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The Way We Think About Charity Is Dead Wrong – Dan Pallotta

“Activist and fundraiser Dan Pallotta calls out the double standard that drives our broken relationship to charities. Too many nonprofits, he says, are rewarded for how little they spend — not for what they get done. Instead of equating frugality with morality, he asks us to start rewarding charities for their big goals and big accomplishments (even if that comes with big expenses). In this bold talk, he says: Let’s change the way we think about changing the world.

Everything the donating public has been taught about giving is dysfunctional, says AIDS Ride founder Dan Pallotta. He aims to transform the way society thinks about charity and giving and change.”
View more TED talks here.

19 Quotes On Perception


Here’s a collection of my favorite quotes on perception.
“There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.” – Aldous Huxley
“The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes” – Marcel Proust
“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”  ― William Blake
“Look at everything as though you are seeing it either for the first or last time, then your time on earth will be filled with glory”  ― Betty Smith
“Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.” – George Bernard Shaw
“It is one of the commonest of mistakes to consider that the limit of our power of perception is also the limit of all there is to perceive.” – C. W. Leadbeater
“We are enslaved by anything we do not consciously see. We are freed by conscious perception.” – Vernon Howard
“All perceiving is also thinking, all reasoning is also intuition, all observation is also invention.” – Rudolf Arnheim
“No man has the right to dictate what other men should perceive, create or produce, but all should be encouraged to reveal themselves, their perceptions and emotions, and to build confidence in the creative spirit.”  ― Ansel Adams
“Your opinion is your opinion, your perception is your perception–do not confuse them with “facts” or “truth”. Wars have been fought and millions have been killed because of the inability of men to understand the idea that EVERYBODY has a different viewpoint.” – John Moore
“One has not only an ability to perceive the world but an ability to alter one’s perception of it; more simply, one can change things by the manner in which one looks at them.” – Tom Robbins
“What I had to learn was, that I’m responsible for my perception of things.” – Chris Robinson
“We must look at the lens through we see the world, as well as the world we see, and that the lens itself shapes how we interpret the world.”  ― Stephen R. Covey
“Only in quiet waters things mirror themselves undistorted. Only in a quiet mind is adequate perception of the world.” – Hans Margolis
“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” ― W.B. Yeats
“Miracles happen everyday, change your perception of what a miracle is and you’ll see them all around you.” – Jon Bon Jovi
“What the joke displays is a switch in perception. This is important in changing the way we think.” – Edward de Bono
“The difference between a mountain and a molehill is your perspective.” – Al Neuharth
“No perspective, no perception. New perspective, new perception.”  ― Toba Beta
“The new limitations are the human ones of perception.” – Milton Babbitt
Find more Creativity Quotes here.
Discover more quotes daily in my Twitter and Facebook streams.

