Portable Cabins Made Like Home

portable cabins can be used for a wide variety of things and can prove more practical in certain situations than other buildings. Here are just a few uses for them. Construction: During the construction of a building or housing development cabins are used to serve as the base for the staff working at the site. A big advantage to using a portable cabin is that they can be easily and quickly transported from one job to the next. They will generally come complete with lights, sockets and heating.

Portable Buildings – Some Unique Advantages

portable buildings are also known as demountable buildings or modular buildings. They are specially designed structures that can be demounted and transported to another site without the full processes of deconstruction and reconstruction. Although portable buildings have been around for many years, they are currently growing in use and popularity.

blog advertising

Spot On

By request, I contributed a post to the Science Online/Spot On event that took place in London recently. The formatting turned out a bit strange, but there it is.

Feminist in all but name

It never fails to take me aback when people say "I'm not a feminist but.." and then follow the "but" with an opinion that indicates that the person is quite likely to agree with the basic principles of feminism, in the sense of believing in political, economic, and social rights for women.
 
OK, so there are worse things than this; it is not difficult to think of many worse things than people who are feminists-in-all-but-name.

Even so, I was surprised the other day at an Administrative Meeting, when a female administrator whom I had not previously met came up to me and said:

 "The Vice-Person for Stuff told me that you are the first woman [position that I now hold in my university]. I'm not a feminist, but I think that's great. It's about time. We need more women [in that job] in the university."

She went on to say that the lack of women leaders in her unit of the university was a serious, longstanding problem. Most of the students and researchers are women, but few of the leaders are women. Every once in a while, a woman is allowed to be an interim head of something, but only until a man can be found to take over the job. She was frustrated by this, and more than a little cynical that it would change any time soon. She herself was an interim director and was certain that she would not be given the permanent position. She was sure they would replace her with a man, although she is highly qualified to keep doing this job.

Well, good thing she isn't a feminist because..

.. because why? I am having trouble finishing that sentence with anything that makes sense.

I don't even know why she chose to preface her sentence with "I'm not a feminist, but..". Why add that? If she had just said "I heard you're the first woman etc. and I think that's great", without the qualifier, what did she fear I would think? That she was a raving man-hating angry woman? That she is not automatically in favor of a woman being appointed to a position with some authority?

I did not ask her. I would very much like to help stamp out these twisted negative views of feminism/feminists, but after that strange little comment, our brief conversation focused on practical things that needed discussing in the short amount of time available.

Why Me?

This has been happening to me a lot lately:

I meet someone for the first time in my new capacity as an Administrator and one of the first questions they ask me is "Why (or how) were you selected?" I italicized you because in 87.3% of the cases, there is an emphasis on you, not necessarily in an impolite way, but to emphasize the you-and-not-someone-else focus of the question.

There are unambiguous 100% neutral examples of these questions -- that is, when I meet someone who has a similar position at another university and we compare notes about our jobs.

But then there are some situations in which the motivation is less clear.

Possible explanations for why someone would ask this question:

Some people (academics or not) may be curious about how things work in the intriguing world of academia in general and/or in particular at my institution.

Some people are surprised, at least at first, at finding someone like me in this position (the first woman ever to hold this particular position at my university). Which leads to these further possibilities:

- They think it is cool and wonder what excellent change has happened at this institution so that finally a woman was selected for this position.

- They wonder if I am qualified for the job, or at least, was I really the most qualified? Perhaps I was selected because I am a woman?

Do men get asked this question so frequently? I don't know, but in a recent poll of n=2 male peers, I realized that, although I had been asked this question nearly weekly for months, these guys had not yet been asked it once.

I don't actually spend a lot of time obsessing about the motivation of these questions. I think that these issues will fade with time.

I will mention, though, that a few days ago when I was asked this question, for the first time there was a witness to it, and it was a different experience altogether. I didn't realize until then that all the other conversations had been one-on-one. This time, a colleague (another administrator) was present and disagreed with the apparently disrespectful way in which the question was asked and did not stay silent. I can fight my own battles when I want, but sometimes it is very nice to have allies.

drizzter

drizzter

Off Topic

A reader writes about her frustration with the prevalence of Women In Science (WIS) events that turn out to be about how to get out of science or, at least, academic science (research), and frustration with the number of workshops and other WIS events that focus on babies babies babies (primarily anxiety about the possibility that babies lead to "career suicide").

"There are very few events about how to do good research at the top competitive levels, the psychological travails of an academic lifestyle" ... "even something about common sexist gaffes (e.g. asking about your husband's job at your job interview) would be helpful ... I went to one .. event early on in my position here, as I work on an area .. with very few women and I like the XX companionship, but it turned out to be a networking event for women looking to get out of research. I still haven't been back."

and

 

"Is this problem [having babies and a career as a scientist at a university] just so big that it eclipses the other ones we could be having?"

This reader provided a very long list of workshop titles to prove her point about the workshop obsession with work-life balance (= having a career and children) and leaving academia.

Has anyone else had this experience of being overwhelmed by an emphasis on opting-out or baby-anxiety topics?

I would hope that there could be workshop theme balance, such that topics included how to find non-academic careers in science as well as how to succeed in a research career in science. Women-in-science events at the university where I had my first tenure-track job were extremely important to me when I was getting started, and definitely included discussion of the topics the reader mentions as being of interest to someone pursuing a research career at a university. If there had been a major emphasis on getting out of research/academic, I would have felt even more isolated than I already did.
 
The topic of babies is clearly a critical one for many women, but it's too bad if this overshadows (or eclipses) everything else. I don't just mean that for women who don't have children (now), but for all women in science. The baby issue should be part of the discussion, but there are many important topics.

I don't mean to minimize the challenges of having children and a career as a professor at a research university, but I hope that in most fields it is easy to encounter -- in real life and in blogs -- examples of happy, successful professor-moms, so that early-career scientists can see that babies ≠ career suicide.

Another hope of mine, perhaps an even less realistic one, is that it wouldn't always be women talking about careers-and-babies, but that more men would be involved in these discussions. It is still common for FSPs who are invited speakers at other institutions to be asked to have a "pizza lunch" or whatever with female students and postdocs, typically to talk about work-life issues.* Are any of you in departments that routinely invite men to do the same?

