In my 72nd podcast I continue talking about my “Summer Listening List,” focusing on Chris Marquardt’s “Tips From the Top Floor.”

I’m beginning to get psyched for the Northeast Regional DEN Event in Valley Forge. I won’t say too much about it now, but I will post a link to the event’s wiki.

Instead, I’d like to talk about part two of my summer listening list. Last time I plugged History According to Bob, which is a great resource for anyone interested in history. Today, let’s talk digital photography.

With the proliferation of camera phones and photo sharing sites like Flickr, it’s obvious that there are many more people getting interested in the digital side of photography. Alas, like in all things, having the ability to do something is not the same as knowing how to do it well. (Have you ever seen a PowerPoint presentation that was so bad it hurt your eyes to look at it, in spite of the useful information it contained? I have.)

Enter Chris Marquardt, master of both sound and photography. First from his home in southern Germany and now from his studio in … southern Germany, Chris produces his Tips From the Top Floor three times a week.

Rather than focus on just the high end professional stuff, Tips From the Top Floor covers the gamut from point and click camera phones to 8 megapixel Nikon DSLRs, with some image manipulation tips using Photoshop and GIMP for good measure.

Rather than stop there, you can also find a thriving forum on his site that discusses photography news, tips, tricks, and is more than willing to offer constructive criticism for your own photos.

If you have any interest in the medium of digital photography, you should really check this one out.

I’ve been putting some thought into my mini lessons.

If you’ve been subscribed to my site for a while then you’ve seen the five short videos I’ve done to teach different projects that I thought were neat and / or unique.

You’ve also noticed that I haven’t done any for quite some time.

I could tell you that it’s because I haven’t had the time. After all, it takes a lot longer to process video than it does to process audio. I could also say that some computer problems a while back caused a long delay, as I had to install a new hard drive and do a reinstall or three this year.

These are all partially true reasons, but none of them is the real one.

The truth is, I’ve been lazy and uninspired.

But I have an idea. I want to do some more mini lessons next year, but instead of my own ideas I think I’ll get the Art Club involved.

Students have a lot of cool ideas, and I’d love to give them a format to share them. I already tried it this year with a podcast, but if I start early enough next year I should be able to get several episodes out each marking period.

I think I’ll stick with the same format, however – and by that I mean with the camera focussed on the art project and the student sitting out of sight. I think they’ll feel much more comfortable if they know that they don’t have to be in front of the camera, and with my concerns for student safety, I’ll feel much more comfortable then them because of the same thing.

Who knows? At the end I might even be able to hand out CDs with all of that year’s mini lessons burned onto them as a keepsake. We’ll see how that turns out.

Many of you are already familiar with that great photo sharing site known as Flickr, but have you ever heard of NIPSA?

NIPSA came to my attention when I was searching Flickr for photos tagged with “Second Life.” I’ll admit it, that game is very addictive, and one of the ways I find neat places to explore is to look at photos placed online on various sites.

Well, I started to run into some discussion about photos and whole accounts being marked as NIPSA. NIPSA? What was that? Naturally I did what anyone would do in that situation.

I Googled it.

Figuring that the Northern Ireland Public Service Alliance was not the NIPSA I was looking for, I looked a little harder.

It turns out that as it relates to Flickr, NIPSA stands for “Not In Public Site Areas.” In a nutshell, it’s Flickr’s way of censoring without deleting.

Out of a nutshell (it was cramped in there anyway), a Flickr photo that’s marked as NIPSA is still viewable, can be submitted to groups, placed on websites, downloaded, and so on. What you can’t do is search for it by using tags or paging through the “Everyone’s Photos” section.

The key to NIPSA is a little check box labeled “May Offend.” If you see a photo that you don’t think a 14 year old should be looking at, you check the box. If enough people do that, the photo is NIPSAed. This sort of social police work appeals to me, as it’s rather empowering for users to know they can do something about inappropriate material besides whining to a moderator. I have my suspicions that a check from Flickr staff might hold more weight than the average user, but hey, they’re getting paid to do that so I don’t mind.

You can even mark your own photos as “May Offend,” if you feel that while your images are artistic they may not appeal to everyone.

Naturally, I see NIPSA as a good thing. If I’m going to recommend Flickr as an educational resource (which I do…) then I don’t want to hear about some unsuspecting 3rd grade teacher generating fodder for 30 phone calls from concerned parents because of a couple mouse clicks.

There is another side to NIPSA, though. You see, Flickr is marketing itself as a photo site. Drawings, paintings, collages, CGI screen captures, and of course works that appear to be copyrighted by others don’t fit into this category, so they often will NIPSA those pictures as well. This has a lot of Second Life enthusiasts foaming at the mouth, since any “photo” from the world of Second Life is in reality a screen capture.

Truth be told, Flickr has every right to do this. It’s their freely provided service, so they can enforce their terms of use as they see fit.

That being said, I’m a little worried. My own Flickr account is full of artworks created by my students, which I’ve uploaded to showcase various lesson ideas. The line between a drawing and a photo of a drawing is thin and, at best, merely philosophical. All I need is one Flickr staff member having a bad day to visit my site, and suddenly I’m off the grid.

But I’ve had my account for over a year and it hasn’t happened yet, so I’m cautiously optimistic.