Bristol Zoo in the winter

Hello everyone!

I've been going through my (very large) photo backlog and I've nearly finished 2013...yes, I've got a ways to go.

When I was doing my master's I did a piece on ways people improve their mental wellbeing. As part of that, I interviewed the lovely Sara, who volunteers at Bristol Zoo Gardens. Volunteering is a great way to get back into doing work when you may have had a bit of a break, and if you help out at the zoo you can get in for free, which is quite handy, especially in the summer!

We decided to do the interview at the zoo - managed to find a place with ducks for some nice atmospheric noise - and then wandered around looking at the animals.

It was pretty close to Christmas so they had some reindeer visiting, which was pretty exciting! There were lots of small children getting very excited so it was a bit tricky to get a good shot so I thought I'd frame the picture with the kids.



Sara volunteers in the lemur walkthrough so we spent a bit of time watching them. This little guy was chowing down on a sweet potato, while his buddies had cucumbers and bananas and all sorts of other goodies.



I seem to have quite a few photos of capybaras from this visit to the zoo, so here is one just chilling out.



And finally, we found this rather happy frog. So pleased! It can be quite tricky to get shots of animals in enclosures as there's stuff like glass or netting in the way, so I'm happy with how this turned out.



Check out the rest of the zoo collection or have a look at my Flickr photostream for more pictures.

What is Computer Science?

Hello everybody!

I've been hard at work on my project, which I am very close to making public - just waiting on the last couple of interviews to be done before I release the site for testing.

I really wanted to share some of what I've done with you all, so I've put a video up on Youtube. To give you a little bit more context, my final project is about the new Computing curriculum in English schools and the outreach that is being done to get kids interested in Computer Science.

I wanted to keep the feature quite general, so it would be the kind of piece that could slot in to the features section of a national news website, rather than being specifically tailored to a technical audience. In order to achieve this, I had to explain what CS is. Throughout my undergrad degree, I often had people asking me what I even learnt...so who better to explain than crytographer extraordinaire, Nigel Smart?

Nigel is a Professor at the University of Bristol, doing research into cryptography as a means of securing systems. Here's his take on CS:




One of the important things with a large multimedia feature is to have a variety of page elements - I didn't want it all to be text, but I also didn't want every section to have the same format. I thought I'd experiment and try making an audio slideshow - a great way of showcasing some photos and getting Nigel's point across without making people read swathes of text.

If you're interested in checking out some more audio slideshows, I would recommend the Guardian's poetic piece about Van Gogh. My tutor suggested looking at Ciara Leeming's work, which is simply beautiful, definitely worth viewing!