For those who share the experience of my reader in not finding WIS workshops that focus on topics relevant to women who want to stay in (academic/research) science, blogs can help fill the gap to some extent, but there's no substitute for talking with others -- sharing stories and experiences, getting and giving advice and support, laughing and expressing anxiety. If you can't find that in workshops sponsored by a particular group, perhaps you can create your own mini-workshop or social-professional event, somehow getting the word out and seeing if there are others interested in discussion of similar topics. Alternatively (or in addition to this), see if you (and like-minded women) can get word to the relevant organizations for WIS and let them know what topics would be of interest to you.


* Not long ago, something rather cool came out of one of these women-lunch discussion things that I did years ago at another university. One of the women who attended my discussion later became a high school science teacher in the region where I live, so, when one of her students became interested in my general field of research, this teacher got in touch with me and we arranged that I would meet the student and introduce her to some undergraduates and professors involved in advising the undergrad program in my department and I thought this was a great, albeit unexpected, outcome of having what I remember as rather bad pizza while being quizzed about the usual work-life issues by anxious young women.

Food shot. What I needed to do differently on this one.

This is an image of a really lovely dish. It's a pork shank served with spaetzle. It's hard to make big hunks of meat look fabulous no matter how delicious which is why (with the exception of racks of ribs) most meat gets photographed as individual servings already plated.  Another exception is fowl which can look good when photographed in its entirety. Our client serves up this dish as one that's shared at the table. More a bar food than a restaurant entreé. My job was to make it fit into the series of images we would make for use in their advertising.

The image looks good in a web size and my client was pleased with the way it looks on the website for the business but in retrospect I think we could have made just a few changes to improve the overall image.

First, I think the dish might have been better presented if it had already been sliced to show the interior of the meat instead of just its delicious, golden exterior. Providing the privileged view of the insides for the package delivers more selling message per image.

Next, I could have used more olive oil on the exterior to create more shine and pop on the skin. When the dish was first presented it glistened more and we needed to apply some oil and some steam right before shooting in order to maintain that fresh from the broiler look.

In retrospect I wish that we had used some sort of garnish for the spaetzle since it looks to monochrome along with all the other warm colors in the image. A sprig of rosemary, some marinated purple onion or some other concise, fresh addition would have been a nice counterpoint to the softness and uniformity of the dish. My only concern would be potentially introducing a second point of focus which would draw the eye away from the cooked green onion garnish of the pork.

Finally, I whsh I had used a stronger backlight on the dish. Just enough more raw light to add a crusty delineation to the top of the bone in the pork shank and to better define the edges of the meat.

I find it very useful to come back to an image after a few weeks and really study it. We learn more from our mistakes than we ever do from hitting it out of the ballpark every time. I'll ad this to my notebook on food photographs and take a look at it next time I head out to shoot food.

The above brings up a topic that I feel strongly about (which ones don't I...?). I've had the habit of keeping a "job journal" for many years now. I sit down after a job and write notes about things that worked and things that could have worked better. Some of the journal entries are extensive and detailed while others are little more than recordings of feelings or moods. Along the lines of, "How did that portrait interaction feel? And why? What should I have done to move it into more positive territory? Could I have changed the Gestalt?"

Usually the journals are much more technical than emotional. For instance, I did an assignment last week for a company that tests chemicals, creates reference compounds, and analyzes complex substances. It's the kind of quiet company filled with employees who have doctorates in chemistry and other esoteric fields. This was a job that is part of a recurring advertising campaign and one in which they would like continuity of the visual components.  For me, that means getting the lighting and point of view to match up.

I was doing portraits against a white background with individual people dressed in lab coats. I looked back at last year's journal entry of the same, basic job. I was able to quickly find that the distance of the background lights (three total) was 12.5 from the white seamless background. The background, measured with an incident light meter read f8.2.

The distance from the background to the subject was 23 feet. The distance from the 60 inch softlighter diffused umbrella that I used as a main light to the subject position was approximately 50 inches. I used a Westcott one stop net between the main light and the subjects right shoulder so that the ultra-white lab coat would not burn out. I was able to see that last year I used a passive fill reflector as a fill light to the opposite side of the subject. It was a 40 inch round white reflector.

Having all this information at hand meant that this year I was able to set up more quickly and surely, spend a bit less time testing and come away with images (portraits) that will match, year-to-year.  It was a time saver. There were also notes about how I post processed the images as well as how and to whom I delivered them.

The cameras changed from last year to this year but after a conversion to black and white for the campaign the biggest issue will always be the uniformity of lighting.

My notes for the food shoot done in late August are more...voluminous. And when I studied the notes yesterday I went back and referenced a food shoot I'd done several years ago with LED lights. While I dealt with a few technical issues on that shoot it presented an interesting counterpoint to the recent shoot. I think the lighting was much more nuanced in the previous shoot. I'll study a bit more and see what I can combine from both the food shoots to make the next one a little better.

Younger photographers may scoff at the idea of keeping a job journal since they can remember most of the shoots they've done so far, but jobs pile on jobs and details get muddled. At this point in my short career I can look back at my ledger and find that I've done over 10,000 assignments. Most are not memorable but some are mileposts and point of view shifters.  Having a clear, post action assessment helps me to intellectual internalize what led to success and what details led to less success.  

I still remember, with much clarity, a note I wrote myself after a personal trip where I took along everything but the darkroom sink. I told myself that I felt I had carried a boat anchor through Paris. I suggested that a small, fast camera body and a zoom lens that covered 24-85mms was all a vacationer/street photographer/documentarian would/should ever need. That and his wits. I hedge my bets when I travel and also take a fast, short telephoto; like an 85mm. But when I sit down to pack I'm always like a kid in a candy store. Bags get crammed full of stuff even though I know in some part of my brain that picking up a bag and carrying it across the studio is nothing like carrying the same stout bag on and off trains and over my shoulder for ten or twelve hours a day.  Then I read my note about travel cameras and I open the bag and start dumping stuff back into the drawers. I always thank myself later.  And you know what? I never miss the gear I didn't bring.

I think a journal is even more critical for an amateur/enthusiast. Since you don't shoot as often you tend to get rusty. A good journal is always there to remind you of what ultimately makes you happy each time you go out to shoot. And it reminds you of what you didn't use, hated carrying and wish you'd left at home. Sometimes we all need a reminder.

Go out and shoot and have a great day!

There isn't always just one "right" angle for food...

Tamales.

The shot directly above is my favorite for this dish but we routinely try out as many angles and croppings as we can in order to give our art directors and our clients a choice of images for a range of uses.

Every region has its own regional, culinary cliché. Here's ours.

