Teaching The Pebbles
Other posts in the series:
- What's Obvious to You? by Ann Handley
- With Great Challenge Comes Great Adaptability, by Michelle (Chel) Wolverton
- 4 Steps To Awaken Your Superhero Power, by DJ Waldow
- The power of realization or Superheros are where you find them, by Helena Bouchez
- Making the Jump, by Tamsen McMahon
- We All Have It In Us, by C.C. Chapman
- Teaching the Pebbles, by Bryce Moore
- Stop Being the Green Lantern of Business, by Justin Kownacki
- Taking The Vow of Super Heroism, by Whitney Hoffman
- Crisis and Motivation, by John Wall
When Mr. Penn approached me, as he had others, with the opportunity to create a guest post for him in his absence, I was initially and naturally quite honored. That feeling, however, turned like spring weather in the Midwest often does to a horrible feeling of dread. How could I, far from a professional or even remotely consistent blogger of letters, possibly hold a candle burning at both ends to the likes of Mr. Wall, Ms. Hoffman, Mr. Kownacki, or even Mr. Penn himself?
It took me a few days of fighting a Xanax-resistant strain of seizing panic to finally realize what he did here: not only was this an opportunity to fill space on Mr. Penn’s website while he racked up more frequent flyer miles than Clark Kent, it was a teaching moment directed squarely at me, and that’s a superpower we all possess.
Despite the reflexive reach for a gas mask that the term “life coach” compels out of me, we all possess some knowledge of some subject we can convey to someone else in the world. It could be a mechanical, philosophical, intellectual, or an artistic skill or talent, but the unrealized superpower in all of us is this: No matter the pursuit and how much you think you know or don’t know about it, there is always someone who knows less about that subject than you. These people are your target, your audience, and your unrealized opportunities.
It’s important to remember that whatever your subject or level of expertise, your students will almost never be blank slates. Like pebbles on a mountaintop, each student will behave differently in accordance with their natural gifts, needs, and their own unique imperfections. Some of these pebbles will stubbornly refuse to move, fighting the push of external force and the pull of gravity and in doing so deny themselves their own innate potential, accepting a destiny of forever remaining where they lie. Some will veer off too soon, impulsive and without direction, and tumble off the mountain, never to be heard from again. Some only seem to move when forcefully motivated by the boot of the teacher. Many will sadly slide down the smoothest path available, avoiding friction and resistance at every possible turn, safely landing at the goal of the bottom without so much as a scratch, but at the same time unnoticed and with little fanfare — they will have traded away their potential for an easy victory but are left with nothing to build on of their own.
The best students, however, will be the ones that show patience. They recognize their flaws and they wait — waiting to be shaped by the teacher’s tools — however limited those tools may seem — and allowing the experience and the environment to smooth away the imperfections. They’re the last pebbles to leave the mountaintop. Once these pebbles are ready and set down the path of the mountain, however, they become immense, awe-inspiring forces unto themselves that even the teacher dares not stand in the way of. They command a following of the very environment around them they once waited unassumingly in — water, ice, wind, boulders the size of cities — and transform it all into a crushing, unconquerable force of an avalanche that changes the landscape of the world.
What about the teacher, you ask? Of course the teacher is a pebble himself influenced by his own teacher until set free to become the foundation of his own mountain. Turn enough pebbles into unstoppable waves of energy, however, and you will be seen as the real definition of a superhero — something everyone will fear and respect for your ability as a kingmaker to unleash the power of the pebbles under your care.
My own pebble is the girl in the picture above, and my shaping tool is a camera. She’s ever the patient student and has taken well to learning my photographic philosophy of being part of the world she imagines inside the camera — as opposed to being simply on the world with a camera in hand. You can see the rounding of the corners and the smoothing of the jagged edges of this pebble with every new photograph she captures. Should it continue to be her pursuit, it will not be long before she is ready to be set upon a world that will never see her coming — and I will take great joy in watching the elements at her command rush past me and form something more amazing than I could ever imagine for myself.
It’s one of the many open secrets of the universe that we all possess this ability — most of us simply fail to realize it. We are content to be our own unassuming pebbles gliding down the easiest route possible on someone else’s mountain.
Your challenge and biggest reward as a teacher is to find these pebbles of opportunity on your own mountaintop and set them upon the unsuspecting world below, transforming them from a humble start into something unimaginatively powerful. These pebbles do not necessarily need to be children or relatives — we are surrounded by potential pebbles of all ages in nearly every interactive aspect of our daily lives.
Be a superhero: Find a pebble and teach it to become its own mountain.
Bryce Moore (@abiteofsanity) is an IT professional by day, a photographer by love, and one of Christopher Penn’s many pebbles by grace and choice. While trying to duck out of the way of boots thrown in the area of his cranium, he photoblogs daily and writes not nearly enough according to some people at abiteofsanity.com.
The wedding of Steve and Mindy Penn
I’m thrilled to have celebrated and been a part of my little brother’s wedding as best man yesterday. For those wedding guests who are interested in the photos from the event, you’ll find them in this Flickr set. Special thanks to Brooke Pichette for some of the ceremony photos!
