©2010 Charles Buchwald & Friends. All Rights Reserved.

©2010 Charles Buchwald & Friends. All Rights Reserved.

• Photo Editing for Photographers
• Websites for Community Groups

Register for a course with a friend, and one of you gets 10% off!

Photo Editing for Photographers

Back by popular demand after being offered last fall, this course is geared to beginners!

Learn how to edit your photos to improve composition, contrast and colour, to fix defects such as dust, scratches, redeye or incorrect exposure. Learn about key concepts including: dynamic range, resolution, file types, and workflow; and special techniques such as painting with light, restoration, photo montage, and more.

Together we’ll edit a variety of sample photos to create beautiful, powerful images. This is a great way to take your photography to the next level!

The lab will have PC’s and software available. We’ll use Adobe Photoshop CS2 in class, but the principles and techniques will apply to Elements, Lightroom, Aperture, GIMP, and other photo image editing applications.

Prerequisite: intermediate computer experience, including the ability to open, save and organize files.

Tuesday nights, for 6 sessions, from 23 March to 27 April, from 7:00 to 9:00 pm.

Web Sites for Community Groups

Turn over a new leaf!

Learn how to use a modern web system to build, maintain or renovate your community group website.
We’ll cover domain names, menus, static and dynamic pages, graphics, links, connecting to mailing lists, photo sites and promotional sites such as Facebook or MySpace.

The goal is to create or remodel your community group’s site by the end of the course.

Prerequisite: membership in a Salt Spring community group with permission to create or remodel the group’s site. Intermediate computer skills.

This is a great way to get a functional, easy to update and maintain website for your group, and to connect to local community groups on the web to share skills and resources.

Thursday nights for 6 sessions, March 25, April 1, 8, 15, 22, 29, from 7:00-9:00 pm

Details for both courses

About the Instructor: Charles Buchwald has 20 years experience as a creative professional, including graphic design, web development and photography projects for clients including BMW, Disney and Pillsbury. He enjoys sharing the experience of learning and has taught image editing and other classes in the U.S. and Canada.

Location: GISS Room S111 (the computer lab)

Note: the fees are primarily to cover use of the H.S. computer lab during the courses.

SPECIAL: REGISTER FOR THE SAME COURSE WITH A FRIEND, AND ONE OF YOU GETS 10% OFF

Please contact me if you have any questions about the course. Please contact Saltspring Community Education to register.

©2010 Charles Buchwald & Friends. All Rights Reserved.

©2010 Charles Buchwald & Friends. All Rights Reserved.

Here’s the course description from Community Ed:

Learn how to edit photos with Adobe Photoshop. Improve composition, contrast and colour; fix defects such as redeye or incorrect exposure. Learn about key concepts and techniques including color space, resolution, file types, and image noise. The class will edit a variety of sample photos to create beautiful, powerful images. The lab will have PCs available. Contact the instructor if you wish to bring your own laptop. Prerequisite: intermediate computer experience; ability to open, save and organize files

8 Wednesdays
Oct 7, 14, 21, 28, Nov 4, 18, 25, Dec.2
7-8:30pm
GISS Room S111

The class filled quickly, but if you are interested please stay in touch, as it may be offered again in the Spring 2010 schedule.

If you are have registered for the course, please check this new section of  this site for class information, examples, tips and resources… or leave a comment below… and we’ll see you soon!

©2010 Charles Buchwald & Friends. All Rights Reserved.

©2010 Charles Buchwald & Friends. All Rights Reserved.

Registering a .com, .org, .net or many other top level domains is quite straitforward: you sign up with a registrar, pay them around $9 to $20 depending on their services and the domain, and you are set.

But with Canadian .ca domain names, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) adds some extra steps. It goes like this:

1. After you register with your domain name registrar and purchase your .ca domain you receive an email from CIRA.
2. The email contains a link, a username and a password.
3. You must follow the link, user the username and password, and confirm your legal status in Canada, your address, and other information. They’ll ask you if  you want to establish an account or membership with them, although it’s not necessary to complete the domain name process.

So, it’s not a scam, it’s not particularly complicated… and it is essential to confirm on time with CIRA, if you want to get up and running with your .ca domain name.

CIRA has more info for new registrants.

Tips? Questions? Comments? Please leave me a message in the comments for this article.

P.S. For registering .ca domain names, and .com, .org., .net, and others, I’ve used v2reg.com for several years, and I appreciate their simple, inexpensive service. There are many others, including Godaddy and Network Solutions for example, that work well, but because they complicate their offerings with lots of addons and up sells, my experience has been that they are more trouble than they are worth.

©2010 Charles Buchwald & Friends. All Rights Reserved.