One of the very successful, new restaurants I do artwork for has several different preparations of Jalapeño Peppers as appetisers. In fact, even their signature burger comes bristling with the snappy little devils.  As highly mobile employees in a large hotel chain the food and beverage directors who helped to create the menu are newly transplanted to the central Texas area and still hold to the newcomer belief in Texas myths. One of these being that Texans will eat anything with a spicy hot pepper on it, that we crave the peppers, and that in some way the Jalapeño is the national food of Texas. Food shorthand...

The shot we were aiming for in the brief was a more complicated one with multiple, roasted, stuffed peppers in a metal rack cut to the shape of the state of Texas. Once we had that shot in bag I decided to do the locally time worn "pepper on a fork" image.  Having not seen it before the new arrivals loved it. The original shot is less contrasty and has a lot of wasted space around it. The final image above has been enhanced with more saturation, contrast and sharpening as well as a vignette on the sides and corners.  Below is the original crop.

I really enjoy shooting food for restaurants and hotels because they generally have teams of chefs that have gone to top culinary schools and have lots of experience plating food in order to present it well. Here's how a food project usually goes in my business:

It always starts with an e-mail from an art director or creative director at the agency which is handling the account, and when working with larger companies they nearly always have an agency relationship in place. I'll generally get invited in for a meeting and asked to bring a big sampling of food work. They want to see that you can do what they need---with certainty. The agency may want you to leave your portfolio (my food work is on a iPad) so they can show the client and get final approval of their photographer of choice. (Good to have multiple portfolios, even if that means multiple iPads.) The benefit to the agency of calling in a portfolio instead of going by what's on the website is that they can blow stuff up and really look at the details. With the new Retina Screen iPad it's a much more compelling presentation than smaller images on a website.

This preliminary meeting will also be the one where the number of shots and the general style and feel of the images will be discussed. That's important because it always affects the budget. It's at this point that we talk about usage rights as well. When working with bigger clients there's always the possibility that the work you do for the "local" version of their restaurant may be the framework for a whole chain and you'd hate to realize that you gave away the rights for many locations, spread across regions,  for one small usage fee.  You'll also discover that even though nearly all these projects start as websites only  briefs the agency quickly psychologically amortizes the cost to shoot by convincing the client that the images will be able to be used not only on the web but also in point-of-purchase advertising and other print media.  Maybe even as still images for TV commercials.

What that really means is you'll want to shoot with the highest resolution camera you can get your hands on in order to generate images that stand up to multiple uses across media.  Just makes sense; you can always make them smaller but it's harder to make images bigger, especially after the fact.

For me, if the shoot is on location, the next step is to scout the location. On a recent scouting trip we discovered that the room we'd be working in gets full sun for most of the afternoon. We're bringing along big sheets of black drape for that one. Good to know before the day of the shoot.

If we're working with a good food stylist we arrive with all the lighting gear and cameras and leave the food fixin tools to the expert,  but if we will be working directly with a chef and without the services of a real food stylist then we pack a full kit for styling food. We need a mister, glycerin, olive oil, a hand held steamer, chop sticks, scissors, toothpicks, styrofoam peanuts and armature wire; for starters. Everyone's kit is unique.

I like to start by having the kitchen bring me samples of all the plates we'll be using so I can see how they fit on the background and how tightly I'll be cropping. I set up a rough lighting design based on our meetings and then we bring out a dish and plop it down and work on the lighting and the camera look until everyone is in agreement. Once we agree and we like the lighting we fall into a rhythm.  A dummy plate comes out with the chef's best intention for a dish. We look at it and tell him if we want changes and then we get busy lighting the dummy dish and working around it to find the right face. Once we've dialed it in the chef makes a perfect hero dish and we rush it to the table, switching it with the dummy. At this point the stylist or I will accent the dish with oil, move garnishes around and even blast in a little steam to make the food look hot and fresh.  While we're working on the hero plate the chef has moved on to the next selection and is working up our next dummy plate. 

Every once in a while we'll pop the memory card out of the camera and grab some jpegs (we usually shoot food in raw+jpeg for just this reason) to look at on our laptop in order to really study the set up and find any problems before they screw us up.  

My assistant moves lights, keeps my working area clean and makes sure that lenses I discard are capped, front and back, and put back in the right spot because I'll almost certainly want to use them again soon...

Some dishes work best with backlighting and some with sidelighting but it's always important that the images feel connected. They need to look like they all came from the same shoot and the same family.

Once the food is done we move on to drinks and we try to give every client their own unique drink look. We don't have a formula which we apply across the board. To make this work we generally take a coffee break and get everyone re-wired and re-focused so they can all help build a consensus as to what their customized look and feel will be. Drinks are tough. Maybe the toughest part of a food shoot. Think about lighting the background and pushing light through the drinks from the back.

Once we wrap I generally book the assistant to come in the next morning and clean all the gear. Methodically. When you are moving fast and working with lots of dishes and food you are touching your camera gear with greasy hands and sometimes there are spills and drips. Better to get all that off your lenses, cords and lights before it's been there too long. Don't want to loose your favorite extension cord to mice or your favorite camera body to tiny ants....

After the client makes  final selections I go to the computer and start enhancing. I want the food to come forward and the backgrounds to recede. That means lightening some stuff and darkening other stuff. It may be mean selectively sharpening the food while aggressively blurring the background. Pretty much whatever it takes.

That's enough for now....I'm starting to get hungry and I think there's some left over påte in the fridge. Now, where did I put that cork screw?

Shooting drinks for fun and profit.

 I recently did a photography assignment for a restaurant in one of our city's major, downtown hotels. We photographed food and we also photographed adult beverages. The images that I turned in to the advertising agency were straightforward food and beverage shots that included the full product but sometimes I like to experiment so I went in tight to photograph this mint julep variation. I love the green garnish that sides to the right and I love the random bubbles and subtle suggestions of ice. I'm sure there are many rules that I've broken but that's beside the point. The point was the exploration of the image after covering what the client needs.

In this instance I was shooting on a table top in a small, private dining room and I aimed a monolight with a grid spot onto a reflector on the floor behind the table. The reflector bounced the light up onto the back wall and gave me a softer but still controlled splash of light behind the glass.  I used a light in the back right corner, modified by a small 16 inch softbox to add a backlight to the glass and a bright highlight on the leaves that stood up.  There is also a large, soft, general light (a beauty dish pushed through a 4x4 foot diffusion screen coming from the left. The large soft light is modified by a black flag to keep it from effecting the look of the background and the saturation of the background colors.