28 Quotes On Play


“Life is the game that must be played.” – Edwin Arlington Robinson
“Look closely and find subtle ways to play in your work. Play breaks up the burden of labor and gives it ananda – deep meaningful joy.” – Thomas Moore
“A person might be able to play without being creative, but he sure can’t be creative without playing.” — Kurt Hanks and Jay Parry
“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” – Plato
“It is in playing, and perhaps only in playing, that the child is free to be creative.” – D W Winnicott
“We all operate in two contrasting modes, which might be called open and closed. The open mode is more relaxed, more receptive, more exploratory, more democratic, more playful and more humorous. The closed mode is the tighter, more rigid, more hierarchical, more tunnel-visioned. Most people, unfortunately spend most of their time in the closed mode. Not that the closed mode cannot be helpful. If you are leaping a ravine, the moment of takeoff is a bad time for considering alternative strategies. When you charge the enemy machine-gun post, don’t waste energy trying to see the funny side of it. Do it in the “closed” mode. But the moment the action is over, try to return to the “open” mode—to open your mind again to all the feedback from our action that enables us to tell whether the action has been successful, or whether further action is need to improve on what we have done. In other words, we must return to the open mode, because in that mode we are the most aware, most receptive, most creative, and therefore at our most intelligent.” — John Cleese
“Creative people are curious, flexible, persistent, and independent with a tremendous spirit of adventure and a love of play.” – Henri Matisse
“Necessity may be the mother of invention, but play is certainly the father.” – Roger von Oech
“Children learn as they play. Most importantly, in play children learn how to learn.” – O Fred Donaldson
“It is paradoxical that many educators and parents still differentiate between a time for learning and a time for play without seeing the vital connection between them.” – Leo F. Buscaglia
“The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work.” – Richard Bach
“Children need the freedom and time to play. Play is not a luxury. Play is a necessity.” – Kay Redfield Jamison
“Play is training for the unexpected.” – Marc Bekoff
“Whoever wants to understand much must play much.” – Gottfried Benn
“Deep meaning lies often in childish play.” – Johann Friedrich von Schiller
“A child who does not play is not a child, but the man who does not play has lost forever the child who lived in him.” – Pablo Neruda
“When we come together to play and be we are truly ourselves When we are truly ourselves it is wonderful and when we act collectively in that wonder we do transformative work for our community and our world.” – Brad Colby
“Too much of our work amounts to the drudgery of arranging means toward ends, mechanically placing the right foot in front of the left and the left in front of the right, moving down narrow corridors toward narrow goals. Play widens the halls. Work will always be with us, and many works are worthy. But the worthiest works of all often reflect an artful creativity that looks more like play than work.” — James Ogilvy
“Almost all creativity involves purposeful play.” – Abraham Maslow
“Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.” – Miles Davis
“Don’t play the saxophone. Let it play you.” – Charlie Parker
“To the art of working well a civilized race would add the art of playing well.” – George Santayana
“If you must play, decide on three things at the start: the rules of the game, the stakes, and the quitting time” – Chinese Proverbs
“There is work that is work and there is play that is play; there is play that is work and work that is play. And in only one of these lies happiness.” – Gelett Burgess
“Work and play are words used to describe the same thing under differing conditions.” – Mark Twain
“A child loves his play, not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard.” – Benjamin Spock
“Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.” – Heraclitus
“Life must be lived as play.” – Plato
Find more Creativity Quotes here.
Discover more quotes daily in my Twitter and Facebook streams.

Enhance Images With Bokeh & Special Blur Effects – Russell Brown


“Russell Brown demonstrates how the ability to add a creative blur to images in Adobe Photoshop CS6 just got easier. With the new Blur Gallery you can target regions within your images and customize the areas that you want to be in, or out of focus. This tutorial will discuss the detials in using the new Bokeh feature found in the Blur Gallery. Learn the fine art of adding a bokeh of light to your images for unique, and special effects.”
View more Photoshop videos here.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.

Science, the Antidote to Fear, Visions of Tomorrow – Roger Ressmeyer


Roger Ressmeyer shares what he’s learned over many years working with many brilliant scientists as a science filmmaker and photographer. After a life-long career in science and space photography working with National Geographic and NASA and many others, Ressmeyer is banding together with a group of scientific and spiritual visionaries from around the world to make a film that proves that global solutions to the world’s problems do exist, from climate change to inequality to war. The starting point is hope.
Preview Roger’s ongoing movie project Visions Of Tomorrow.

Find out more about Roger Ressmeyer here.
View more TED talks here.

Images That Work & Why – Participant’s Antarctica 2013

Feedback on work produced during a workshop is an important part of each learning experience. Useful feedback usually starts with identifying core strengths before a discussion about how to improve (no matter how successful images are) and identifying possible next steps.
Here’s a collection of participant images from our Antarctica Crossing The Circle 2013 Voyage and a quick note about each image’s core strengths.

Ginette Vachon presents peak action in a way that elicits empathy

Cathrine Spikkerud enlivens an other-worldy stage with quiet understated action

Nancy Leigh animates an already dramatic stage with an energetic gesture

Marilynn Nance uses rhythm and perspective to make an historic building even more interesting

Robert Pettit use repetition to create a play between balance and imbalance

Fusako Hara explores the transitions between realism and abstraction

Benoit Feron uses line and texture to reveal natural processes

Jodie Willard uses opaque layers a strongly felt sense of space through design

Karin Pettit use transparent layers to portray depth

Norm Larson uses abstraction to portray not just an external reality but also to suggest an internal state

