Author: adam

Why is Twitter on trial for Mendenhall #OBL tweets?

We’ll all remember where we were the night of May 1, 2011, when President Barrack Obama announced that Osama bin Laden had been captured and killed.

I was eating dinner at home with my girlfriend. We sat, glued to the TV, and talked about how that moment felt like one of those scenes in a movie where an entire nation, and many parts of the world, was united, hanging on every word of a news broadcast.

But the TV screen wasn’t the only source of news and commentary for us. That night, like so many other nights in the past few years, laptops and mobile phones were positioned on dining room tables so we could see the latest from our Facebook friends, refresh our Twitter searches and send text and instant messages as the events unfolded.

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Mommatorial: April Fools! A lesson in transparency

Why I told my most supportive fan to delete her Facebook comment.

Confession: my mom is my best friend on Facebook. I’m fine with that. She’s embraced the social network, friended me and leveraged the channel to show, among other things, her relentless and unyielding motherly support.

Whether I’m tagged in a photo, linking to a new blog post or telling a joke, mom is there in a heart beat to Like it, share it and comment on it.

Is it lame that my mom is usually the only person that comments on my content? Yeah, I guess it is. Whatever. There are worse problems in the world than having a mom who’s “too” supportive.

But as much as I appreciate her good intentions, sometimes a comment from mom can cross the line. And on April Fools’ day (of all days) I had to ask her to take one down.

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Toy car in downtown Phoenix

This is a real car, driving next to a real man on a real bike in downtown Phoenix. Why does it look like a toy car on a model set? Because I used a miniature faking effect that simulates a shallow depth field and fools your eyes into thinking it’s looking at something up-close.

Another component of the miniature illusion is selective focus, which in its purest form is achieved with tilt-shift photography. However in this case, I faked it with Photoshop and directed your attention to the car in the picture for this miniature effect.

Not bad for a first attempt, although I should have spent more time fiddling around in Photoshop to make the guy on the bike less blurry. This tutorial made it surprisingly easy to achieve this effect.

See more photos like this in this tilt-shift miniature fakes flickr group.

Photo details:

  • Exposure: 1/400
  • Aperture: f/9.0
  • Focal Length: 50 mm
  • Taken from the fifth floor of a parking garage at 10am

Mommatorial: 5 Twitter Fears, Conquered

My mom asked me a while ago to show her how to use social media better. After I rolled my eyes and said something snobby and confusing like, “Well…what do you want from social media?” I realized that it’s a great question for her to be asking.

I sometimes forget that despite the massively over-publicized explosion of Facebook and Twitter users, there are a lot of people who are still unsure of how to get any value out of social media for themselves.

In my Mom’s case, she knows how to find her way around on Facebook, and she has a blog, but Twitter is still a scary, somewhat hairy animal. The more I thought about her question, the more it made me realize that I know a ton of people like her, who are still either afraid or completely unfamiliar with Twitter.

And it’s a shame because if they could all just get over a few initial hurdles, they’d have a much richer social media experience and easier access to information that they would probably find very interesting.

In hopes of getting my mom (and others like her) over these entry barriers and to shed some of the stigmas associated with Twitter for newcomers, here is my first Mommatorial: 5 Twitter Fears, Conquered.

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