I worked handheld and moved in to the minimum focusing distance of the lens. The 4000 by 6000 pixel file, with very high sharpness, allowed me a lot of freedom in playing around with various crops.

The shot was very conventional but I also pulled the file into SnapSeed and used the "structure" tool and a bit of vignetting to get the effect I wanted. Not as exciting as images of super models in lingerie but a nice exercise in the middle of a job for me.  Most of all I like the colors and the contrasts.

I am very happy with the 85mm Sony lens. It is cheap and very good, optically.

I was using a Sony a77 camera with a Sony 85mm 2.8 lens.

Old Tri-X film that keeps re-surfacing.

I carried around a camera over the weekend but I didn't see anything I felt compelled to shoot. That's okay because I was busy with other aspects of life. Sunday brunch with my parents, the acquisition of a new car and some last minutes searches for important papers that ended up in the very last place I looked. In the process of looking for a car title I came across a sheet of negatives from many decades ago. I was not a (capital "P") photographer back then, just a happy amateur and many of the negatives in the sheet were overexposed or poorly developed. But I pulled the negative for the image above and put it into the Epson V-500 scanner in my studio and fiddled around with it for a few minutes. I'm pretty happy with the resulting images and happier still that the image prodded my memory and reminded me in exquisite detail just how free and easy the hobby of walking around taking photographs was in the middle of the 1970's.

I took a semester off from college to walk around a much different Europe than we have today. I am amazed to look back in a contemporaneous journal and discover that my girlfriend and I spent a good part of the semester backpacking, staying with new friends and occasionally splurging and staying at hotels and pensiones for about $800 each. That covered food, transportation and lodging but not our plane fare from the U.S. and back.

We camped out in the south of France in dozens of towns from Avignon to Perpignan, pitching our small tent in rustic campgrounds and making meals with a little blue gas portable stove. A frying pan hung from one of the straps of my backpack.

My camera of choice for the trip was the only camera I owned at the time, a Canonette QL 17 III. I took that little camera, a few extra button cell, PX-625 batteries and a small plastic bag with about 30 rolls of Kodak Tri-X film which I bulk loaded into blank canisters in order to save nearly a dollar a roll. I used the strap that came with the camera. It was a thin nylon strap with no logos or branding, just a little rubber shoulder gripper that kept the camera from sliding down my arm as I walked around.  I mostly used the camera in a completely manual mode because my friend, (and fellow photographer) Alan Pogue, took the time to teach me how much more accurate my little system could be if I used the pictogram sheet that came packaged with every roll of Kodak film as an aid to calculate my exposures. Sometimes I didn't even bother to double check the increasingly worn and poorly memorized sheet and depended on the vast exposure latitude of the film to save my ass.

I also shot some color transparency film but unlike the black and white negatives there is nothing on the color film that interests me, even for a moment.

The primary mission of the trip was not to have a primary mission. My girlfriend and I were going for adventure and fun. We wanted to see Rome without our parents in tow. We wanted to lay out on a beach on a Greek Island and waste full days doing nothing more than watching clouds and drinking beer with other tourists from all over the place. That made the camera incidental. That meant I used it when I was intrigued by something rather than spending useless energy lurking around trying to goose the muses into giving me a little something for posterity.

And when I looked at the images I stuck in this blog post it got me thinking about how easy things are to do when you don't focus all of your energy directly on them. It's almost like dating where aggressively stalking someone and calling them all the time are counterproductive.  Better to have a bit of insouciance and reticence in your pursuit and not care overly much about tightly controlling the outcome.

Shooting with the small rangefinder camera was such a wonderful way to add small doses of documentation to the experience. The camera had few controls and demanded little attention. The battery with which it arrived in Europe  was still going strong as we headed home. The rangefinder was pretty easy to use, and accurate, and the lens (when one paid attention to technique) was quite sharp and charming. But the real beauty of the photographic part of this experience is that nothing was riding on the outcome. No clients would "die." There were few expectations.

When I returned to Austin I spent happy months learning to print in our little co-operative dark room. It was located in the Ark Cooperative near the UT campus and the whole dormitory (according to rumors) had once been the Tri-Delt Sorority house. The room the darkroom occupied rumored to have been Farah Fawcett's old room. The one she lived in before being drummed out of the sisterhood for some indescretion. Whatever. It was a magic place and I spent many long nights getting a tan under the dim red safelights as I printed very personal images from the trip onto box after box of double weight Ilfobrom graded photographic paper.

The girlfriend exited the scene a few months after our return but the camera is still sitting on top of the equipment cabinet to remind me that a lot of good work can be done with minimalist tools. When I go on a digital camera buying spree I remember to stick the little rangefinder in a drawer before I head to the store. If I don't do that I imagine it sneering at me in superior derision for wasting my time and money buying cameras that are barely as capable as that thirty seven year old tool.

What an odd collection of ideas for today....

Getting queasy thinking about buying new cameras.

Let's call it camera buying fatigue. Or maybe it's the realization after so many years that a slightly better camera isn't going to do squat when it comes to making me a better photographer. Seems like a short time ago I was waiting anxiously for the new Sony a99 camera to float down from the stratosphere of a camera design and convert my pedestrian vision into world class art. But now that the delivery date is drawing nigh I have nothing but ambivalence about parting with ever more money for fractional perceived improvements in the imaging minutia that may not trickle down through my heavy handed usage into the final images I give to myself and my clients.

What happened to extinguish the camera lust that has always burned so brightly in my psyche? I think it's been the process of thoughtfully reviewing selections of images I've made from the inception of my interest in photography to the present. And truthfully, there is no mechanical or technological confluence of factors that makes one image "better" or "worse" than the other.

To my mind my best work came when using tools with which I had long term familiarity. We pay lip service, nowadays, to the idea of mastering our cameras but if we look at this assumption rationally, knowing that we are now impelled, seduced, moved to rationalize, persuaded to "upgrade" our magic boxes and their attendant lenses every eighteen months to two years can we really say honestly that we have the time and tenure with the gear to create a man/machine relationship that is truly, really, genuinely transparent????

The image above was taken with a film camera. After loading film (autopilot function) the only choices open to me as the operator were aperture, shutter speed and focus. That's it. Exposure measurement was largely a function exterior to the actual camera. I didn't worry about "creative" settings, color spaces, focus adaptations, noise reduction, color temperatures, parameter adjustments or even raw versus jpeg. The camera operation almost instantly became subservient to the process of actually taking the images. 

