Tim Abbott

The Story of Everything

Thanks to Jonny Baker for flagging up this wonderful live animation of the big picture story of the Bible by Rich Oster.

[If you can't see the video or you're reading this via RSS click here.]

More background on this at CMS Pioneer Mission Leadership Training

I can see an immediate use for this as part of an RE day we're running soon.

Royalty free photo request

I received an email from a regional marketing company today asking for permission to use the above photograph that I'd taken of Colchester High Street with Christmas decorations which they'd spotted on Flickr. The purpose was for an email marketing piece and they asked if I would "permit us to use the following image rights free for this work only".

I replied;

I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'rights free' - do you mean 'royalty free'? As this is a commercial activity I'm sure you'll understand that it's only fair that I ask what budget you may have available for the use of images. I'd be happy to consider use of this image but it would be helpful to know a bit more about the intended use.

I am more than happy to grant permission for any of my photos to be used for non-commercial use and have done so on a number of occasions. But I'm concerned about a growing trend for commercial users to try to get photos for nothing by flattering people into allowing use of their images for the sheer 'honour' of attribution. If there's money changing hands somewhere in the process then it's only just that an appropriate proportion, according to the budget, goes to the content providers.

The reply I received was as follows;

Unfortunately whilst this is commercial activity there is no additional budget for imagery. Our entire imagery budget is utilised... on developing a stock library and as a result we have access to more than 30,000 images for free usage. Whilst it would be nice to feature your image, given its quality and relevance to the content, in this instance we do not have a budget to do so.

For the record, I'm not bothered about the money. I don't call myself "Tim Abbott Photography" and put watermarks on my photos on Flickr in the hope that someone will think my photos are worth something. But neither am I that excited by the prospect of having my photographs used for free by people who get paid to make use of them, so for this request my answer is "no".

However, in the event that someone wants to use one of my images for non commercial or charitable use I'm quite OK about that which is why they have a Creative Commons licence. Ask and I'll likely say yes.

Sex, Porn and Teenagers

Sex, Porn and Teenagers is a documentary on Radio 4 tonight at 8pm.

Writer and presenter Miranda Sawyer also has an article in The Guardian here. She concludes:

I wonder whether sex education classes shouldn't take more account of modern life. Knowing what a sperm and egg get up to in the privacy of their own boudoir is all very well, but understanding that if you let yourself be videoed having sex that film can be used against you is perhaps more useful. The fact is that some of today's teenagers are zooming straight past spin the bottle to specialist interest. And we aren't helping them learn how to deal with it.

I'm out at our termly Youth Leaders Gathering tonight, so I'll have to listen to the podcast.

h/t Sarah Smith Oasis Esteem

The Classroom Experiment

The Classroom Experiment is a two part programme coming up on BBC2 at 7pm on Monday 27th and Tuesday 28th September.

Professor Dylan Wiliam, deputy director of London University’s Institute of Education, gets to test his theories on a class of Year 8 students for a term with apparently surprising results. Not asking students to put their hands up, which tends to favour brighter more articulate young people, seems to be the attention grabbing headline, but there are other strategies that challenge conventional thinking and seem to have a positive effect.

Genuinely LEARNING to love yourself

Rachel, one of our interns, has posted an inspiring piece about Girls Aloud singer Nicola Roberts' journey of coming to terms with being pale skinned in an industry dominated by the perma-tan.

Genuinely LEARNING to love yourself

And in a PS to anyone who has been following my colleague Amy's blog, she has now renamed it to BelovedBlog to reflect the ministry to teenage girls that she and Rachel are developing here in Colchester. If you've been following on RSS you'll need to update the feed address.

Amy and Rachel are co-authoring the site which will continue to give updates about "Beloved" as well as other ideas and reflections on matters of body image and self esteem among young women.

tunein radio

 

I'm loving the tunein radio app for iPhone. It allows you to listen to, pause, rewind and record live radio.

Excellent news now that BBC 6 Music has been reprieved!

tunein radio - itunes link and web site

Wired predictions from the 90's

I was fascinated by this list of quotes from the first five years of Wired magazine, from May 93 to Dec 97, compiled by Kevin Kelly. His conclusion,

"all predictions of the future are really just predictions of the present."

There's variety here. With the benefit of hindsight, some are mildly bonkers, some are pontifications about things that would have been fairly obvious at the time and some are stabs at pop philosophy. Some predictions, however, seem to have become even more true with the passage of time.

My favourites:

• We as a culture are deeply, hopelessly, insanely in love with gadgetry. And you can't fight love and win. (May 93)
• Yesterday, we changed the channel; today we hit the remote; tomorrow, we'll reprogram our agents/filters. Advertising will not go away; it will be rejuvenated. (Feb 94)
• The scarce resource will not be stuff, but point of view. (Mar 94)
• Life is not going to be easy in the 21st century for people who insist on black-and-white descriptions of reality. (Nov 94)
• The very distinction between original and copy becomes meaningless in a digital world -- there the work exists only as a copy. (Dec 94)
• The future won't be 500 channels -- it will be one channel, your channel. (Mar 95)
• The human spirit is infinitely more complex than anything that we're going to be able to create in the short run. And if we somehow did create it in the short run, it would mean that we aren't so complex after all, and that we've all been tricking ourselves. (Nov 95)
• We have a predisposition in Western culture for "just do it," whereas, I think that part of the future will be built much more around "just be it." (Sep 96)

Body Image - 1

By now you've probably seen this image and the story behind it circulating on the web.

It is, allegedly, a Ralph Lauren ad featuring a ridiculously photoshopped model, Fillippa Hamilton. (Here she is on the Ralph Lauren web site looking relatively normal) As the image started circulating Lauren started issuing DMCA takedown notices to offenders (will they be calling here I wonder?)

Boing Boing has a full rundown of events.

Going after companies who posted the image inevitably invokes the Streisand Effect whereby an attempt to censor stimulates the multiplication of the information across the internet. Lauren subsequently admitted that they were indeed responsible for the "poor imaging and retouching" and that they have "addressed the problem".

There are a whole lot of unanswered questions, like, Who did the original artwork? and, Who signed off this image for publication? Surely no fashion house with the resources of RL would allow an image like this out by mistake. And no one seems to have been able to come up with the original ad in print or on the web. All of which makes me wonder what's really going on...


UPDATE, 15 Oct
Well, it seems the original of this ad was a display poster for a Japanese department store. But no matter, Fillippa Hamilton has now been sacked by Ralph Lauren "as a result of her inability to meet the obligations under her contract with us" which apparently means she was too fat. Hamilton is a UK size 8. More details from The Times

How teenagers consume media

How Teenagers Consume Media by Matthew Robson, 15, on work experience at Morgan Stanley.

I am...

Just flagging up a great post by Phil from a few days ago looking at Jesus words, "I am the way, the truth and the life." He's uploaded the videos he used. My favourite is "I am the truth".
[If you're interested, there are several alternative versions on YouTube!]