Here also you’ll find the prepared remarks for the best man’s toast I wrote and delivered amidst much revelry:
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen! If I might have a few moments of your time to say a few words.
More than a few of you have probably noticed how much I use my camera. I’m an amateur photographer, with emphasis on the amateur part, and I wanted to share a few observations from behind the lens. Cameras can capture much more than we can consciously perceive. Our eyes see everything as a blur, a continuous flow, doubly so at a wedding, but the lens can capture the tiniest moments in time.
One of the things a lens can catch that our eyes miss are little expressions on our faces. Psychologists and behavioral specialists call these micro-emotions, the faces we make in between moments. We never see them. They’re there, and they may register subconsciously, but we never really see them with the naked eye. In those slices of time, everything is revealed, because we’re unable to mask our true faces, emotions, and feelings in the spaces between the notes of life.
Why do I bring this up? In the past day, I’ve had the chance to take plenty of photos of Steve and Mindy, and here’s what the lens shows in the moments between the chaos of getting married: they really love each other, very deeply and truly. The thin slices of time when no one is looking tell the reason we’re all gathered here today: two friends in love not just consciously, but thoroughly, in every way from the obvious to the subtle, from the conscious to the invisible. Love that’s apparent even when no one is looking, even when no one except the camera lens is even capable of looking.
Please join me in a toast to Steve and Mindy as we all wish them a lifetime of those little moments together. To my brother and my new sister, I celebrate all the moments you’ll share together – even when no one is looking.
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Photo Friday: New York City HDR
As much as some of my friends who are professional photographers dislike HDR as a gimmick, it’s a fun gimmick, so I do it when I can and when I see the opportunity.
This is one of my favorite shots of New York City in HDR, not just because it’s dramatic and stormy, but because of the subject matter and timing. If you’re not familiar with New York City, this is one of the major banks that got hit hard in the financial crisis. The photo was taken a little more than a year ago when the market was in flames, so the appearance of HDR-enhanced doom and gloom over a well known financial institution was quite apropos.
Have a great photo Friday!
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The light you see
The light you see
Photography’s an interesting art form. At its core, it’s entirely about light. How much light reflected from the world around us dictates what our picture looks like. As a photographer, you have nearly total control over how much light you choose to see, what quality the light is, and what you choose to see with that light. In total darkness, photography is phenomenally uninteresting – but rarely are you ever photographing in total darkness, unless you leave the lens cap on. Even on the darkest of nights, there’s enough ambient light to take a photo.
Don’t believe it? If you have a camera that can hold open the shutter (like a DSLR) and a rock solid tripod, set it up facing out a window one night and press the shutter. It may be a minute or two before you hear the shutter close, but when you look at the result, you’ll see quite a bit. As long as the camera is undisturbed, you’ll have a photo that looks shockingly like the daytime, even when your own eyes struggle to see.
This makes for an interesting metaphor for your life, doesn’t it? It’s not that there isn’t enough light in your life so much as it is your eyes, heart, and spirit might not be open wide enough to pick it up. A camera set up to patiently wait in the middle of the darkest night can see as if it were day.
If there’s not enough light in your life, plunk yourself down like the camera on a tripod, stop the chaos around you, take a whole bunch of deep breaths, and open up your eyes. Don’t think – just wait, watch, breathe, and see if your mental and emotional lens can find the light that’s already there.
The light is there, waiting for you.
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10 free iPad Wallpapers
10 free iPad Wallpapers
Got one of the two million new iPads out in the wild? Grab yourself one (or all) of these free wallpapers derived from photos I’ve taken over the years. iPad wallpapers are 1024×1024 pixels (square to adapt for rotation). Click on any image to get the various versions and choose full size for the iPad specific image. If you’re on an iPad, just tap and hold for a Save Image box.
Enjoy, and if you like them, please throw a link back to this blog post.
iPad Wallpaper: Autumn
iPad Wallpaper: Billiards
iPad Wallpaper: Bird in flight
iPad Wallpaper: Patriotism
iPad Wallpaper: Violins
iPad Wallpaper: Hibiscus
iPad Wallpaper: Chris Brogan
iPad Wallpaper: Day lily
iPad Wallpaper: Rose
iPad Wallpaper: Otters
My images are released under the Creative Commons By Attribution, Non-Commercial, Sharealike License, US 3.0. You must provide a link back to www.ChristopherSPenn.com if you republish these images.
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Photo Friday: Morning sunrise
In an effort to remind myself to take and post more photos, we’ll have a little fun called Photo Friday.
This is a sunrise I’ve been waiting to take ever since starting to work for Blue Sky Factory email marketing. It’s a reservoir near my house, not too far from I-90, and there’s a relatively unsafe
place to park on the side of the road that during regular traffic hours would be stupid to park in, but you can get away with it at sunrise because there’s not much traffic on the road at 5:30 AM.
I took three exposures, -2, 0, and +2 with my D90 and merged them in Photoshop.
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