With digital cameras I find myself wrenched into a mode of heightened vigilance. I become overly aware of all the settings and "gotchas" of the digital workflow.  Not with just one digital camera but with all digital cameras.  There are hundreds of combinations of settings we can enable or disable and all of them, in one way or another effect either the image quality or the quality of making the image.

It's like the "Tyranny of Choice" for average consumers. Careful studies find that consumers mostly want three choices in a category. If they are looking for a jar of raspberry jam they are looking for "good, better, best." And, unless they are budget constrained, most will pick better. If confronted my too many choices and too many variations they may (if they do not already have a brand preference) skip the purchase altogether.  One several levels I'm sure this dissonance to effecting a cascade of choices drives a wedge between the camera and the user when it comes to comfort with the process. How else to explain our almost constant search for the next camera and our supplementation of a our "primary" camera with a growing selection of secondary cameras, rationalized as "carry around" cameras? Aren't they almost all "carry around" cameras?

In my personal situation (what else can I know?) I've had the Sony a77 cameras for almost seven months and I've used them to make over 30,000 images. Frankly, I am just now becoming comfortable with all of the menu settings. And that is not because the Sony has more or more complicated menus but because there really is no "right or wrong" setting and not all settings apply uniformly to the creation of all images. So I'm asking myself "why?" when I am just becoming comfortable with the way the cameras work and shoot, why am I considering "upgrading" to yet another device and another set of things to learn and implement. It surely isn't any perception that the cameras in hand have failed me in some way, or that my clients are demanding some decisive jump in overall image quality. It's because there is always the implied promise that I will somehow generate more interesting and profound work.  But I'm here to tell you that a recent browsing through my archives tells me that meeting the right people and being in the right situations has far, far, far more to do with creating images that I will like than some tiny movement in the calculus of my taking camera's ephemeral ability to nail down a performance paradigm that causes me to exceed my own limitations.

In fact, I feel like the rejection of the newest toy and a dedication to wringing out the best performance from my current two main cameras is much, much more likely to allow me the transparency in taking images that will make them more fun to look at and more fun to share than anything that takes place on the pixel level. If you think about it, shooting in raw is just another way to not have to knuckle under to the tyranny of choice, at least not in public and not until you are comfortably ensconced in your own little cave to privately tend to your wounded ego as you come to grips that a new camera won't make your work more universally successful-----no matter what Canon, Nikon, Sony and Olympus would like you to believe. It really does all boil down to you.  And that's more reason to dig in and move toward man/machine transparency than to kick the can down the road and just upgrade the stuff.

I like the idea of the Sony a99. I like the idea of a full frame sensor. I like the idea of some of the cameras new features but I'm pretty sure it won't make my interaction with portrait sitters any better, more exciting or more intimate. In fact, in the short run I'm certain that my uncertainty with the nuts and bolts of the camera will have the opposite effect. When I audit, with searing honesty, the kind of work I like to do with cameras and, by extension, the kind of work that comes to me as the result of showing the kind of work that intrigues me, I realize that there's nothing more in the a99 than there was in any of the endless line of digital cameras that have paraded through my hands. At the end of the day the camera is generally on a nice tripod and the lights of the studio are shining and winking and glowing. I'm still trying to engage the person in front of the camera and the less time I spend engaging the camera the more time I have to do what I consider my real job: selecting and collaborating with people whose images I'd like to interpret and share. Nothing else really matters.

In 2009 the people at Leaf lent me an AFi 7 medium format digital camera with a whopping 39 megapixels of resolution and an $8000 Schneider 180mm f2.8 lens. This should have been the ultimate camera for the kind of subjects I like to shoot. The lens is among the best in the known universe and the camera, at the time, represented the state of the art.  After six weeks I sent it back with no regrets. I was so overwhelmed and hyper-vigilant in the operation of the camera that I couldn't relax and just take portraits. Batteries constantly needed attention, settings beckoned, and the auto focus took a lot of attention away from the real action. Here I was with the $50,000 image machine that my peers drooled over and in the short run, at least, it stymied my ability to make great images.  Oh yes, they were sharp and possessed of awesome bokeh and infinite tonality but I would have been better served to have dumped everything but one species and genus and family of camera and plod onward.

And the appreciating tragedy of using lots of different cameras, all together and serially, is that the personalities of the cameras mash and wiggle and jostle together in your mind so that each implementation is like another layer of chaos in your mind. And since it's impossible to flush no longer needed information from yout mind you just have an ever escalating and very poorly organized catalog of facts and settings that slows you down, distracts you and diminishes the enjoyment of the moment.

All something to think about as we start the next round of "upgrades."

9,000,000 Page Views as of Last Night. Thanks for keeping me company.

When I first started writing this blog in 2009 I didn't know what to expect. Would I be writing strictly to myself or would there be an audience out there in wild for me? Turns out that lots of nice and interesting people take time to read what I write almost every day.  Thank you for sharing the blog with me.

Think Different?

Not long ago, I spent some time with a very diverse group of academics: professors and administrators from the sciences, engineering, humanities, and the social sciences. It can be interesting to experience academically diverse committees and workshops like this one. Even if the overall experience is boring (that is, the doing of the thing that we are tasked to do and have outcomes and deliverables for the stakeholders etc.), but I like the people (well, most of them) and I am fascinated by glimpses of how other departments and disciplines operate.

Anyway, at this particular event, a group of us were sitting around drinking hot or cold caffeine and discussing what our priorities are in our daily work life. We were not talking about work-life balance (with or without cats); we were talking about work-work balance. That is, when faced with several (many) competing work tasjs, all of which, in theory, need to be done now, which ones do we realistically do now and which ones do we do later?

This is what blew me away: when discussing two very specific examples that I will vaguely describe below, the physical scientists and engineers prioritized one thing and the humanities and social science faculty prioritized the other.

These particular examples involved whether we would deal first with a possible crisis involving undergraduate students or whether we would respond first to an urgent request from an unnamed upper-level administrator. The scientists and engineers opted to (hypothetically) wade into the student crisis and try to sort it out, but the others (hypothetically) opted to respond to the administrator first.

I hasten to point out that those who prioritized the administrative issue emphasized that they nevertheless were concerned about the students. We all agreed that both these issues were important and should be dealt with as soon as possible, we just disagreed about what should be done right now and what should be done immediately-after-right-now.

