For the last month, I have been attending a series of web-based presentations that are being held in place of a 5-day conference. Unsurprisingly, the experience is less immersive than a physical conference, but that’s pretty much unavoidable.
Attendees can view the presenter’s screen, and can ask the presenter questions either verbally or via chat. The presenter verbally answers any chat questions. For the first few sessions, most questions were asked verbally, but as time has gone on chat has become the predominant way to ask questions. Chat just works better. It’s hard to know when to throw in a verbal question when you are viewing the speaker’s screen rather than the actual speaker. Multiple people talking over one another is extremely annoying and hard to unscramble. And any attendee with an unmuted microphone can cause unintended disruption, whether it’s a coughing fit, a dog barking, or other people making noise nearby. With questions submitted via chat, the presenter can answer questions when it fits well in the presentation.
Ok. That’s useful feedback but I think that’s the issue: a workshop or a discussion is not supposed to be a talk or a presentation. Monologue is something that I want to avoid at any cost. I think Jitsi Meet has this “raise your hand”-feature. Doesn’t that work? So this sounds like an online workshop might be a real challenge…
An online workshop would definitely be more challenging than a presentation. To make it understandable, you will need to establish some sort of protocol for how people participate. If there is a “raise your hand” feature, you could use that together with a request that everyone keep their mics muted unless/until their raised hand is acknowledged. Just state the protocol clearly at the start of your workshop, and be prepared to repeat it in case there are any latecomers.
Also going to hold a workshop (not photography, creative coding) on LGM. I am also currently teaching a photography class (including work reviews, theory, live demonstrations and discussions) digitally. I have also occasionally livestreamed art, and did in person workshops in a variety of settings in past.
First of all, this is totally doable. I use a mix of voice and text depending on students preference, and have the screencast open almost always. Honestly, even only text just works fine. I usually say out loud what is written in text, to give more context to what is being said and encourage people to talk via questions and asking occasionally if there are any questions from them. It depends on the audience through.
Blurry image and relatively low resolution overall is unfortunately a common situation. One solution I found is to keep my screencast area I am working on (e.g. darktable) to a portion on my overall screen that makes sense with what I anticipate to be the quality of the video. This way, I have space to always monitor the text chat. I also have to zoom in any time I am doing detail work, which helps making sure what I transmit is lower resolution friendly. After all, we used to do photography in very low (for today’s standards) resolution screens and it was fine. Less then ideal projectors and screen situations even happen on live events. It is a question of planning how to work around with it and being ready to improvise.
Due to my personal situation, I will never get to go in person. If the time is right and my internet isn’t laggy (I had a 15s lag in my last zoom meeting where I had to do an interactive presentation! ), I will try to attend as a visitor virtually.
I just gave a one-on-one class on darktable, using Jitsi for screen sharing… Well, even for 2 participants in the same country, it sucks a great deal. Image is quite awful.
@paperdigits Are you one of the organizers of online LGM2020? Maybe you can communicate with Timothée, who informed me today about the technical issues with Jitsi?
Self hosting jitsi requires a lot of bandwidth and optimizations. This is nothing you do quickly. Especially for large crowds.
That’s why I recommend using things like twitch. Where you only have video for the speaker.
For questions you have either text chat or a voice chat in parallel. For making this work all you need is https://obsproject.com/ for sharing your screen.
I enjoy the post processing sh*t. I don’t enjoy learning I’ve been doing it wrong for years, or the learning complexities, but don’t mind the process of shifting pixels. I think of it as painting. The old master paintings could take months to complete. A photo can be processed in just minutes or hours. The problem is the modern mindset which wants a thousand things done in an instant. In the past, an artist might have a hundred images over a career. Today, we can have it in a day.
Usually, people don’t spend time on editing because they enjoy it, but because they are fighting the software to come with a decent result.
There is a large difference between starting from a blank canvas and starting from a digital image. Painting doesn’t hide magic beneath a GUI, it’s all analog and hackable operations. Digital is mostly about display preparation, and that should be reasonably fast, or something is broken in the pipe.
Well… it’s an interesting question. I try to give a few examples.
Painters of the 15th century in northern Europe often have a preserved oeuvre of maybe 15 works. Emphasis is on preserved. They probably produced around 30 “paintings” most of which are not actual paintings but mostly altarpieces and devotional panels. As far as large altarpieces are concerned, most of the executed painting is not the work of the workshop leader but several other assistants, the main master often executed the underdrawing, the faces and the hands. There are/were drawings, too, but most of them is lost since paper is fragile. It is important to know that painting technique was very time consuming and complex, there are several paint layers and the painter had to let dry each layer before painting a new layer.
As far as Rembrandt is concerned, probably a little more than 300 of his paintings are preserved and in addition he created several 100 etchings and many drawings. Probably most of his oeuvre is preserved. Rembrandt was one of the most productive artists of his time and his painting technique was much more simple than 15-16th century painting technique.
The major issue in oil painting was always that oil did not dry so quickly.
My guess is that Monet produced around 1000 paintings. Not sure about Gerhard Richter… maybe 2000 so far?
Since 2006 I uploaded a little more than 1000 photos to Flickr. I think I am not one of the most productive photographers. Probably I have hundreds of thousands of raw files on my hard drives. During a hike last saturday I shot more than 600 photos. So far I edited 5, all of them on sunday, I probably needed around 30 minutes for each one of them. Since then I did not feel like editing. I feel “tired” after editing 5 photos. I hardly ever do batch processing. Probably I’d feel more often like editing if I were more satisfied with my life…
A friend of mine produces 1-2 pictures a week, but she photoshops heavily. Another friend of mine can produce up to 50 photos per day, but she does not edit/shoot every day, she does use presets I think. Yet another friend can produce hundreds of photos at a time.
Usually, people don’t spend time on editing because they enjoy it…
Oh, I am unusual, then. Very unusual, because I fully agree with @Soupy.
Give me a “negative” (that’s a RAW file, today), and I bet that I will be able to
make several different crops / interpretations / enhancements / whatever from it.
A skilled darkroom technician can perform wonders and that is what fascinates
me with all superb “development tools” we have access to today.
), I will try to attend as a visitor virtually. 
and that is what fascinates