Mara's Musings

Why the hell I have multiple things in my internet life?

In 2007 I started blogging under the pseudonym of Gudrun Miller on this wordpress blog I’m surprised it’s still up there. I just decided to leave it there.

A few years later I made a LiveJournal which is full of stuff that might be of interest to some people one of these days. I also have an audioblog>/a> [another post entirely on that] and twitter, FaceBook and YouTube [and all that comes with a Google account]. But I am excluding all the social networks from this as I want to talk to day about blog sites.

Blogging is fun. It’s a great way to get to know interesting people. And where is the best place? Tumblr. I love Tumblr because of its population of enthusiastic young people, artists and so on. It’s a place where anything goes. Thanks heaps for making this thing work, Tumblr staff!

Tagged: Internet lifeTechBlogging

Elusive iPhoto

I have spent the past two days grappling with iPhoto. iPhoto is very good on the whole - gives lots of feedback with VoiceOver. But, there’s always a but, the exporting capabilities don’t talk so well - not as well as they could.

They did talk before so I grappled with my Mac. They didn’t talk to me. Then… I found something cool!

I found flickr export which is easier to authorise than iPhoto on the Flickr end. VoiceOver performs well. I am still testing but I think I might buy it.

Tagged: PhotographyComputersAppleAccessibility

The Camera

So I did buy a camera. But oh the amazement when I went shopping for it. “Have you got a basic point-and-shoot that records audio as the photo is being taken?” They shook there heads.

So the nice man at JB HiFi found me an easy-to-use camera. It’s really great! You can see some of the photos from it on this flickr page

Now to decide which photo sharing service I am going to use. I joined Flickr to test accessibility but might just keep sharing my photos here on Tumblr as it’s easier to get them on the web.

The Elusive search for a blind friendly camera

I want a camera so badly. Want to tie better pictures that look good and put them on TwitPic. At the same time I want a cheap, basic camera with one special thing: I want it to record audio as the picture is being taken.

I have been surfing the web the past few days. You can get a pretty good camera for under $100. I have read many guides on what to look for in a digital camera. I have CameraBag, the iPhone app that makes one’s photos look as if they came from film - that’s all cool.

There’s one problem with the iPhone, one can’t name one’s photos.

Next up Old Dick Smith

Tagged: blind photographydigital camerascamerasphotographyy

My Photography

I have always been interested in taking photos. When I was a little girl my Grandma had an old camera in her toy box and I would take great pleasure in pretending to shoot photos of people with it. Then when I was eleven my parents gave me a camera for my birthday- it was a red cokacola camera. I loved it! I took lots of photos of things and people.

In case you don’t remember, I am blind. When I got my first camera phone [a Nokia with an 8 megapixel camera] I took photos of everything again. It was great fun.

In 2009 shortly after I discovered Twitter, I began putting photos on TwitPic. People look at my photos but never post any comments- kinda cool when they don’t know that I’m blind. Now I have a Mac computer, an iPhone and iPhoto. I caption all my photos on the computer. I try to do it as I take them and get them off the phone. Now, I want a proper camera again- one that can take a good picture better than 5 megapixels I have on my iPhone.

Over the past few years Ma Haswell has sent me articles and useful links to blind photographers. I read about the exhibition held in Japan every year. I hope to send my photos there some day.

Photography is fun- it’s of real things and less messy than abstract painting. The other day I showed my photos to a former photographer who said “She has captured things in a simplistic, non seeing way which is kinda cool!”

Tagged: blind photographyexperimentingphotographyyinteresting