Why the difference, I wondered?

A couple of weeks after the incident, I told a colleague of mine -- a former upper-level administrator -- about it, and his explanation was that it was not so much cultural differences among disciplines (and definitely not degree of concern for students) but rather a function of the specific personalities of the administrators involved. That is, the humanities and social sciences faculty have long had very demanding and aggressive administrators, whereas the scientists and engineers have had more "flexible" administrators in our part of the university. We STEM people may therefore feel less pressure to give an immediate response to an administrator if we have another urgent situation to deal with at the same time.

I had never thought of it that way before, but it makes some sense. And, if my colleagues is right, it is a rather dramatic micro-illustration of the effect of administrative personalities on the operation of the units for which they are responsible. I suppose that can be good or bad, depending on the situation.

There's a Dean For That

Deans Deans every where
nor any .. (something something something)

As I traipse through my academic existence, I keep finding new Deans I didn't know existed. Over the years, in my routine professorial existence, I have encountered the Usual Deans -- deans of collegiate units within the university and the various deans who have responsibilities for students, money etc. These Deans are typically "familiar" people, in the sense of having been long-serving faculty members; many of them were former department heads. I don't mean "familiar" in the sense that I (or most faculty) know them well, but they are familiar in the sense of having followed a similar career path as many of us faculty (before they veered into administration). They are typically well respected (and well paid) for the important jobs that they do. I have been fortunate to work with excellent deans and associate/assistant deans over the years.

However, many of the Unusual Deans that I have been encountering recently are a bit less "familiar" in this way. Some of them veered into administration very early in their careers, and some are deans of "unfamiliar" (to me) things, like programs I didn't even know existed. Many (most?) are in the humanities or social sciences, so are exotic to me for other reasons.

This familiar/unfamiliar, usual/unusual designation is of course highly subjective (FSPcentric), relative to my own existence, and in no way implies criticism or a negative opinion of these exotic (to me) deans. I do, however, find myself wondering, from time to time: why does that position require a Dean? The more deans I encounter, the less sure I am what the title even means anymore. According to Wikipedia:

In academic administrations such as universities or colleges, a dean is the person with significant authority over a specific academic unit, or over a specific area of concern, or both.

I suppose one could spend a bit of time pondering what, exactly, "significant" means, but this definition is, ultimately, a bit unsatisfying in that "specific area of concern" is vague, although I can see that this is the part of the definition that refers to Deans of Students, Research Things, and so on.

Anyway, it doesn't really matter, I suppose, whether someone who has significant authority over a specific area of concern is a dean or something else, except that, at my institution, Deans of Whatever tend to have higher salaries than professors. I think that can be a source of unhappiness among the hard-working professoriate, especially if there seem to be a lot of these rather exotic dean-people, deaning in highly specialized areas of concern.

Tenure Times

A mid-career reader wants advice about writing a letter as part of the tenure evaluation of a candidate at another institution. In particular:

.. I don't know what the usual length, format, etc. is, and if/how tenure committees "read between lines" for certain cues, i.e. what do I need to do so that I send the intended message without inadvertently compromising it?

I have touched on this topic before, but I don't think I have ever discussed the specific information of length, format etc. My earlier posts on this topic started in 2007, then skipped a few years, then picked up again in 2010 with not one, not two, not three, but four posts on this general topic, then decreased to one in 2011.

Here are my answers to the reader's questions, although of course I hope that others will provide alternative information and suggestions from other disciplines:

Length: One page is too short, but how far you go beyond one page depends on how much substantive information you can provide -- this may or may not be a function of how well you know the candidate and/or the candidate's work. I think it may also be discipline-dependent. In several of the physical science and engineering fields with which I am familiar (and for which I have read external letters as part of the tenure evaluation), 2-3 pages (single spaced, on letterhead, 11-12 point font) is pretty standard, unless someone has really detailed knowledge of a candidate, in which case the letters may be slightly longer (but not by much). In a few other fields, however, very long letters seem to be the norm. For example, I have seen some astoundingly long letters for c`ndidates in the math department. In these letters, the evaluators provided detailed descriptions of every article or other type of work produced by the candidate, in some cases taking us through proofs step by step. Some of these letters have lots of equations and read like lectures. I am not sure that happens in m/any other discipline (?).

Format/content: The request-for-letter cover-letter might provide some clues as to the desired format. Do they want you to address specific questions or topics? If so, you can do this if you want, using the questions as your framework for the letter. Or you can ignore the specific requests and write what you want. One thing that is good to address up-front, even if you are going to be a loose cannon with the rest of the letter/format, is how well and in what capacity you know the candidate. This sets the context for you letter, and is important information for people who will be reading the letter. If you don't have any other specific guides about format and are wondering what to write next, you could pick out a few publications (articles, conference proceedings, or whatever is most relevant) and explain why these are interesting and/or significant.

Something I do look for in the cover letter is whether those requesting the letter want me to comment only on research or also on other things. I may not feel that I have sufficient knowledge of the candidate's teaching and service (the typical 'other things' besides research), so I may not provide an opinion about this, even if asked, but at least I will know what the expectations are. This can be important, for example, if the request is strictly for comments on research/scholarship, in which case you may want to avoid mention of how great this person was on the organizing committee for the Science Conference Workshop Panel Thing. 

I wouldn't worry too much about the reading-between-the-lines issue. Some people do this no matter how you write the letter, and there's no point in getting psyched out about something you can't predict. I have seen letters that I thought were an unambiguous endorsement of a candidate -- letters packed with strong positive statements and substantive examples -- only to have a fellow committee member say But if they really thought X should get tenure, they would have put the word "very" in front of "spectacularly outstanding pioneering genius superstar".

So, don't worry about it. If you want to send a mixed message with both positives and negatives, just be clear about this and about your final opinion (Do you endorse this person for tenure or not?). If you want to be entirely positive, use lots of awesomely positive adjectives. And if you think the candidate does appallingly bad and pointless work, I am sure you can find some equally awesome adjectives to convey that. If you think they are mediocre, say so.

Probably the biggest pitfall -- in terms of sending a message you don't intend -- is if you compare the candidate to so-called peers. You may be asked to do this, or you may want to do this even if not asked. I refuse to do this because I think it is nearly impossible to do it in a fair way, and I have seen a few examples in which a letter-writer wrote X is a spectacularly outstanding pioneering genius superstar just like Z at Other Great University and I therefore support X 100% for tenure at Your University, only to have a committee member say But I think Z is an idiot..