WOLF Kids web site

The WOLF Kids program is a very exciting “nature immersion” program on the leading edge of educational curricula. Here’s an excerpt from the program description:

Wolf Kids offers a nature immersion and home school program where students interact with their natural environment through adventure, challenges, and a lot of fun. A core principal of the program focuses on experience in nature, as it has always been fundamental to the education of young developing human beings. For instance, climbing trees and running, tracking animals, building shelter and watercraft, making fire, discovering edible and medicinal plants, students acquire a keen knowledge of the taxonomy of flora and fauna, as well as traditional outdoor skills. These activities lead to an ecological integrity, which answers the call for affirmation and maximization of the potential of our children. Their classroom is the forest, ocean, fields, streams, and mountains. Their teachers are the otters, birds, shifting winds, and the people who make up our tribe. This full immersion program, utilizes both scientific and indigenous studies. Through hands-on outdoor experiences, students develop an ingrained knowledge and awareness of the natural world, and their place in it. They become eager and quick learners, the stewards and unshakeable voices of our environment, in whatever they choose to do for the future.

Please check out the site and leave a comment to let us know what you think!

©2010 Charles Buchwald & Friends. All Rights Reserved.

The Work That Reconnects: Discovering Our Ecological Self
Sunday, July 19th

“our pain is a measure of our love for our world”

The Work that Reconnects helps us to connect with our deepest emotions about Earth in a respectful and supportive environment. By recognizing and experiencing the profound feelings we have about what is happening on our planet, we develop insight into our radical interdependence. From this understanding comes hope and empowerment!

The workshop utilizes experiential group exercises, ritual, creative process, journaling, movement, time in nature, discussion, and community building. By exploring our “ecological selves” we experience a wider sense of identity and discover new possibilities for engaging our hearts and minds in healing Earth.

Created by deep ecologists Joanna Macey, Thomas Berry, Arne Naess, John Seed and others, these experiences can sustain us as agents of change in the Great Turning – this process of building a Life-Sustaining Community from the wreckage of the Industrial Growth Society.

Goals of the workshop:
to provide people the opportunity to experience and share with others their innermost responses to the present condition of our world
to reframe their pain for the world as evidence of their interconnectedness in the web of life, and hence of their power to take part in its healing
to provide people with concepts–from systems science, deep ecology, or spiritual traditions–which illumine this power, along with exercises which reveal its play in their own lives
to provide methods by which people can experience their interdependence with, their responsibility to, and the inspiration they can draw from past and future generations, and other life-forms
to enable people to embrace the Great Turning as a challenge which they are fully capable of meeting in a variety of ways, and as a privilege in which they can take joy
to bring people into mutual support and collaboration in working for the world

Please contact Shoshanah at shoshanahray@gmail.com or 250-537-8598 to participate in this work shop.

About the facilitator:
Shoshanah has been involved in the Work that Reconnects for approximately five years. She has studied with Joanna Macy and John Seed, and taken a workshop facilitator training with Ruth Rosenhek of the Rainforest Action Network. Last summer she facilitated deep ecology exercises with children at FUN (Friends Uniting For Nature) Camp in Vancouver, including two “Councils of All Beings”.

©2010 Charles Buchwald & Friends. All Rights Reserved.

I’ve written, illustrated and/or designed a number of manuals, including the successful Park Tool School manual, a guide to the Automated Flight Following system for the BC Ministry of Forests, and many others. I’ve taught, as a university teachers’s assistant, in community education, and in secondary school. I’ve co-invented first-of-its-kind educational software and worked on several educational technology initiatives. And I’ve taught canoeing and rock climbing and worked as a ski instructor.

So here are some tips for writing useful instructional or support materials…

•  Introduce and sum up your materials with what entrepreneurs call an “elevator pitch”. In sixty seconds or less make a pointed summary of your main point or points in a logical, memorable, concise way. If you can’t say it in a few paragraphs or a short time, then how is your audience going to remember it?
• For consumers, aim for an 8th grade reading level. This is the average in North America. This means it has to be “short, sweet and simple”. Paragraphs should be around 3 or 4 sentences. Sentences should be around 8 or 10 words at most. And words should be short, too—no fancy, multi-syllabic stuff.
• Repeat the important points three times. Your audience won’t absorb it without saying it several times. Repetition drives the point home and increases retention and three times is optimum. (See what I did there?)
• Use illustrations instead of photos. Clear, black and white line drawings reproduce more clearly than photos. They also eliminate distracting details, thereby increasing comprehension and retention. Photos may seem less expensive or easier, but drawings convey the important information more clearly, concisely and memorably.
• Typography and layout are important. It’s not so much a matter of making it look good, as it is optimizing reader understanding and memory retention. Help your learners by using a qualified and experienced graphic designer, or at least a professional template.
• Create a “teacher edition” while you are making the student or consumer version. Any good layout will have some white space—use this with another digital layer of information to add notes for an instructor or tech support person. This can be printed at the same time, with a separate plate, or as a digital print.
• Use a single folded sheet or a spiral binding so your work can lie flat in use. This is especially important for user manuals, where your reader may be performing a task while reading your materials.

A few simple points like these can make the difference between instructions or a manual that will help and support your user versus one that will frustrate and discourage. Often these materials are your users first contact with your support system. Leave them with a positive feeling about how you take their enthusiasm for your product or service seriously and with care, and the effort will be well repaid.

©2010 Charles Buchwald & Friends. All Rights Reserved.