Celie Placzek uses number and proximity to suggest community

Jim Brewster uses negative space to highlight important figures amid chaos

Dennis Lenehan uses mass and volume to create dramatic contrasts

Geir Morten Skeie employs a delicate palette to create a transcendant mood for a monolithic structure

Joelle Rokovich expresses contrasts in scale to express size and distance with a minimalist efficiency
Find out about our 2014 Fly Antarctica Sail Across The Circle Voyage here.
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The 7 Best Argentinian Wines On Our Antarctica 2013 Voyage


Seth Resnick loves wine. So does Greg Gorman. The two of them have taught me most of what I know about wine. Through them I’ve come to appreciate wine in new ways and with a new depth of understanding. They know that if they drink wine with me, I’m going to ask a lot of questions, to learn as much from them as I can and to appreciate the wine I’m drinking with them even more.
On many of our Digital Photo Destinations workshop adventures, Seth and I share wine with our participants. On our 2013 Antarctica South Of The Circle Voyage we bought enough wine for the entire group to try a new wine at the start of each evening meal. As we embarked from Argentina, we selected only Argentinian wines, mostly reds, found at our favorite wine store in Ushuaia – Quelhue. Something that we looked forward to each night the wine started conversations, lifted spirits, and strengthened our community.
Here’s a list of the seven best wines we had during our voyage; each ranked on a scale of 1-10 (10 highest). You might enjoy them too. I use the iPhone app Wine Notes to record my impressions and usually include a picture of the person I drink the wine with along with the label in each entry as part of this journal. These are my only opinions (with input from Seth). Be mindful that I like my wines like I like my people, with character.

9.1            Malbec                                    Achaval Ferrer / Finca Bella Vista             Perdriel             2007
A truly elegant wine from old vines in volcanic soil riddled with complex flavors that are so beautifully blended they are hard to separate and keep changing from beginning to end and through its extremely long finish. It’s often appropriately referred to as a “chimera”.

8.9            Cabernet Sauvignon            Luigi Bosca                                                                          2010
Big, bold, full-bodied. Beautifully balanced structure with a great beginning, middle and end, with a long finish. Red fruits, cherry dominant with hints of chocolate, coffee, and cinnamon and distinctive earth flavors.

8.8            Malbec                                    Tapiz                                                            Black Tears            2008
Smooth full body with great mouthfeel (maybe a touch chewy) and solid structure and tannins. Big berry flavors, currant dominant. Complex layers. You can taste that it came from volcanic soil.

8.4            Tannat                                    Quara                                                                                    2009
Really big, complex, and earthy (especially on the nose). Fast, but lingers long with hints of cinnamon and tobacco. It’s unusual to find this grape on it’s own instead of blended.

8.4            Cabernet / Malbec            D V Catena                                                                         2010
Red fruits (cherry, raspberry, strawberry) with a hints of mint and eucalyptus. The smoky earth flavors from ashy volcanic soil gives it rich character.

8.4               Cabernet Sauvignon            Gascon / Finca Escorihuela Gascon            Reserva            2009
Elegant, rich, full, classic cabernet that doesn’t hide the earth it was grown in.

8.3            Malbec                                    Tomero                                                Gran Reserva            2008
A classic Malbec in every sense.
Wine is just one of the things that makes our workshops unique.
Find out about our 2014 Fly Antarctica Sail Across The Circle Voyage here.
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A Detailed Look At Adaptive Wide Angle – Russell Brown


Learn some advanced tips and techniques for working with Adaptive Wide Angle inside of Adobe Photoshop CS6. This tutorial will give you a detailed look at the built-in correction tools that help you adjust the lens distortion in your own images. If you are ready to move to the next level in Adaptive Wide Angle then this video is for you.
View more Photoshop videos here.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.

Tales Of Creativity & Play – Tim Brown


At the 2008 Serious Play conference, designer Tim Brown talks about the powerful relationship between creative thinking and play – with many examples you can try at home (and one that maybe you shouldn’t).
Tim Brown is the CEO of innovation and design firm IDEO, taking an approach to design that digs deeper than the surface. Having taken over from founder David E Kelley, Tim Brown carries forward the firm’s mission of fusing design, business and social studies to come up with deeply researched, deeply understood designs and ideas – they call it “design thinking.”
View more creativity videos here.