If X is greater than or equal to Z, and Z is an idiot, then X must be.. some answer that depends on who is doing the math. Yes, I realize that this is contradicting my previous suggestion to forget about predicting what letter-readers might do, but I think this particular issue -- that of comparing people -- is a real mine-field.

Is anyone freaking out? Please don't. These are outlier examples that occur and are typically stomped on by the sane faculty members, who, believe it or not, have outnumbered the others in every case with which I have personally been involved in STEM disciplines. That is, I have not seen the outcome veer negative because of irrational read-between-the-liners.

My main advice is: just write a sincere ~2-page letter that has substance to it (examples, incidents) and an unambiguous statement of your opinion at the end and/or beginning of the letter.

What They Don't Tell You in the Non-Existent Training for this Job

File this under: I had no idea students did this.

In my so-called normal professorial existence, students considering applying to my department for graduate school and possibly wanting to work with me send me an email with various bits of information and assorted questions. I have written about this fascinating topic at length before.

But did you know that some students do this?: They go straight to the person they perceive as the 'top' (for example, a head/chair or other administrative leader of a unit/department/etc.) and explain their interest in graduate studies. They may or may not be interested in that person's particular field of research (most of us are, after all, still professors who teach and advise), but they seem to want to make contact with the "head" -- not the director of the graduate program, not the administrative assistant responsible for the graduate program, not the potential advisor/s (although some may write to these individuals as well) -- to announce their existence, their intentions, and to Ask For Things (advice, confirmation of their self-stated outstanding qualifications for graduate studies, etc.).

This surprised me, although maybe it shouldn't have. Does it surprise you? Is this normal behavior in your program or field?

My usual approach to these things is to be as non-judgmental for as long as possible. Some of the student email I get in my normal professorial existence can be classified as "clueless" (I am somewhat sympathetic to these, as I consider myself to have been among the clueless at the applying-to-grad-school stage of my life). But never in 57 million years would it have occurred to me to write to an administrator (other than the graduate director of a department) to introduce myself and lobby for admission.

Yes, I know it is best not to psychoanalyze a student's motivations in sending one of these emails, but that's what we do in blogs.. sometimes. Also, it doesn't really matter what I think about these students because I don't make the admissions decisions, even if some students seem to think that I do.

Pecking Order

While perusing some books and articles on academic administration, I tried to set myself a little challenge that would help me keep reading and not either fall into a boredom-induced stupor or fling the book/e-reader across the room because the author makes so many unjustified and insulting assumptions. And that challenge was to see how far in the book/article it took for me to find something, anything, that was interesting or useful to me.

For some of these books/articles, the challenge is never met and I wonder if this is more a reflection of my administrative inadequacies than the apparent boringness of the reading material, but in one book (by C.K. Gunsalus), I found one thing that perked me up for few moments, a few chapters into the book. And that was a statement that every member of the faculty and all of the "secretaries", as well as most of the grad students and other staff members in academic departments knows exactly what the "pecking order" of faculty is; that is, a hierarchy of sorts, based on I-don't-know-what, but indicated by various "intangible" things.

The intangible items that are listed are a bit bizarre and (along with the mention of "secretaries") made me check when the book was published: the Dean's sherry party? getting your own name on letterhead? etc. But let's ignore that and focus on the "pecking order" concept.

Without defining it or its basis any more than I already have(n't):

Do you think your department has a "pecking order" (and are you faculty, staff, or a student)? If so, what do you think the basis for it is? Research awesomeness? Personality? Other?

And what are the consequences? (salary, office/lab space, invitations to sherry parties)

Is this a bad thing, a neutral thing, a good thing?

I suspect that your comments will make for more interesting reading than any of these guides to academic administrating.

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new*

To: femalscienceprofessor@gmail.com

How come you are so fixated upon your gender.A female professor in science is nothing new.Should I state that I am a male professor and include that in every e-mail really?
Sent from my iPad

Yes, please do that.




* Samuel Beckett, male writer

I May Have Mail

Upon achieving semi-galactic status in a particular academic unit, my mailbox was moved from its traditional spot amidst the throngs of regular faculty and researcher mailboxes up to an exalted location at the very top of the mailbox warren.

My staff said to me "If you want, we can get your mail for you and bring it to your Awesome Office and put it in a special mail-place like we did for your Distinguished Predecessors".

I thought, "That's silly, I'll just pick up my mail on one of my 57 daily trips through the office with the mailboxes."

But. I soon realized the flaw in my plan: I am too short to see into my new majestically elevated mailbox. This was not a problem for my predecessors, all of whom are men, going back into the 19th century.

Would it somehow detract from my attempt to cultivate an aura of gravitas if I placed a little step-stool by the mailboxes?

Now Stand in the Place Where You Work

When I used to blog 5 days/week, it was easy to come up with topics. No topic was too trivial, it seemed. Since I haven't been blogging every weekday, suddenly each potential post comes with extra baggage: is this topic important enough for a rare post? I ask myself. How can I write about mundane issues when I haven't even commented on the fact that some female Olympic athletes from certain countries (Japan, Australia) flew to London in coach class while the male athletes were in business class? Also, there has recently been an amazing outpouring of letters on behalf of FSP-as-mentor (thank you everyone for this); shouldn't I write something mentor-y? etc.

Maybe I should, but today I am not. Because it's summer? My blog muscles are flaccid? All this is to warn you that the infrequency of my blogging does not correlate with the importance of my blog-topics when a rare post appears.

What I was obsessing about recently (and not for the first time) is how we arrange our faculty offices so that people (students, colleagues) can visit us and have an obvious and convenient place to sit. I think about this particular topic:

- when I visit some other faculty offices*; and
- when people visit my office;

(* but not in my own department!; my colleagues mostly have the visitor-chair situation figured out very well. I cannot, however, say that I have this figured out for my own office.)

Despite the fact that many of us have visitors in our offices multiple times every day, it is amazing to me how many times I go to someone else's faculty office for an extended chat and it is not clear where I should sit. In some cases, there is no available chair, or no chair in an obvious place for conversing with the person whose office it is, and so on. Oh sure, there may be one or many chairs scattered about the office, but some or none of them seem safe/convenient/possible for sitting and conversing. It doesn't matter what type of institution it is -- giant university, small college: many of us are furniture-challenged when it comes to receiving visitors in our academic offices.

