by teaching I do just that.  In November I ran the first of a new style of workshop - this was challenge based.  It consisted of 2 parts, the first setting the scene, and issuing a challenge (in this case taking photos where the main colour of the image was one of the Madgex colours - you can see Kevin's submissions here) and the second reviewing the submissions.  Amongst the feedback from the attendees of the session was that there was too large a gap between the people who had high end cameras, and those using their iPhones or low end digital cameras, and also that those who had an aptitude for photoshop had an advantage.  When I started thinking about my 2nd workshop, and what the challenge would be I took these into account. 

Today, I issued the new challenge, this was partially inspired by this blog post which I read some point last year.  I'd bought 2 identical disposable cameras (Kodak Fun Flash 27+12 for those who want the exact details) to be shared between the 8 attendees (somewhere between 9 and 10 shots each).  I then issued them with a list of 8 items to take photographs of (inspired by lomokev's hot shots course) and as they like an element of competition, some scoring element.  

So, the photos:

1. a number
2. something taken from ground level
3. a Brighton landmark
4. something red
5. a dog
6. shoes (this one is in tribute to lomokev and his fine collection of shoes and feet photographs)
7. street art
8. the person you're handing the camera over to

And the scoring:

Basics:

• 1 point per picture that matches the brief

Bonus Points:

• 1 bonus points for doing them all in order
• 2 bonus points if you can manage a theme that runs through all 8 of your images
• 1 bonus point if your picture is judged to be the best of that category by me
• 1 bonus point if you use only 8 exposures rather than the allowed 9

Penalty Points:

• Lose 1 point per day you're late handing your camera over to the next person
• Lose 1 point if the last photo of your set isn't the person you're handing over to
• Lose 1 point per extra exposure over your allotted 9 you use
• Lose 20 points if you break or lose the camera

The intention is to get everyone thinking more before they press the shutter, to really commit to the image they are attempting to capture.  Having been "playing with" film cameras for the past year I've begun to appreciate how much more focussed I am in what I take with film than when shooting digitally.  I also hope that this takes away the concern about equipment and allows them to focus on composition and colours rather than technicalities.  I'm really excited to see what they come up with and manage to produce, and despite the initial look of mild shock on their faces, I'm hoping that they really engage with it and enjoy this challenge.

As a fervent photographer of my dog, Skitters, I was interested to stumble across the article How to take amazing photos of your dog the other day.  It covers both recommended equipment, and a selection of shots to try.  Some of these I've got examples of amongst my 305 Skitters photos.  Others I have yet to try.  For my own reference I thought I'd list the recommended positions, and post example Skitters photos where I have them.  All of them are useful and good techniques for getting a more unusual shot of your 4 legged friend.

Position yourself low

Fill the frame by getting closer

Use a wide aperture

Take lots of shots

Forget standard camera-holding techniques

I need to work on this one!

As with my review of the eyemodule, this review was originally on the janeandrichard site and dates from early 2001.

The Review

During our trip to the Maldives, we used underwater disposable cameras to take photos of fishes. These came out reasonably well, but weren't of wonderful quality. So, we decided to invest in a proper underwater camera. We'd also been carrying a small panoramic camera around with us, which again didn't produce all that good quality images. So, an APS camera appeared to be the ideal solution. Ironically, we haven't had the opportunity to take it snorkelling since.

We bought the Weathermatic camera at Heathrow Airport as we left the UK for a long weekend in Iceland. It was the only waterproof APS camera we could find at the time. Although for the trip to Iceland we didn't need a waterproof camera, one that was weatherproof and didn't object to being dropped in the snow was a good idea.

The photos it produces are of a pretty high standard, and we've had no problems with it in the 2 years we've had the camera.

The specification claims that it can go underwater to a depth of around 10 metres (we've taken it down in swimming pools, and lakes and things to 3 or so metres and it has been okay).

The controls are designed to be easy to use underwater, and this also makes them quite easy to use with gloved hands. Of course, this makes the camera quite bulky (and also, being bright yellow it isn't subtle).

We're in no rush to replace this camera, and it is used as our main camera for all events.