This is amazing to me, but in a hypocritical kind of way, as my office seems to confuse many people who stop by to chat. They seem perplexed: should they sit in the more comfortable place further from my desk or the less comfortable place closer to my desk? I contribute to the confusion when I occupy the more comfortable seating option rather than sitting at my desk (I do this because I no longer have a desktop computer so why not sit wherever I want? And also I find that sitting in a comfy seat rather than in my desk chair reduces this effect.) Many people choose to stand.

As it turns out, I actually have two offices, and I recently started reorganizing one to be more visitor-friendly. I don't really want to talk to people across a big wooden desk (well, sometimes I do, but most of the time I don't), and I don't want people to stand because they aren't sure where to sit. I also don't want to get up and walk across the room to sit in some other chairs every time someone stops by for a brief chat, etc.

So, how is your office arranged? (Fig. 1).  Do you talk to visitors across your desk? (That is, you are seated behind your desk, visitors are sitting or standing on the other side.) Or do your visitors typically sit in a chair at or near the end of your desk (or desk-like thing)? When you have visitors, do you move to a seating area away from your desk? Or something else?

Figure 1. Some possible office configurations.

And: Is your office arranged in a particular way for visitors because you have thought about how you want to interact with visitors, or because you don't really have a choice given size/furniture constraints?

And most important question: Do you have always/commonly/sometimes/never have to move piles of papers and other stuff off a chair so that a visitor can have a seat?

No, actually this is the most important question: Do you think it matters how your office is arranged with respect to where visitors sit? For example, does it affect how you interact with students and others? Can a well-arranged office make you a better mentor? Or not?

Popsicle Project - Video Instructions Part I

Here is a short video (4 minutes) explaining how to do the tech part of the popsicle puzzle project.

Popsicle Puzzle Project

I made the top popsicle puzzle project with my Girl Scout troop for Valentine's Day and started thinking that it could adapted for academic and notebooking purposes. So I put together a sample project (using both the front and back of the sticks) and showed it to several teachers. Many of them wanted to know when we could start working on it.

I liked it because it had a tech element to it (setting it up in Word) and the teachers liked that it could be used in just about every subject. I have a couple of classes lined up for after our state testing in May (we have four weeks after that till the end of the year). I'm making a rough guess that it will take four class periods to complete....and when you have four weeks to go to the end of the school year time consuming projects are appreciated :)

I put together two short videos that I will post explaining how the project is done both on the tech end and one the crafting end.

Moon Phase Box

I happened to walk into a fourth grade class the other day and they were hard at work making moon phase boxes. They were totally adorable and the kids were completely into it. The teacher very kindly let me take some pictures (thank you Mrs. Parker!) and add to my blog.

Students would need a shoe box and they need to cover the inside and inside lid with black construction paper. Using fishing wire they would hang a ping pong ball in the center of the lid so it is suspended in the center of the box. They then take a flashlight and trace the light end on one of the short ends of the box and then create viewing flaps in the middle of every side (including the one with the light bulb (but that might be slightly off center). It is important that the viewing areas are flaps and not cut directly out (you need to keep the light coming into the box blocked as much as possible).

The teacher used a box cutter to cut the flaps and flashlight hole for the children. I probably would have had students do the cutting and get a parent volunteer to oversee the safety of that station. I am a big believer in letting children do things like cutting (it gives them confidence and makes it easier on me :)

Once it is complete you put the lid on and put the flashlight in the hole. When you look through the viewing stations you will see the ping ball is lit up like the main phases of the moon (only four phases).

Seemed like a very doable project to add into an astronomy unit.

ELA - Tech Project - Idioms

Guess that Idiom

More PowerPoint presentations from Eve Heaton

I know this is not a science post but I thought I would share anyway as many followers teach a lot of different subjects or know people who might be able to use a fun ELA idea.

Today I worked with a fifth grade ELA class rounding out their study of idioms. In an effort to better integrate technology into the classroom I came up with this cute and easy Guess that Idiom project using PowerPoint.

Students were given five idioms and had to use clip art to represent their idioms on one slide and then give the definition on the next slide. The students learned (or put into practice things they learned) about setting up a project and saving (not as second nature as you would think :)

We also talked about Google searches and how to narrow your search criteria by adding key words. For example, instead of typing in "Fit as a Fiddle" type in "Fit as a Fiddle Idiom."

The secondary ELA strategy we focused on in the lesson was paraphrasing. We discussed what it is, why it is important, and how to do it correctly (an important lesson in ELA when most children just want to copy the definition straight from the internet).

Our ELA blocks are mandated by the district at 100 minutes so we had a lot of time to work on the project. For people with less time I would definitely recommend allotting two class periods. Students who were done early were allowed to change the slide design and add transitions.

Brown Bag Animal Reports

I like the idea of using brown bags in the notebook. I think the original post was for younger children but I think it could easily be ramped up for an upper level group of children.

One fourth grade class at my school doing an animal research project in ELA (working in collaboration with what students are learning in science). I was thinking that the students could use index cards to take their notes while researching. They would use the note cards to write their paper in ELA but instead of throwing out the cards they could be "housed" inside these brown bags in their science notebooks.

Magnet Painting

Magnet Painting!

I know it was intended for younger kids but I know my fourth graders would love to do this. You could even try different magnets to see if you can tell the strength of the magnet by the painting that was made. Good way to incorporate art into science. Would also be a fun hallway display.

The idea came from THIS WEBSITE.

Moon Phases Plate

I liked this moon phase plate idea that I saw online. It is something I would do with a group of students.

We can occasionally see the moon at our school during the day but I think it would be better off going home with students...possibly as part of a moon journal activity???

Hallway Display

We have a big inspection team coming to one of the school's I go between at the end of February and that got me thinking about hallway displays.

I wanted a hallway display that could be left up all year and simply added to as the year progressed. I originally thought of doing what I did in the pictures above but labeling it 1st quarter, 2nd quarter, 3rd quarter, and 4th quarter (which I still think is a good idea). I approached the fourth grade science teacher and she was game to let me put it up outside of her room (my old classroom) and pull children to put together the display for the first two units in science. The idea is that then the children would add items to the next unit they are moving into.

I have received a lot of compliments on the display and I sort of hope others use it to spring board their hallway decorations. It can be put up at the beginning of the year and just added to each quarter.

I added a sun to each unit as the connecting link between them. One teacher thought that the blank sheets could be laminated and reused every year.